Alabama has now joined Texas and Florida in eliminating ABA accreditation as a requirement for admission to the bar, and Tennessee may soon follow.
Under Alabama's new rule, graduates of five law schools in Alabama are admissible to the bar, as are graduates from otheir law schools if they are admissible in the state in which the law school is located. Thus all graduates of ABA-accredited law schools are still admissible, and now so are graduates of various state-accredited and even unaccredited law schools in some states.
Meanwhile, the ABA today cravenly acceded to the federal government's demand that it revoke its rule requiring accredited law schools to demonstrate a commitment to diversity in admissions and hiring. Suddenly the spineless ABA is singing from the oppressive régime's songbook, condemning the already tame requirement as an error. The ABA has been warned, however, that its status as accreditor may still be withdrawn despite its dutiful revocation of the rule respecting diversity.
We at OTLSS have long taken the position that the ABA should lose its status as accreditor. But there seems to be no coherent strategy for replacing it. Will we end up with a free-for-all? inconsistent policies from state to state? another arbitrary accrediting body with no real standards?
The ABA has been losing credibility for many years, for a variety of reasons. I expect the trend of states allowing law schools and students to ignore it, and still be allowed to sit for the Bar Exam, and get a law license to continue. To me the real problem is student loans. As long as people can easily take out huge amounts of student loan debt to finance law school, they will. Many college grads already use law school as a three-year all-expenses paid vacation, and why not? Many refuse to repay their student loans after graduation, with little or no consequences. When you have a bankrupt Federal Government that believes it can just print-and-spend money forever, scams like this become very common.
ReplyDeleteWe have always taken the position that the ABA is the bitch of the law schools, as is shown by its failure to do anything about the worst of them. Yes, on one or two occasions it has posed as taking some minor action against a law school that was obviously about to fold anyway. Note, however, how it went on waiving its own "rules" for years and years until Cooley finally met one of them (allegedly). Far from being a serious regulator, it is a rubber-stamping body controlled by the very law schools that it purports to regulate.
DeleteStudent loans do remain the key problem, but they interact with accreditation, since they're available only for attendance at accredited law schools. It seems hard to believe that fifty states' governments or court systems will effectively manage accreditation in a coordinated way: much more likely, lax management somewhere will cause problems elsewhere.
An interesting development would be that either The National Lawyers Guild (progressive) or The Federalist Society (conservative) (or both!) offers their "services" as a law school accreditor.
ReplyDeleteAre we getting close to the point where any college graduate will be able to take the bar? Pick up some books after graduation, study and pass.
ReplyDeleteI've said it before and I'll say it again OG: To my knowledge, there has never been any proposal to strip the ABA of accreditation authority that has been motivated by anything other than a desire for MORE toilets, not less. That's why the unaccredited schools always attack ABA on antitrust grounds; their beef with ABA is that it is TOO selective, not that it is not selective enough.
ReplyDeleteIn short, my view on ABA is this: "If you thought you hated the problem, wait until you see the solution." There is zero question in my mind that getting rid of ABA will only mean EVEN MORE toilets, as understandably hard as that may be to believe.
That's my fear. The one effort in the right direction, perhaps, was an attempt by the Department of Education a few years ago to strip the ABA of its accrediting function on the grounds that it was doing a lousy job. But that didn't last long.
DeleteThis is undoubtedly the result of lobbying from the Birmingham School of Law. That place is the poster child of toilet schools--they had a 28% bar pass rate this past february.
ReplyDeleteCalls for elimination of the bar exams, or exemptions from them, stem from the same wretched sources.
DeleteSince 180+ law schools are dumpster fire scams, isn’t it a good thing if they stop preying on minorities with student loan access? If you limit DEI in admissions, you limit the number of BIPOCs indebted in student loans forever with zero prospects of a legal job.
ReplyDeleteI'm more than happy to get rid of the scam schools, which, as you said, are 90% or more of the schools in existence. But shutting them down for lousiness is the way to go about it. Banning affirmative action will have a whitening effect on the Harvards and the Yales.
DeleteIf these efforts prevail-and they probably will-forget crypto; establish a local law school. You'll make bank by promising all grads that they'll be AI-proof and enjoy the cash. Sure it will last only a few years until folks realize that law isn't AI-proof, but that's the whole point of snatch and grab investing: take the money and run.
ReplyDeleteSo this effort will be a further lifeline to the scam.
Now there's a proposal to open a law school in Wichita. What next: Paducah, Kentucky?
DeleteThey opened one in Paducah years ago. It didn't last long.
DeleteThere was one in Paducah 20 years ago or so. It didn't last long. I think it was called the American Justice School of Law.
DeleteI'll be damned. I just made that up; i didn't know that there once was a fly-by-night law school in Paducah. Thanks for the information.
Deletehttps://www.abajournal.com/news/article/grads-of-non-aba-accredited-law-school-can-sit-for-washington-state-bar-exam
ReplyDeleteNo longer have to be from an ABA-accredited school to sit for the Washington state bar exam.
après moi, le déluge
DeleteState Bar Accreditation is actually an advantage to students attending them rather than a lower tier ABA accredited toilet. A toilet ABA Accredited law school charges the same tuition as Harvard but state Accredited schools are much cheaper. So the alumni who never find employment graduating at a state Accredited school at least will not suffer from the debt as much as the unemployed alumni from ABA Accredited toilets when they are all working in retail or hospitality non-legal jobs.
ReplyDeleteAn article published many years ago pointed out that those state-accredited and unaccredited law schools in California are often predatory, taking the money that people have for study from military or other sources. I'd sooner see someone get training as a welder than flush funding down a state-accredited or unaccredit über-über-toilet.
DeleteThe state accredited schools are really only cheaper because they don't have access to federal student loans. If the department of education strips the ABA of accreditation authority they will, in all likelihood, find it easer (not harder) to gain such access.
DeleteThe picture that gets painted is that the ABA imposes all these high costs that force the schools to charge more. I don't really think that's true, as if the schools are mission-driven true nonprofits that want to charge as little as they can. False. The schools charge what the market will bear, like any other business except for the fact that loan availability distorts what students are willing and able to pay. The minute a currently unaccredited school gains access to that same distorting force, its tuition will go through the roof accordingly. It has nothing to do with schools that currently avoid ABA passing the savings along - it's that they cannot charge more cuz their students can't pay as much.
That's why I think ED action to recognize some other accreditor than ABA would probably backfire. Student loans create a strange distortion where more schools = higher price, instead of the usual downward price pressure that competition exerts. When someone else is cutting the check, all the schools just get into lockstep and charge whatever people are willing and able to borrow. Look at stats on average undergrad indebtedness. It is no coincidence that it tracks so closely with the Stafford loan limits.
I was looking at the prices of tuition at Fordham Law, Cardozo Law School and Brooklyn Law School. The cost of attendance at Fordham Law school is around $82,000 per year and the cost of attendance at Cardozo Law School is $77,602 and the cost of Brooklyn Law is $77,762.0 per year.
ReplyDeleteMultiply that by three, add the cost of living for two summers, and tack on interest at a high rate,. Voilà: a degree from one of those toilet schools costs $300k.
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