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Law School in a Pandemic, Year 2: Moving from Emergency Remote Teaching to Emerging Best Practices in Distance Legal Education
Full text linkFor the 2022 follow-up study on law students’ perceptions of online J.D. classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, AccessLex and Gallup reinterviewed 820 students who participated in the initial Spring 2021 study of J.D. students at 147 ABA-accredited law schools. Though most of these students had returned to in-person classes in the Fall 2021 semester, about one in seven were still in hybrid arrangements, split evenly between in-person and online classes in Spring 2022 (6%), or continuing to attend most or all of their classes online (9%). Students in tier-four schools (i.e., lower-ranked law schools according to ratings by U.S. News and World Report) were most likely to still be taking at least half of their classes online, at 32%
The Pro Bono Penalty: Extracurricular Activities and Demographic Disparities in Bar Exam Success
No full textDemographic disparities in bar exam pass rates are problematic but poorly understood. We investigate a possible explanation: participation in extracurricular activities, which could either distract from bar exam preparation or motivate and prepare students to succeed. Generally, participation in extracurricular activities while in law school does not play a large role in bar exam success. However, there is a significant, arguably causal, penalty associated with one particular activity, pro bono work, most notably in lower-ranked law schools. This penalty is sizable: pro bono work is associated with a 5 percentage point (6%) decrease in the chances of passing the bar exam on the first attempt. This penalty is largest for Black and female students and may explain as much as 20% of the Black-white gap in first-attempt bar pass rates
American Law School Dean Study
Full text linkAs legal education reaches another watershed moment, understanding the American law school deanship has become more important than ever.
The American Law School Dean Study is based primarily on a survey of the 197 sitting and 222 former law deans who served between 2010 and 2020.
The Study was designed to answer three principal research questions: What are the career paths for law school deans before they are selected and after they finish their deanship? What are the processes by which individuals are recruited and selected to be deans at American law schools? What are the most pressing challenges facing law school deans at American law schools, and what solutions have they adopted?
The survey was conducted for AALS by NORC at the University of Chicago. In addition to the survey, individual interviews were conducted with a diverse group of twelve deans at a mix of law schools around the nation, representing law schools that are public and private, large and small.
The capstone report is the first of its kind on law school deans, and reveals important findings of interest to a wide variety of legal education stakeholders
Are Law Schools Cream-Skimming to Bolster Their Bar Exam Pass Rates?
Full text linkLaw schools are held accountable on many fronts to achieve and maintain high bar passage rates. ABA Standard 316 is likely the strongest accountability measure. While the course of legal education itself, along with academic and bar success interventions, is a key driver of bar exam performance, Bahadur et al. suggests that other, obscure institutional practices can serve to inflate institutional bar passage performance. Such practices could include recruitment and admission of transfer students and academic attrition. We examine this hypothesis to assess the influence of both attrition and transfer on law schools’ bar passage rates
It Is Okay to Not Be Okay : The 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being
Full text linkA data dashboard for this report can be found here.
The Survey of Law Student Well-Being, implemented in Spring 2014 [hereinafter 2014 SLSWB ], was the first multi-law school study in over twenty years to assess alcohol and drug use among law students, and it was the first multi-law school study ever to address prescription drug use, mental health, and help-seeking attitudes. The article summarizing the results of the 2014 SLSWB has been downloaded over 12,000 times.
With a desire to learn what has changed since 2014 given the increased emphasis on law student and lawyer well-being among law schools and legal professionals, the authors sought and received grant funding from AccessLex Institute to implement another survey of law student well-being. In addition to assessing alcohol use, street drug use, prescription drug use, mental health, and help-seeking attitudes, the 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being [hereinafter 2021 SLSWB ] also included new questions focused on law student experiences with trauma and on concerns of third year law students related to preparing for and taking the bar exam. Additionally, the 2021 SLSWB included a set of open-text questions asking respondents to identify actions their law schools are taking or could be taking to support law student well-being.
Section I provides a literature review, inclusive of research on law student wellness since the original article on the 2014 SLSWB was published in 2016. Section II describes the methods of recruitment, response rates, and design of the 2021 SLSWB survey instrument. Section III provides results from the largest multi-law school study of its kind, comparing results from the 2021 SLSWB with results from the 2014 SLSWB where possible. Section IV discusses the results and includes recommendations for steps different stakeholders within legal education and the legal profession could pursue to better support law student well-being. With representation from thirty-nine law schools across the country, including public, private, and religious law schools, as well as small, medium, and large law schools in terms of student enrollment, the findings of the 2021 SLSWB have implications for multiple stakeholders in legal education, including students, faculty, staff, and administrators, along with boards of law examiners
Show Them the Money: Improving Consumer Information on Need and Merit-Based Gift Aid to Equitably Empower Prospective Law Students
Full text linkHistorically, Black and Hispanic or Latino/a/x (Latine) applicants have been admitted to law school at disproportionately lower rates than White and Asian applicants. While there is no shortage of law school applicants from all racial/ethnic backgrounds, Black and Hispanic or Latine applicants are less likely to gain admission to any law school and, when admitted, are less likely to obtain financial aid in the form of grants and scholarships (gift aid). As a result, these students tend to finance more of their legal education with student loans and graduate with higher debt balances compared to White and Asian law school students.
It is no secret that underrepresented students have carried a larger share of the load when it comes to out-of-pocket law school expenses. Law school admission and merit-based gift aid which defrays the high (and rising) cost of attendance rely heavily on academic indicators such as the LSAT and UGPA — indicators that tend to correlate with socioeconomic status (SES). Overreliance on academic indicators for awarding institutional gift aid results in applicants from low SES and historically underrepresented racial backgrounds being less likely to receive merit-based gift aid awards. Compounding the issue is the predominance and prioritization of academic indicators of merit over financial need in the distribution of institutional gift aid to incoming law students.
There is a strong need to consider accessibility to institutional gift aid generally, and particularly for students from underrepresented racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Addressing the lack of diversity within the legal profession requires a deep dive into each component of the pipeline to practice with the goal of improving how the entire institution equitably serves talented and motivated aspiring lawyers from all backgrounds. Specifically, law schools might consider how their communications about institutional aid may impact a student’s likelihood of receiving gift aid and, more broadly, their ability to make informed financial decisions about attending law school.
The importance of access to information regarding the cost of legal education and law school financing options cannot be understated. Recent research has demonstrated the need for better information and education in these domains: a 2020 American Bar Association (ABA) survey found that roughly 30% of young lawyers would have chosen a different law school given what they now know about the legal profession and the impact of student loan debt. When asked what they would change about their law school choice, a majority indicated they would have chosen a school that offered a more generous scholarship or lower tuition.
Given the potential to narrow information gaps for prospective law students, this brief aims to examine the availability and substance of institutional gift aid information provided on law school websites to better understand the landscape of merit- and need-based gift aid opportunities in legal education. In the current digital age, law school websites are essential platforms for informing aspiring law students of gift aid options, eligibility requirements, and application procedures. Accordingly, this study undertook a content analysis of websites associated with 194 ABA-accredited law schools in the United States for the purpose of exploring two questions: To what extent do law schools provide public and accessible information regarding gift aid for prospective students? To what extent does the availability and specificity of information about gift aid vary between need- and merit-based gift aid opportunities
Bar Exam Registration Fees
No full textThis source includes data on bar exam registration fees, character and fitness investigation fees, law student registration fees, late registration penalties, and laptop fees for the 50 states and the District of Columbia
Bar Passage Data by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender: 2021-2022
No full textThis source includes data on bar passage rates (first-time and ultimate) by race, ethnicity, and gender. The data comes from the American Bar Association\u27s 2021 and 2022 Bar Passage Questionnaires
Who Watches the Watchmen? Using the Law Governing Lawyers to Identify the Applicant Duty Gap and Hold Bar Examiner Gatekeepers Accountable
No full textThe legal profession holds lawyers to high standards in their personal and professional lives and expects aspiring members to follow the ethical rules with scrupulous precision and candor. Yet the profession, and those monitoring admission to the profession, afford no protections or recourse to this class of young professionals during that critical period between graduation and successful bar passage.Without reform, this previously unacknowledged duty gap will continue to demoralize and potentially harm future lawyers and reflect negatively on the profession as a whole. Supervising bodies, discussed within, treat applicants as if they have already committed an ethical breach. Indeed, applicants are charged with meeting standards strikingly similar to those required for lawyer reinstatement after disciplinary action. Throughout the licensing process, duty remains a one-way street with applicants bearing the burden of compliance.This ethical duty gap was laid bare as these self-appointed supervisory bodies- boards of law examiners across the country, displayed a deeply entrenched commitment to a gatekeeping function by maintaining rigid and opaque lawyer licensing procedures as they administered the bar examination multiple times in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many boards made decisions putting the health, safety, and emotional well-being of bar applicants at risk, and in some instances prevented applicants’ exam scores from being portable. Times such as these have historically prompted changes to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.What the Covid-19 bar exam crisis has revealed is an uncomfortable truth: the legal profession appears to exhibit a marked lack of compassion, fairness, and ethical obligation to bar applicants in the period between graduation and licensure. The newest members of a so-called noble profession appear to be owed fewer duties than a potential client by every entity involved in the lawyer licensing process, and have little to no recourse to have their complaints heard or addressed.This truth is shaking the foundations of the law licensing system, and applicants and others are calling for reform. Yet, on an individual basis, many boards of law examiners across jurisdictions cling to the status quo, or adopt the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). Promulgated by the Madison, Wisconsin-based non-profit organization the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), the UBE is written by psychometricians whose duty is to maintain the statistical reliability of its product, and whose transparency is limited due to its nonprofit status. Boards of law examiners give broad deference to the NCBE, even though the company is not subject to actionable ethical oversight by the jurisdictions that employ it – not in regard to its business practices, profitability, or code of conduct.Bar applicants, meanwhile, lose the protection of being enrolled in ABA-accredited law schools. The commercial bar preparation companies they are forced to employ do not owe any ethical duties to applicants either, as most are privately-held companies who bind users with arbitration clauses, choice of law provisions, and threats of reporting applicants to their jurisdiction’s board of character and fitness if products are misused.This article calls attention to the duty gap between bar examiners, the legal profession, and aspiring lawyers, identifying and scrutinizing its genesis and presence. It also suggests bar reform is best achieved through greater oversight of the lawyer licensing process by current members of the profession, and insists jurisdictions treat bar applicants with the duties prescribed by the rules of professional conduct. Who watches the watchmen? In a self-regulating profession, we all do
The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools That Overperform on the Bar Exam
No full textDespite recent signs of improvement, since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success. At least partly as a result, the rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates’ chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. Our study examines which schools do so and why.We began our research by accounting for law schools’ incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar exam passage rate for each ABA-accredited law school. We then examined each law school’s aggregated performance on the bar exam tests for which its graduates sat based on relative and absolute performance, weighing the difficulty of each state’s bar exam. Through this analysis, we identified law schools that have consistently higher and lower first-time bar exam passage rates over a period of six years: 2014-2019. In addition to identifying overperforming law schools on the bar exam, our methodology is a novel contribution not only to the legal education literature but also to the quantitative methodological literature, given its unique tailoring of the classic value-added modeling design to the realities of the bar exam.In the second phase of our research, we surveyed administrators at these overperforming and underperforming law schools, as well as law schools in the middle of the distribution, to qualitatively assesses how these law schools approach bar support and bar success of their students. Collectively, this research provides significant insight into how law schools are responding to recent negative trends in bar passage rates, validates successful approaches to mitigate this trend, and recommends a suite of options available to law schools seeking to improve their bar passage rate