The sorry saga of Thomas Jefferson School of aw took a major turn this week, when a judge rejected TJSL’s motion for summary judgment in the class-action lawsuit against the school for inflating its employment statistics. Way back in 2012, when this suit was just beginning to make its way through the system, we asked the ATL audience about whether the American Bar Association bears any responsibility for ensuring some minimum level of quality in the law schools it accredits. The answer was a resounding YES.
Obviously, the ABA can’t be held responsible for employment outcomes, but the laughably low barriers to entry for accreditation are inseparable from our current oversupply of law grads. Granted, our survey took place four years ago, but its findings remain germane to the endless “what is to be done?” agonizing over the state of legal education:
- On whether there should be national minimum standards for LSAT and GPA, a strong majority of the 1,200+ respondents voted “Yes” for some form of standardization, with a slight plurality preferring national standards for both metrics.
- 90% of readers believe that if a school’s graduates’ bar passage rate should fall below a certain threshold, accreditation should be revoked.
- 92% of readers felt that anything below a 50% passage rate should jeopardize accreditation; one-third of you would set the bar passage rate cut-off at a stringent 75%.
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The TJSL plaintiffs might be the first-ever to actually have their day in court, but they won’t be the last. If there were any real barriers to ABA accreditation, there never would have been such suits to begin with. It’s hard not to conclude that, while TJSL might have acted egregiously, popular sentiment finds that the real culprit is the toothless, feckless governing body which enables them. (See original post on survey findings here.)