Today, the ABA released the 9-month employment data for the Class of 2012 (ABA Release, March 29).
More importantly, the ABA has taken a long-needed step towards transparency by establishing an Employment Summary Report website with
Gary Rosin
In my recent comments to the ABA Standards Review Committee on the proposed changes to Interpretation 301-6, Endangered: Historically Black Law Schools?, I identified Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School as “arguably” one of the Historically Black Law Schools. This was based in part on the high percentage of its entering students that are Blacks/African Americans. It also was based on a what I now know to be a mis-identification of Atlanta’s John Marshall as the “School X” discussed by Prof. John Nussbaumer (Cooley) in his article, Misuse of the Law School Admission Test, Racial Discrimination and the De Facto Quota System for Restricting African-American Access to the Legal Profession, 80 ST. JOHN’S L. REV. 167, 177 (2006).
In “Case Study One–Initial Accreditation,” School X was seeking full ABA approval. During School X’s transition from provisional to full ABA approval, the share of its student body that were Black/African American fell from 62% to 32% over just five years (1999 to 2004). School X was located in “a major metropolitan area with a large minority and African-American population” and had recently obtained full ABA approval. In trying to identify School X, I noted that Atlanta’s John Marshall, located in Atlanta, was ABA-accredited in 2004.
Imagine my surprise when I got the The Gateway to the Profession, the Consultant on Legal Education’s 2009-2010 Annual Report on the activities of the ABA Section of Legal Education during that academic year. Under the “approvals and Acquiescences Granted in 2009-2010”, there was a photo captioned “Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School.” The first paragraph of that portion of the report said that Atlanta’s John Marshall was granted full approval on December 5, 2009.
The entries for LSAT 25th percentile, total enrollment, minority enrollment, and African-American enrollment shown in Table 9 of Nussbaumer’s article, id. at 181-F, match the entries for the David A. Clarke School of Law of the University of the District of Columbia in the 2001 through 2006 Official Guides. According to Ingredients to Higher Education, the 2004/2005 Annual Report by the ABA Consultant on Legal Education, UDC was granted provisional ABA accreditation in 1998, and full ABA accreditation on August 4, 2005.
My mistake does not diminish the importance of Atlanta’s John Marshall. Not only was that law school one of the first Southern law schools to integrate, it has the highest Black/African-American enrollment of any law school that is not an Historically Black Law School.
posted by Gary Rosin
In letter dated, March 28, 2011, the AALS has questioned the process by which the ABA Section of Legal Education, and the Standards Review Committee, are revising the ABA Standards. As Paul Caron put it on TaxProf, “AALS Goes to War Over ABA’s Proposed Accreditation Standards Changes.” That is putting it gently. The AALS suggests that
[t]he SRC appears to be involved in a thought experiment that asks whether its members could imagine the existence of a school that would produce ethical, competent entry-level lawyers if the standards subtracted any particular element of the current standards…..
Id. at 2 (emphasis added). The AALS argues that
[t]he vision animating the current standards proposals is not entirely clear, and the SRC has never invited or entertained a conversation about the broader vision of legal education advanced by its interlocking set of proposed changes. But one thing is clear: all constituencies need opportunities to discuss the overall vision behind and the combined effect of the proposed radical changes to those standards, standards that have been relied on by all accredited schools, state Supreme Courts, and the public that depends on the quality of the bar in life-changing matters.
Id. at 2. The AALS letter concludes by asking the Council and the SRC to:
1. Reject the radical proposed changes to the role of the faculty, and other changes to the standards that would weaken, rather than strengthen, legal education.
2. Initiate a process for the specific purpose of allowing all important constituencies to understand and debate the vision animating the current proposals and their combined effect on legal education.
3. Undertake or commission an independent, fact-based study of the actual cost drivers in legal education, and their relationship with the accreditation process.
Id. at 10.
Hat tip to Paul Caron and to Mary Lynch (Best Practices for Legal Education).
posted by Gary Rosin
Update: National Law Journal has an article, available on Law.Com, AALS urges delay in debate over law school cccreditation standards that discusses the AALS letter. The article quotes Donald Polden, Chair of the Standards Review Committee:
“[A]fter 2 1/2 years of working on the comprehensive review in a highly transparent manner, I have some definite thoughts about the AALS’ recent request,” ….
* * *
“We would argue that we’ve had that public debate,” …
The article said that Hulett Askew, the Consultant onf Legal Education indicated that
Before the committee started drafting proposals, it agreed in 2009 upon a set of principles and fundamental goals. They include assuring education quality, advancing the core mission of legal education, accountability for law schools, clarity and precision in the standards, and assessing program quality and student learning.
The AALS did not object or comment on those goals when they were established, Askew said.
The SALT has submitted a Statement of Bar Passage Interpretation 301-6 that opposes the proposed increases of the minimum Bar-passage standards on two grounds. First, that any “bright-line” Bar passage standard is inconsistent with alternative outcome measures. This is consistent with the position took on 301-6 when it was initially adopted. Second, that
toughening the standard discourages schools from accepting non-traditional students and contributes to the underenrollment of African American and other minority students in law schools.
SALT had also raised this concern in earlier, but increasing the minimum Bar passage standards heightens their concern.
The SALT website has links to Statements on other aspects of the Standrads review.
posted by Gary Rosin
The posts you’ve been reading recently have been drafts of portions of comments on the proposed revisions to Interpretation 301-6 that I submitted today to the ABA Standards Review Committee. My comments, Endangered: Historically Black Law Schools? are now available on SSRN (Abstract=1797965).
posted by Gary Rosin
In recent years, there has been great concern about law schools relying too heavily on LSAT scores in admissions. The argument is that LSAT scores are at best an imperfect predictor of the academic success of individual law students, as measured by first-year GPAs. Moreover, academic success, is an even more imperfect predictor of success as a practicing lawyer. That said, the LSAT is more reliable when it comes to the predicting the success of groups, including Bar passage rates. For example, consider Chart 1, based on the data used in the LSAC Bar Passage Study, which shows the cumulative Bar passage rates over multiple attempts of persons with the same LSAT score:
Chart 1 
Note: at the time of the LSAC Bar Passage Study (the entering class of Fall 1991), LSAT scores were reported on a scale that ranged from 10 to 48, rather than the current 120-180 scale.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the curve shown in Chart 1 is that a one-unit difference in LSAT (e.g., 35 vs. 36) has a larger effect on cumulative Bar passage as LSAT drops—the curve is much steeper at an LSAT of 19 that it is at an LSAT of 40. This phenomenon is important in crafting an entering class, which will include persons with a range of different LSATs. The ramifications of the phenomenon loom especially large for law schools with lower LSAT medians and 25th and 75th percentiles.
And there’s the rub: many of the historically Black law schools have entering-student LSAT scores at or near the bottom of those of all mainland law schools (i.e., excluding Puerto Rica and Hawaii). For example, over the Fall 2006 through Fall 2009 entering classes, the average of the LSAT 25th percentile for each school averaged 154.7, with a standard deviation of 5.68. The bottom four ABA law schools were Florida A&M, Southern, North Carolina Central and Texas Southern, while District of Columbia, Atlanta’s John Marshall and Howard were grouped around the 15th percentile.
While each school is required to report recent cumulative Bar passage rates to the ABA, that information is neither published in the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools (as of the 2011 edition), nor distributed to all ABA law schools via the annual “ABA take-offs.” As a result, there is no data from which to perform a study along the line of that reported in my article, Unpacking the Bar: Of Cut Scores and Competence, 32 J. Legal Prof. 67 (2008) (SSRN Absttract No. 988429), for first-time Bar passage rates. While the shape of the resulting logistic “S” curve is unknown, the effect of a one-point change in law-school LSAT on law-school cumulative Bar passage rates will be much larger at the low end of law-school LSATs than it is at the high end, which means that the historically Black law schools will be at much greater risk of being affected by raising the minimum “ultimate” (cumulative) standard in 301–6 from 75% to 80%.
Posted by Gary Rosin
Despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), historically Black law schools (HBLS) still plays an important role in the education Black/African American law schools. According to the ABA’s statistics, the proportion of entering law students who were Black/African American peaked in 1998, at 8.1%, and then fell to 6.5% in 2005. Since then, that proportion increased to 7.3% in 2009. Because those statistics includes students enrolled in historically Black law schools, it does not show the level of minority enrollment in law schools in which a majority of the students are White/Caucasian–the bulk of law schools. As shown in Table 1, for the Fall 2006 through Fall 2009 entering classes, Black/African-American enrollment in majority White/Caucasian law schools has average 6.4%, lower than the shares of both Asian/Pacific Islander, and Hispanic, entering students:
Arguably, seven ABA-accredited law schools are historically Black law schools: Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia (DC); Florida A&M (FL); Atlanta’s John Marshall (GA), Southern University (LA), North Carolina Central University (NC), and Texas Southern University (TX). As shown in Table 2, these seven schools are vital to the opportunity of Black/African-American students to enroll in law school.
If the ABA is serious about increasing the diversity of the legal profession, especially for Black/African Americans, it needs the historically Black law schools. ABA accreditation, and Bar passage concerns has already adversely affected Black/African American enrollment in these schools. Raising the minimum Bar passage rate requirements would only accelerate that trend. But more on that later.
Posted by Gary Rosin
In Does Delaware Need Another Law School? Answer: No!, Francis G.X. Pileggi argues that the University of Delaware (UD) ought not open a law school. According to a Letter from the President, In December 2010, the UD Board of Trustees authorized a “feasibility study and business plan” for a law school at its Newark campus. Why does UD need a law school? Well, not because Delaware has no public law school. Rather, UD’s strategic plan calls for one. As the UD president put it in his letter:
No matter what group of universities UD uses for comparison purposes, we stand out as one of the few without a professional degree program in law or medicine.
* * *
To achieve parity with the nation’s leading higher education institutions, one of the most impactful investments we can make is in the founding of a law school. * * * [T]he establishment of a law school has the potential to support UD’s growing prominence and move us into the next rank of American higher education.
Perhaps the feasibility study will conclude that we do not need more law schools (see Do We Need More Law Schools?), in part because the number of applicants to ABA-approved law schools peaked in 2004 (see Flat Demand and More Law Schools).
One might hope that a public law school would be cheaper and allow students a path to a JD with lower debt loads (see Law School Debt Loads). But, given the state of the economy and public attitudes towards higher taxes, state funding of higher education keeps getting cut. As a result, public universities are increasingly being privatized–forced to rely primarily on (increasing) tuition.
For other perspectives, see Professors Steve Bainbridge and Larry Ribstein.
Changing Demographics of Historically Black Law Schools
March 27th, 2011Posted in ABA, Admission, Bar Exam, Commentary, Diversity, Empirical Studies, Law Schools, LSAT | No Comments »