Bar Exams, California

Bar Passage Rate Isn't The Most Important Thing, It's The Most Basic Thing

This law dean has a point, but he's still not good enough.

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Welcome back to school, old indebted friends. And welcome to school, new cherubs and bumpkins who have gleefully gambled your financial futures in service of the law schools you decided to attend. Welcome to the nightmare that never ends. Welcome to Above the Law.

Normally my post-Labor Day post is more upbeat, but I’ve just had my second child and I can’t recall the taste of food… nor the sound of water… nor the touch of grass. On the other hand, dealing with my own seemingly adorable choices spitting and pooping all over me does put me in the right frame of mind to talk about law school.

Specifically, I noticed a story today about a California law school suing because the state has imposed a 40% bar passage rate as a threshold for state accreditation. Please note, in California a homeless man reading selected passages from Black’s Law Dictionary can get accredited as a law school — so long as he provides his own water. Imposing a 40% bar passage requirement must be looked as one of the most minimum standards possible.

Nonetheless, the Southern California Institute of Law has a problem with the requirement. Stanislaus Pulle, the law school dean and Game of Thrones naming convention reject, argues that the standard is too rigid, will hurt low-income students, and will force the school to accept people who have a better chance of passing the bar instead of “other types of students.”

Let’s table for the moment the issue that SCIL thinks it’s a good idea to admit the “other types” who are NOT likely to pass the bar, and focus on the low-income concerns, because for once a law dean has a reasonable point about servicing low-income students and low-income clients those students might one day represent. In the L.A. Times, Pulle said: “It is our responsibility to help those who are new arrivals, who are new immigrants, who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Lots of law deans spin that yarn, but Pulle’s school puts its money where his mouth is. SCIL charges less than $8,000 per year. As one person in the Times article put it, that’s like a monthly car payment. At the point where you are going to law school for the price of a used Honda, you are opening legal education to a bunch of people who would otherwise be shut out. It’s incredibly important for there to be schools that provide access to legal education economically disadvantaged people.

But providing that access is no excuse for running a crappy law school that struggles to get even half of its graduates through the licensing exam. I think I should have cheaper access to space, but I’m not going up there if the ship’s heat shield is patched together with duct tape. You aren’t doing the poor any favors by giving them access to an education that doesn’t educate them. These SCIL kids might as well spend the $8,000 on a DVD box set of Law and Order for all the good the law school is doing them.

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If accreditation is going to mean anything, it’s got to mean that the school has achieved some minimal level of competence that the public — both prospective students and prospective clients of those students — can rely upon. Accreditation standards are a form of consumer protection, and if you can’t consistently get 40% of your graduates to pass the bar, then you are not running a legal education operation anybody should be a part of.

Listen to this woman, again from the Times article:

Students say that they are aware of the school’s track record.

Sarah Ali Khan said she was shocked when she checked the campus’ July 2012 bar passage rates when 17 alumni from the Santa Barbara campus took the bar and none passed.

The statistics “were abysmal, but they were also motivating as well. It gave me a sense of urgency, that I was betting on myself,” said Khan, who reasoned that the school’s low tuition mitigated concerns over the school’s bar passage rate.

See, that lady there needs to be protected from herself. “A sense of urgency”? “Betting on myself”? Why weren’t you urgently betting on yourself when you took the freaking LSAT? The other way for low-income students to mitigate the cost of law school is to get a good enough score on the LSAT that a real law school lets them go for free. And while low-income students aren’t in the best position to do well on the LSAT, they’re also the ones who can least afford to waste three or four years of their lives pursuing something that will lead to no job because they can’t pass the hurdle that is conveniently placed at the end of experience after the law school has pocketed their $8,000. Spend $8,000 on LSAT prep materials, spend a year studying, then apply to law school. Bet on yourself before the die has been cast.

It’s the Tragedy of the Penny Slots (I think I just made that up). They’re enticing poor people to play a game that they will almost certainly lose based on the illusion that they can afford it.

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New students have tons of things to worry about besides passing the bar. But you need to pass the bar. That’s a dispositive issue. Hopefully, most of you are going to the type of institution that can spend its resources doing things other than suing to depress statewide standards of bar passage rates.

Law school continues fight over minimum bar exam passage rate [L.A. Times via Morning Docket]

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