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Well, I wasn't horribly worried about the MPRE, but the test was crazy enough that I felt I couldn't be too sure. Alas, I passed with room to spare.
Even though my Legal Ethics professor insisted that the class wouldn't help us much to prepare for the MPRE, I think he was wrong. Ironically, most useful was my recently completed California Civil Discovery class, which focused on issues of conflicts and trusts and investigators and whatnot early on.
Otherwise, I did the BarBri lecture, ran through the sample questions on the MPRE website, and reviewed the Chemerinsky outline. So, I was a bit worried that I had been too lackadaisical.
Here's what I really learned. Having glanced at the "Professional Responsibility" BarBri outline, I am not looking forward to bar exam prep.
Update: 2007 numbers here.
One of the most critical things law schools face, should a school choose to face it, is the American Bar Association's accreditation process. There are 196 ABA-approved law schools in the country. In order to gain approval, law schools must meet a number of standards. Some of these standards address number of class hours, full-time faculty, etc. Others address student quality, or, perhaps more accurately, the level of quality of the law school education based on student metrics. A huge metric is Standard 301(a):
(a) A law school shall maintain an educational program that prepares its students for admission to the bar, and effective and responsible participation in the legal profession.
On June 19, 2007, the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar introduced a new, much tougher, interpretation of standard 301(a). After considerable back-and-forth, the current ratified recommendation could have substantial impact on law schools in California.
This is not a complete description of the new requirements; that can be found in the documents. Some of this information is not readily available. However, the primary metric, bar passage rate, is made available by the California State Bar. And so, for current, fully approved schools, the new interpretation would roughly require the following for continued approval:
- Over the preceding five years of bar exam administrations, the first-time bar exam pass rate of each law school must meet a state-based rate for at least 3 of those years.
- The principal state-based rate is the bar passage rate of first-time bar exam takers who have graduated from ABA-approved law schools minus 10%. That is, schools must have a bar passage rate no more than 10 percentage points below the state average in 3 of the preceding 5 years.
I began wondering about what impact would this have on current ABA-accredited schools in California. More importantly, I wondered how bad the ripple effect of schools dropping out of the approved list could be moving up the chain.
The end result: As many as five current ABA-approved law schools could lose their accreditations. Four schools (Golden Gate University School of Law, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Whittier Law School, and Western State University College of Law) would immediately fail to meet this standard:
| School | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 |
| CalWestern | 63.58% | 66.17% | 54.77% | 61.25% | 68.51% |
| Chapman | 64.58% | 58.82% | 62.22% | 60.48% | 60.13% |
| GGU | 51.61% | 39.00% | 30.34% | 43.50% | 55.17% |
| Hastings | 76.55% | 77.51% | 78.45% | 83.69% | 83.38% |
| Loyola | 67.62% | 68.87% | 66.21% | 72.32% | 73.73% |
| McGeorge | 67.63% | 67.91% | 68.16% | 63.36% | 73.12% |
| Pepperdine | 59.14% | 69.94% | 73.61% | 72.94% | 83.96% |
| SCU | 67.80% | 67.29% | 63.37% | 65.26% | 78.11% |
| Southwestern | 67.82% | 56.25% | 56.19% | 66.55% | 65.77% |
| Stanford | 85.44% | 92.00% | 89.80% | 88.51% | 87.85% |
| TJSL | 46.15% | 47.47% | 40.00% | 36.99% | 50.00% |
| UCB | 85.09% | 90.45% | 86.17% | 84.77% | 84.91% |
| UCD | 74.51% | 80.52% | 74.42% | 73.81% | 74.71% |
| UCLA | 91.82% | 89.08% | 86.41% | 87.45% | 85.66% |
| USC | 80.23% | 80.65% | 78.61% | 81.91% | 85.42% |
| USD | 72.94% | 81.10% | 68.12% | 79.92% | 78.20% |
| USF | 64.24% | 64.94% | 64.40% | 73.71% | 72.90% |
| Whittier | 41.18% | 29.65% | 38.13% | 38.89% | 55.51% |
| WSU | 43.33% | 44.34% | 45.54% | 26.32% | 28.87% |
| ABA Rate | 67.94% | 68.19% | 66.24% | 67.45% | 70.31% |
But the fallout may be greater. The loss of those schools bumps the ABA passage rate up, which causes some collateral damage, taking out Chapman University School of Law:
| School | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 |
| CalWestern | 63.58% | 66.17% | 54.77% | 61.25% | 68.51% |
| Chapman | 64.58% | 58.82% | 62.22% | 60.48% | 60.13% |
| GGU | 51.61% | 39.00% | 30.34% | 43.50% | 55.17% |
| Hastings | 76.55% | 77.51% | 78.45% | 83.69% | 83.38% |
| Loyola | 67.62% | 68.87% | 66.21% | 72.32% | 73.73% |
| McGeorge | 67.63% | 67.91% | 68.16% | 63.36% | 73.12% |
| Pepperdine | 59.14% | 69.94% | 73.61% | 72.94% | 83.96% |
| SCU | 67.80% | 67.29% | 63.37% | 65.26% | 78.11% |
| Southwestern | 67.82% | 56.25% | 56.19% | 66.55% | 65.77% |
| Stanford | 85.44% | 92.00% | 89.80% | 88.51% | 87.85% |
| TJSL | 46.15% | 47.47% | 40.00% | 36.99% | 50.00% |
| UCB | 85.09% | 90.45% | 86.17% | 84.77% | 84.91% |
| UCD | 74.51% | 80.52% | 74.42% | 73.81% | 74.71% |
| UCLA | 91.82% | 89.08% | 86.41% | 87.45% | 85.66% |
| USC | 80.23% | 80.65% | 78.61% | 81.91% | 85.42% |
| USD | 72.94% | 81.10% | 68.12% | 79.92% | 78.20% |
| USF | 64.24% | 64.94% | 64.40% | 73.71% | 72.90% |
| Whittier | 41.18% | 29.65% | 38.13% | 38.89% | 55.51% |
| WSU | 43.33% | 44.34% | 45.54% | 26.32% | 28.87% |
| ABA Rate | 70.28% | 71.31% | 69.40% | 70.96% | 73.37% |
It's not hard to imagine a series of upcoming lawsuits, as well as some of these schools turning into clones of the non-ABA-approved law schools in California, which tend to focus largely on teaching to the bar exam. Things could get very messy.
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