Three million readers

As the column to the right shows, OTLSS has been visited more than three million times. Thanks to our many allies in the battle against the law-school scam.

People have pointed out that OTLSS appears to be the last of the scam-blogs and that we have been publishing less and less. Old Guy does what he can to sustain the last major source of information on the law-school scam. Times have been difficult for most of us (Old Guy by no means excluded), and the dearth of news on law schools—other than a few recent closures—has contributed to a decline in our anti-scam journalism. We remain vigilant, however, and shall continue to provide the news, analysis, and activism that you have rightly come to expect.

Projects for the new year include a fresh analysis showing which schools may be worth attending and a summary of the data from the ABA's 509 disclosures, which were just released.

We at OTLSS thank you for your continued support and wish you happy and scam-free holidays.

Cooley dumped by Western Michigan University

In an apparent bid to lift itself out of the bottom of the shitter, Cooley affiliated itself with Western Michigan University in 2014. Recently Western Michigan decided to dissolve this ill-advised marriage in November 2023.

Western Michigan was gracious enough to utter a few pieties about returning to its core mission (Cooley was specifically identified as "a distraction"), and it conveniently blamed COVID-19 for the downfall of its bonds to that laughing-stock of law schools. Astute observers of the law-school scam, however, will perceive a different motive behind the propaganda. However much the partnership may have improved Cooley's reputation, it only tarnished Western Michigan's. Cooley indeed has been closing campuses, and it also is at risk of losing its accreditation. How could Western Michigan have gained from that deal? 

Recent months have seen little news here at OTLSS. Stay tuned, however, for a report on the celebrated OTLSS question of whether law school is worth attending at all.

Cooley closes another campus

Cooley, which once rated itself the second best law school in the US, is closing another campus. The one in Grand Rapids will be gone at the end of the month.

Allegedly the closure of one more campus places Cooley "in a position of strength". If it is so damn strong, why has it closed three campuses in the past few years? Cooley's president blamed COVID-19 and changes in the demand for law degrees, without ever mentioning the utter shittiness of his über-toilet. Yale, which Cooley left in the dust on the widely ridiculed Cooley rankings, managed to increase its first-year enrollment by 4% in precisely the same context. How is it that Cooley shrank by 46%? Might it be that something other than external factors contributed significantly to Cooley's fate?

Cooley has recently failed to meet one of the ABA's standards for maintaining accreditation. In practice, the ABA can be expected to extend the time for achieving compliance, which is a polite way of saying that it will not meaningfully enforce its own so-called standards.

The number of law schools that have closed in the past five years or so now stands at thirteen:

Cooley (one campus)
Hamline or Mitchell*
Indiana Tech
Whittier
Charlotte
Savannah
Valpo
Arizona Summit
Cooley (a second campus)
Thomas Jefferson†
La Verne†
Concordia
Cooley (a third campus)

Which school will be the next to close? Florida Coastal and Appalachian are strong contenders. Not far behind are Mississippi College, Golden Gate, Ohio Northern, Faulkner, Western State, District of Columbia, John Marshall, Vermont, and a number of others. Step right up and place your bets!

NOTES:

* Hamline and Mitchell merged. Which one closed is difficult to say: arguments can be made on each side. Anyway, the two schools became one, so effectively one of the two closed. The merger was a closure in dignified guise.

† Forfeited ABA accreditation and continued with only the accreditation offered by California.

Concordia University's law school closes after all

Only four months ago, Concordia University's law school in Boise, Idaho, announced that it would be acquired by Concordia University in St Paul, Minnesota. Now the deal has fallen through, and Concordia's law school will not be opening this autumn after all. Count one more law school as dead.

Although the institutions involved decline to provide details, it seems that a $300M lawsuit against the parent university (based or formerly based in Portland, Oregon) resulted in liens that blocked the transfer of the law school's assets. The parent university recently announced its own closure, but of course its assets may still have to answer that nine-figure claim and possibly other claims as well.

Anyone interested in keeping Concordia's law school alive might consider raising money with which to settle or at least secure that claim. A bake sale should do the trick: just make a dollar's profit by selling a carrot cake or a plate of brownies (or red-velvet cupcakes for Lisa Tucker McElroy) to every person in the US! We have helpfully offered numerous other ideas for bailing a law school out. Indiana Tech never tried them, but maybe Concordia can succeed.

Our dear friends at Law School Transparency have already stricken Concordia from their database, so I cannot provide a link to their data. But the entering class of 2019 had only 59 students, and Concordia was definitely deep in über-toilet territory. It achieved ABA accreditation just last year.

What shall become of those 145 Concordians who have been left high and dry? The U of Idaho has tentatively offered to take them in, one and all, if only it can find a place for them. Options include moving them all to the university's own law school (far away in Moscow, Idaho) and cobbling together a temporary place for them at the university's facilities in Boise. Expect plenty of other toilet institutions to come begging for the newly scuppered Concordians, much as the U of North Dakota scooped up much of the jetsam of Arizona Summit when the latter went tits up days before classes were supposed to start.

Twelve law schools have closed in the past few years (if we count campuses of the Cooley chain as separate law schools) or at least forfeited their ABA accreditation in lieu of closing for good:

Cooley (one campus)
Hamline or Mitchell*
Indiana Tech
Whittier
Charlotte
Savannah
Valpo
Arizona Summit
Cooley (another campus)
Thomas Jefferson†
La Verne†
Concordia

Which will be next?


NOTES:

* Hamline and Mitchell merged. Which one closed is difficult to say: arguments can be made on each side. Anyway, the two schools became one, so effectively one of the two closed. The merger was a closure in dignified guise.

† Forfeited ABA accreditation and continued with only the accreditation offered by California.

ABA notifies ten law schools of non-compliance with Standard 316

Recently we reported that eleven law schools are out of compliance with the ABA's Standard 316. That standard, introduced in its current revised form in May 2019, nominally requires that "[a]t least 75 percent of a law school's graduates who sat for a bar examination must have passed a bar examination administered within two years of their graduation". The non-compliant schools are

Faulkner
District of Columbia
Mississippi College
Inter-American (Puerto Rico)
Cooley
South Dakota
Florida Coastal
John Marshall–Atlanta
Florida A&M
Pontifical Catholic (Puerto Rico)
Charleston

In May 2020, the ABA sent letters of non-compliance to all of these but Faulkner. (I have not found an explanation for the failure to call Faulkner out, even though it had the lowest percentage of graduates who took and passed a bar exam.) Those law schools must now produce a report by February 2021 and appear before the relevant council of the ABA in May 2021. The report must present "a reliable plan for coming back into compliance within [a] 2-year period" starting from the date of the letter (in this case May 2020). "The school returns to compliance by showing that a subsequent two-year cohort has a 75% ultimate pass rate"; otherwise "the school’s accreditation will be removed … unless an extension of time is requested by the school and granted by the Council for good cause shown".

This weak standard was adopted despite the militant opposition of the law-school scamsters and their lackeys, who did not want to have their good thing spoiled by even minimal requirements. Note some of the weaknesses of the standard:

1) Schools that have had perfectly dreadful results on the bar exam for years—including all eleven of the schools listed above—still get the full opportunity to improve their results. In the meantime, they continue to draw in new classes of lemmings, few of whom are likely to pass a bar exam ever.

2) The standard refers to "coming back into compliance", but quite a few schools have never been in compliance.

3) Only those graduates "who [have] sat for a bar examination … within two years of their graduation" are considered for the purposes of this standard. A law school can thus manipulate the data by discouraging its least promising graduates from taking any bar exam within two years of graduation, so that their expected failure will not count against the law school. It is well known, and has been reported here, that law schools have resorted to bribery and other corrupt tactics in order to keep students from taking a bar exam.

4) Likewise, a law school could simply reduce enrollment for a couple of years in order to reach the 75% threshold. Many law schools have resorted to this tactic, especially in recent years, so as to seem more competitive or selective than they are.

5) A law school can also turn its curriculum into little more than three years of bar review. Already that is reality at many law schools, despite the pretensions to "global leadership", flashy specialties, scholarship, complex litigation, and so on. Quite a few law schools have formal bar-review courses every semester, and the rest of the curriculum too is effectively more bar review. The ABA prates about rigorous programs of legal education but does little to evaluate, still less to regulate, what is actually done at toilet law schools.

6) The two-year period "for coming back into compliance" can be extended as the ABA sees fit.

7) If a law school fails to achieve compliance within the two-year period or any longer period allowed by the ABA, it can get a further "extension of time", perhaps indefinitely.

8) The ABA affords a full year between the notice of non-compliance and the evaluation of the school's plan for achieving compliance. Throughout that year, the school is free to do as it pleases.

9) The ABA does not say what it will do if the presented plan is deemed unsatisfactory. More extensions? Opportunities to try again?

10) Nothing in this standard stops a law school from manipulating its way into compliance only to fall back into its usual über-toilet practices immediately until slapped on the wrist again for non-compliance. This yo-yo cycle could continue forever.

So what will happen to the ten law schools whose accreditation has been called into question on account of Standard 316? A few of them are so shriveled up or financially threatened that they are likely to fail before the two-year period lapses. The ABA knows this, of course. As for the rest, I expect them to receive the sweetheart treatment from the ABA, which never saw a scam school that it didn't like. Maybe the ABA will feel the need to strip one or two dying schools of their accreditation just for the sake of appearances, to create a veneer of seriousness about upholding standards or policing the law-school scam. It has done the same in recent years to a couple of schools that had one foot in the grave anyway. But what about the rest of the schools? Will they not get extensions and other dispensations until they attain the pitifully low 75% threshold?

On-line instruction: boon or bane to the law-school scam?

Faithful readers, we are still here. We have been relatively quiet only because there has been little news to report on the law-school scam, thanks in large measure to the disruption resulting from COVID-19.

One new development is the shift to on-line instruction. Since March, on account of the virus, law schools have closed their campuses and switched to lectures delivered via the Internet. Harvard recently announced that it will do the same for at least one more semester, once classes resume in the autumn.

What does this development mean for the law-school scam? The very viability of teaching law in this way casts doubt upon the putative need for expensive buildings, libraries, and, above all, faculties of overpaid professors. Now that the entire student body at Harvard can complete a semester from Paducah, Peoria, or Phnom Penh without getting dressed, why not complete all of law school in the same way? And if students can do so with nothing but some Internet-based lectures, can Harvard not slash its faculty and support staff? The lectures themselves can just be recorded once and for all; students anywhere can attend them at their convenience. A few adjuncts can be hired to grade exams on the side.

It might be argued that the students have to write a paper or two, using the library's resources, or perhaps conduct a moot. But that doesn't justify three years on campus: the students can just show up for a couple of weeks and stay at a hotel if necessary while they do the little bit of work that must be performed on site.

Harvard has long been regarded as the bellwether of the law-school scam: what Harvard does, every über-toilet is sure to imitate. (For instance, every über-toilet teaches law as if its charges were slated for Global Leadership™ or litigation before the Supreme Court.) Now that Harvard can operate entirely via the Internet, other law schools will do likewise. And why shouldn't they? Why maintain the costly, old-fashioned mode of instruction when a cheap and efficient substitute can be rolled out even at Harvard?

The implications for the law-school scam are harder to predict. On the one hand, the widespread introduction of on-line instruction may shore up many a toilet law school by facilitating enrollment. Students no longer need feel constrained by geography: wherever in the world they may live, one toilet is accessible as another. That fact may foster competition among toilets, but it may also help them to put lemming asses into virtual seats. On the other hand, the on-line medium will sap law school of much of its mystique and prestige, thereby discouraging many a prospective student. And even some of the thickest lemmings may call into question the fancy price tags attached to JDs. That could drive the cost down significantly.

Will COVID-19 prove to be good or bad for the law-school scam? Share your thoughts below.

COVID-19 used as an excuse to lower standards to the vanishing point—literally

In response to the spread of COVID-19, the bar exams scheduled for the summer of 2020 have been canceled. New graduates and others who had expected to take the exams this summer may now have to wait until the autumn or later. First-year jobs in law may be placed on hold. Alternatively, new graduates may find themselves having to study for the bar exams while working. People are crying rivers over these problems.

Of course, those with rheumy eyes for the Class of 2020 have rushed to offer solutions. One of these is to admit people "temporarily" without examination on the condition that they work under the supervision of a lawyer. This is just a back door to skipping the exams altogether. Once people had practiced "temporarily" in this way, there would be demands to license them permanently on the strength of their alleged experience. After all, we would be told, they had already demonstrated their competence in practice. But who knows what they would do under "supervision"? Who knows how much supervision they would get, or whether the supervising lawyer was competent to supervise them (or even to practice law)? Even in the best of cases, the experience gained and ability demonstrated would likely be closely circumscribed. Most lawyers specialize in one or two areas of practice, often quite narrow. The relatively few generalists might not be able to offer rich and varied work under supervision to fresh graduates. However much experience a person might acquire under this "temporary" measure, it would not demonstrate even the shallow breadth of knowledge covered by the exams.

Advocates of this "temporary" proposal have pointed out that it offers practical experience, which is required for admission to the bar in many countries but not in the US. Yes, many countries do require a period of apprenticeship—but they also require exams, usually a damn sight more difficult than those used in the US. Canadian requirements vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but typically include about ten months of "articling" (apprenticeship) and a battery of exams, sometimes also months of part-time or full-time courses run by the bar association. Most of the rest of the Commonwealth takes a similar approach. In Germany, law students have to take multiple exams, some of them oral (no bullshit multiple choice!), over a period of years; usually they get only one or two chances at passing, and the exams are designed to eliminate a large part of the class. After all that, German students still have to complete an apprenticeship. They are usually close to 30 when they are admitted to the bar. By contrast, the weak exams used in the US are constantly denounced as an unfair hurdle—and they're really the only hurdle at all, other than character-and-fitness requirements and the payment of a modest fee.

Another proposal, endorsed by more than two thousand law students in a recent letter to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, is "diploma privilege": simply admit every graduate of an ABA-accredited law school to any bar in the US without examination, on the assumption that the JD itself proves their competence. Readers of Outside the Law School Scam will already know what Old Guy thinks of this proposal. Before ripping into it, however, I should explain that it is actually used in some places: New Hampshire and Wisconsin extend diploma privilege to graduates of their respective state law schools, while generally requiring graduates of other law schools to pass the exams. Old Guy admits that the U of Wisconsin is one of the more respectable fourth-tier law schools (the same cannot be said of the U of New Hampshire—named, incidentally, after Franklin Pierce, one of the worst US presidents other than the current abomination and some of his recent predecessors). At least it can be argued that a state can, in principle, manage its own state-run law school well enough to ensure that each graduate meets a reasonable standard of competence. But the corruption that we have seen even at supposedly élite—Old Guy would say fourth-tier—state-run law schools such as the one at the U of Texas undermines that argument. Moreover, admission to one US bar, for a holder of a JD from an ABA-accredited institution, opens the door to all others. It is not clear that diploma privilege in one jurisdiction should be so readily portable. And if the assumptions underlying diploma privilege even in a Wisconsin or a New Hampshire are questionable, think of the hellacious free-for-all that would result from admitting to the bar every knuckle-dragging über-toileteer that manages to buy a degree (using borrowed money, bien sûr) from the likes of Appalachian or Cooley.

Besides, scamsters, why stop at ditching the bar exams? Why not ditch the JD as well? It obviously does not prove much knowledge of law: even graduates of élite law schools typically sign up for costly, time-consuming bar-review courses in order to bone up for the current exams by learning rudimentary law that they never got from law school. Most of the profe$$ors look down their aristocratic noses at practice; many of them have themselves practiced law very little or not at all, and quite a few have never passed a bar exam or even studied law. Outside a few core courses of widely varying quality, much of the curriculum consists of such crapola as Hip-Hop and the American Constitution, Law & Harry Potter, six-course specialties in Global Law and Leadership, and, by way of proving the cultural and artistic merit of the "million-dollar" JD, lessons enabling one to mutilate "Margaritaville" with three chords on the ukulele. It also eats up three or more years and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, usually billed to the public. Will the hackademic scamsters that recommend throwing the bar exams out the window, conveniently just after eleven of them fell short of the ABA's new standard for passing the bar exam and many others barely met it, cheerfully throw law school and their own overpaid sinecures after it?

Old Guy won't be found shedding a single tear for the Class of 2020. Its members could not have foreseen the hysteria à la Chicken Little that would be whipped up around a virus that does nothing like the damage caused by such easily cured but criminally underreported maladies as malaria (half a billion infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths every year) and starvation coupled with its associated preventable diseases (some 25 million deaths per year, to say nothing of many hundreds of millions of cases of malnutrition, even though the world produces enough food to make every person morbidly obese). But they knew, or ought to have known, that law school is a giant scam, particularly at prices typically far over $200k and sometimes close to $400k. They get not one whit of sympathy from Old Guy for their stupid decision to attend law school despite the work that we have been doing here at Outside the Law School Scam for years.