American Bar Association / ABA, Law Schools

The ABA Is Doing 'Absolutely Nothing' About Low-Performing Law Schools

Wow. Are you surprised by this?

By  
on
Coming to a law school near you? Probably not.

Coming to a law school near you? Probably not.

I guess if there was more political pressure on accreditation I think there would be a lot more media in this room. There would be a lot greater scrutiny nationally on ABA and the amount of debt that many of my peers and students that I don’t know are struggling to deal with who cannot find legal jobs and I think … there are just very few excuses that the ABA and the Commission … has done to help propel this, and so I guess my question is specifically related to these low-performing institutions is what are you guys doing?

Because when I sit here and I hear you guys I hear [about] a lot of … students who just essentially got screwed over because of the market and that is not acceptable and I don’t think that is what you intended to say but what is the ABA or the Commission now doing to prevent these students and my peers and other students from entering this clear path where it just seems like there is not many jobs at the end of the road and they are going to institutions where they are going to be paying thousands and thousands of dollars per month.

And from this presentation and reviewing the staff report, it seems like many things are going well but when we look at these low-performing schools you guys are doing absolutely nothing.

— Simon Boehme, a conflict resolution specialist and committee member of the Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), speaking out against the state of the legal profession during the proceedings that took place this past June against the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. NACIQI recommended that the ABA be stripped of its power to accredit law schools for one year.

Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. Follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Sponsored

Topics

, , , , ,