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Law School, Debt, and Discrimination
No full textLaw school is more than a professional training ground. Our graduates play a special and privileged role in the nation’s politics and culture. They know—or should know—the language of the law, the vehicle broadly capable of moving society from where it is to where it aspires to be, and ideally aimed at achieving justice in the case of individuals wronged by the state, a neighbor, or simple bad luck. This special role for lawyers adds significance to questions of who goes to law school and what law students do after they graduate. Law graduates’ career decisions have practical effects on access to justice; for example, new lawyers may choose to serve, or not to serve, poor, historically subordinated communities.
Decisions about careers also link access to justice to student financing of law school. The more law students must borrow to pay for their education, the more pressure they are under to pursue higher-paying jobs to manage repayment. While empirical evidence of the impact of indebtedness on decision-making is scarce, the data we do have suggests that more borrowing for law school correlates with a lower likelihood of seeking a career devoted to the public interest. The correlation makes sense, because public interest careers tend to pay less. The more students must pay for law school, the more likely it is that they will seek more lucrative careers
The Pink Ghetto Pipeline: Challenges and Opportunities for Women in Legal Education
No full textThe demographics of law schools are changing and women make up the majority of law students. Yet, the demographics of many law faculties do not reflect these changing demographics with more men occupying faculty seats. In legal education, women predominately occupy skills positions, including legal writing, clinic, academic success, bar preparation, or library. According to a 2010 Association of American Law Schools survey, the percentage of female lecturers and instructors is so high that those positions are stereotypically female.
The term coined for positions typically held by women is pink ghetto. According to the Department of Labor, pink-collar-worker describes jobs and career areas historically considered women\u27s work, and included on the list is teaching. However, in legal education, tenured and higher-ranked positions are held primarily by men, while women often enter legal education through non-tenured and non-faculty skills-based teaching pipelines. In a number of these positions, women experience challenges like poor pay, heavy workloads, and lower status such as by contract, nontenure, or at will.
While many may view this as a challenge, looking at these positions solely as a pink ghetto diminishes the many contributions women have made to legal education through the skills faculty pipelines. Conversely, we miss the opportunity to examine how legal education has changed and how women have accepted the challenge of being on the front line of educating this new generation of learners while enthusiastically adopting the American Bar Association\u27s new standards for assessment and student learning. There is an opportunity for women to excel in these positions if we provide them with allies who champion for equal status and provide the requisite support.
This article focuses on the changing gender demographics of legal education, legal education pipelines, and the role and status of women in higher education with an emphasis on legal education. The final section applies feminist pedagogy to address challenges, opportunities, and aspirations for women in legal education
Connecting Prospective Law Students’ Goals to the Competencies that Clients and Legal Employers Need to Achieve More Competent Graduates and Stronger Applicant Pools and Employment Outcomes
No full textIn changing markets for clients and legal employers, law schools that most effectively connect the goals of prospective and enrolled law students to the competencies that clients and legal employers need will be successful. Over time, a school that creates this type of effective bridge will benefit from a reputation both among legal employers and clients for educating highly effective graduates and among prospective students for helping them achieve their goals. All stakeholders benefit, but for faculty, stronger applicant pools and strong post-graduation employment outcomes in particular contribute greatly to the quality of the students and the school’s ranking and financial stability.
This article is the first to help faculty and staff make use of new data on the goals of undergraduate students considering law school and enrolled law student, the competencies that clients and legal employers want, and the learning outcomes that the law schools are adopting to design a more effective curriculum to help all the stakeholders to reach their goals. The article in Section II analyzes the growing empirical evidence on prospective law student and enrolled law student goals; in Section III, the article analyzes data on the competencies that legal employers and clients need, and in Section IV, the article examines the learning outcomes that the law schools are adopting as the schools move toward competency-based education required by the 2014 ABA accreditation changes
Measuring Law Student Success from Admissions Through Bar Passage: More Data the Bench, Bar and Academy Need to Know
No full textUsing institutional data from a total of 2,440 students who matriculated between Fall 2009 and Fall 2015 from two law schools, this study examines relationships between: 1. LSAT scores, Undergraduate Grade Point Averages [UGPA), the combination of LSAT and UGPA, and student performance in doctrinal courses and experiential courses, overall first year grades and final law school GPAs; 2. LSAT scores, course performance, final and first year GPAs, and first-time bar passage; and 3. LSAT scores and pro bono work performed in law school. Results indicate LSAT scores predict more weakly for experiential than doctrinal course performance and suggest that, at some schools, data may not support the manner and extent to which many schools rely on LSAT scores as predictors of students’ law school academic performance or bar passage. While LSAT scores had some relationship to bar passage at both schools studied, that relationship was minimal once we looked at the scores in conjunction with law school doctrinal course grades. Further, at the schools studied, the combination of LSAT score, first-year and upper-level doctrinal course performance only accounts for about 30% of variance in bar passage for both schools, leaving 70% of variance in bar passage unknown. The study results confirm prior research that schools’ reliance on numerical LSAT scores in admissions and scholarship decisions should be examined on a school-by-school basis. The results provide additional evidence questioning the value given to LSAT scores in US News rankings calculations. Finally, the results suggest that to the extent schools seek more information about bar passage, they must look beyond LSAT scores and law school doctrinal course grades and engage in longitudinal studies of other potential factors both during law school and the bar study period such as students’ study methods, motivation, self-confidence, financial-/family-/work-related obligations
Are Law Schools Engines of Inequality?
No full textIn \u27Robin Hood in Reverse,\u27 Professor Aaron Taylor examined an important problem: how the cycle of rising law school tuition and expanding merit scholarships damages the pipeline of opportunity for aspiring lawyers and reinforces the social \u27eliteness\u27 of legal education. Taylor directs the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE), which gathers data on the experiences of thousands of law students each year, and he is in a good position to shed light on the important problems he examines. He advanced some bold claims which deserve careful consideration. Professor Taylor has generously shared with me the LSSSE data he used in his analysis. Working with these and other data, I evaluate Taylor\u27s arguments and analyze what we can reliably say about how law school scholarship programs have evolved and how they function today. (p. 243
Beyond the Numbers: An Examination of Diverse Interactions in Law School
No full textA concerted effort has been devoted to diversifying law schools. However, the focus has been almost exclusively on increasing the structural diversity of the student body rather than increasing diverse interactions. This study investigates the types of activities and experiences in law school that relate with more frequent diverse interactions. Findings illustrate several other factors, in addition to structural diversity, are related with more frequent diverse interactions. These factors include perceptions of a supportive and friendly law school environment, interactions with faculty members, positive relationships with other students, pro bono work, and being a member of a student organization
Analytix by AccessLex
No full textAnalytix by AccessLex® puts law school data into clear and accessible formats--such as graphs, PDFs and Excel files, allowing the legal education community to readily analyze, research and compare law school-specific information. Analytix puts the power to benchmark various schools, display trends, gain crucial insights and fuel independent research right into the hands of those who need it
Lighting the Fires of Learning in Law School: Implementing ABA Standard 314 by Incorporating Effective Formative Assessment Techniques Across the Curriculum
No full textThe American Bar Association now requires law schools to incorporate formative assessment into the law school curriculum by providing feedback to students relating to course-specific learning goals before the end-of-semester exam. Peer reviews and self-evaluations are two powerful formative assessment techniques that faculty can use to meet the new ABA standards to assess the students’ learning outcomes while courses are ongoing, creating more effective learning environments within the classroom.
This article argues that peer reviews and self-evaluations can be successfully used across the law school curriculum to deepen student understanding, encourage student cooperation, and develop students’ abilities to be self-regulated learners in law school. We provide background on the power of formative assessment in general as a teaching and learning tool, and then move on to focus specifically on peer reviews and self-evaluations. The nature and essential components of these formative assessment tools in teaching and learning contexts are explained, with a discussion of research supporting their usefulness in enhancing learning across multiple educational contexts and disciplines. We provide examples of how both peer review and self-evaluation exercises have already been used in some courses and make specific suggestions regarding how these tools can be used across the law school curriculum as effective formative assessment tools, serving the goals of ABA Standard 314 without creating an undue burden on faculty even in large classes that rely primarily on a lecture or Socratic dialogue format. Finally, we conclude that incorporating formative assessment across the law school curriculum will benefit teachers and learners alike and suggest ways for law schools to create express incentives for faculty to develop and implement peer review and self-evaluation exercises across the curriculum