Why Law Schools Need External Scrutiny

Brian Tamanaha

Get ready law schools: A Senate hearing on the ABA regulation of law schools might be coming. That is the subtext of Senator Boxer's most recent letter to the ABA. It's overdue.

Law schools have demonstrated time and again that we are incapable of regulating ourselves. It started a century ago, when AALS and ABA wrote accreditation standards to keep out competition from lower cost urban law schools that educated immigrants and working class people. It was on display in 1995, when the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust suit against the ABA, charging that legal educators had captured the accreditation process and were using it to ratchet up their wages and reduce their teaching loads. And it is happening again now--as highlighted by two recent examples.

The recent disclosure that Illinois law school had submitted false LSAT and GPA medians to the ABA and US News was bad enough (coming on the heels of Villanova's similar disclosure), but that is not the worst of it. The real scandal is that law schools and the ABA have created a bizarre arrangement that appears designed to allow false reporting.

Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) administers the LSAT and maintains records on every single law student at every accredited law school in the United States. The ABA and LSAC jointly publish the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA Approved Law Schools. Both the ABA and LSAC put their imprimatur on the validity of the data.

Now here's where the arrangement gets strange. The ABA asks each law school to supply data on the LSAT and GPA of the 1L class, and it publishes in the Official Guidebook whatever information law schools submit. What's weird about this is that the co-publisher of the Official Guidebook, LSAC, has this information in its database (literally). The ABA could simply ask LSAC (rather than law schools) to supply this information (but it doesn't), and LSAC puts its name on a book that contains information that it could easily check (but it doesn't). As a result, law schools can submit false information with impunity.

Rumors have circulated for years that a few law schools have been submitting false information to the ABA (these rumors include prominent law schools as well as lower down schools). Yet the ABA never asked LSAC to verify the numbers, and LSAC never told--despite the fact that both organizations jointly put their name on the "Official Guide" to law schools.

LSAC could blow the lid off this tomorrow by supplying the true LSAT and GPA medians for every law school for the past ten years--but it won't. Why not? LSAC President Daniel Bernstine explains, “That’s just not something we have done historically, and I don’t see why we would. We are not in the reporting business. We don’t distinguish between our [law school] members.”

You see, LSAC is a non-profit organization controlled by law schools (revenue of $70,000,000 last year), with a board of trustees nominated by law schools (and the President, who earned $600,000 in 2010, is a former law school dean). LSAC apparently views its primary loyalty as properly oriented toward law schools--that is--toward protecting its constituent members.

One might wonder why the ABA would go along with such an arrangement, and would put its name on an "Official Guidebook" with an organization that exists to serve the interests of law schools. After all, the ABA is supposed to be regulating law schools.

Well, the thing is, the ABA Section on Legal Education has itself long been dominated by legal educators. That's what got the ABA into trouble with DOJ in 1995, and the intertwining of the ABA and AALS (a lobbying organization for legal educators) goes back more than a century. It's a good old-fashioned story of regulatory capture.

That brings me to the second recent event which confirms that law schools need external scrutiny. Read more »
Posted 7:00 AM by Brian Tamanaha [link] (17) comments

Remembering Derrick Bell

Mary L. Dudziak

The legal academy has lost a giant, with the death yesterday of Derrick Bell, Visiting Professor at New York University.  Tomiko Brown-Nagin put it this way on the Legal History Blog:

Bell's legacy in the law is long and deep. Bell never trained professionally as a historian; yet his scholarship reflected great historical consciousness and insight. It's fair to say, I think, that every historian of the civil rights era and every scholar of race and the law is indebted to Professor Bell. 

He was a person of singular importance in American legal education -- from his own barrier-breaking role as the first African American tenured professor at Harvard Law School, to his public and behind-the-scenes role mentoring so many who followed after him. Bell has left a legacy in his own work, and in the work of so many others who were inspired and encouraged by him. He would sometimes offer words of support to people he did not know -- like a very junior untenured law professor at Iowa who sent him an unpublished paper. His simple and kind letter to me many years ago helped me stand my ground with my first significant article, when some readers did not want to hear that archival records complicated and challenged a "simple justice" narrative of civil rights reform.

Derrick Bell has left an important paper trail so that the next generation can explore social change during his era, and his own  role in transforming American legal education. His extraordinary papers have been open for some time at NYU. Here's a post describing what you can find there.
Posted 2:32 PM by Mary L. Dudziak [link]

Cory Maples's Golden Ticket

Jason Mazzone

Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Maples v. Thomas. I blogged about the case earlier this year.
Posted 8:04 PM by Jason Mazzone [link]

The Poor Employment Market for Law Grads Predates the Recession

Brian Tamanaha

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the remarkably high number of graduates of the class of 2009 who failed to obtain jobs as lawyers. When confronted with data like this, law schools respond that the dismal job placement rate is a recent phenomenon, a product of the current recession, suggesting that things were fine before and all will be well once again when the legal market rebounds. It’s wrong to isolate on and condemn law schools, they say, for results that reflect a historically bad time for jobs across the economy.

The problem with this response is that it is not true.

While it is correct that the recession exacerbated matters, things were not fine before, as demonstrated by the following chart, plotting the year before the recession, 2007 (in red), alongside 2009 (in blue). Notice that at many law schools--including schools ranked in the top 100--twenty percent or more of graduates of the class of 2007 failed to obtain jobs as lawyers (nine months after graduation). Read more »
Posted 7:00 AM by Brian Tamanaha [link] (15) comments

Recommended Reading on #OccupyWallStreet

Frank Pasquale

In previous posts, I've worried that a large-scale effort to protest inequality in the US would spark a backlash. But the Occupy Wall Street movement has carefully and skillfully built up a network of alliances (from local community groups and unions). As news outlets and citizens consider how to react to the hundreds of arrests made yesterday, they should be aware of these sources:

Mark Engler, Five Things That #OccupyWallStreet Has Done Right

Micah Sifry, #OccupyWallStreet: There's Something Happening Here, Mr. Jones.

Mike Konczal, Understanding the Theory Behind Occupy Wall Street’s Approach

Doug Henwood, The Occupy Wall Street non-agenda

Glenn Greenwald, What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has been condescending and dismissive. I recommend the alternative sources above because of the people I met on Thursday evening when I went to see the protest for myself.
Read more »
Posted 12:21 AM by Frank Pasquale [link]