Arizona Law Picked A Fight With A Big Dog

Arizona Law might get booted from the LSAC club.

(U.S. Air Force Photo by Josh Plueger)

(U.S. Air Force Photo by Josh Plueger)

As we told you this morning, Arizona Law’s plans to scrap the LSAT in favor of the GRE has pissed off the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), the professional organization that administers the LSAT. In a letter to the school, LSAC is playing hard ball and said if “substantially all” of Arizona Law’s students did not take the LSAT it’d get booted from the LSAC club.

That might seem very 7th grade, but the truth is LSAC has a whole range of information about law school applicants. Members of LSAC are able to use that information to market themselves to potential applicants. It also acts as a clearinghouse, operating the Credential Assembly Service which allows students to streamline their application process. If Arizona were cut out from LSAC, students who take the LSAT would have to file a separate application just for Arizona.

You can imagine folks at Arizona aren’t taking that threat very well. Though only a few students have been accepted with only the GRE they do expect the number to climb — it is the primary reason for making the switch after all. So they are doing what lawyers do, and talking about their legal options. As the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports:

“We believe that your proposed action unreasonably restrains competition in the law school admissions testing market,” said Arizona Law’s dean, Marc Miller, in the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A spokeswoman for LSAC declined to comment.

“It’s been a one-party system until now,” Mr. Miller said in an interview. “Because they’re a monopoly, they have no one to push them.”

Slow your roll there buddy. This isn’t close to a slam dunk antitrust case:

Daniel Crane, an antitrust expert at University of Michigan Law School, said a legal challenge to LSAC’s dominance over the law-school admissions process might be a tough sell.

In antitrust litigation, he said, there has been a “history of deference to professional organizations that are performing a gatekeeper function.”

LSAC’s governing board is made up of mostly law school deans and law professors, and schools elect the board chairman. A court looking at the matter, he said, would want to know what other law schools think about LSAC’s role and whether they share Arizona Law’s concerns.

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The gatekeeper argument is also supercharged by the real world ramifications of the legal industry’s brain drain. We’ve written about this before but as fewer students are applying to law schools, the schools, particularly those outside of the top tier of the rankings, have lowered their admissions standards to fill the seats. Then surprise, surprise a few years later, when those admitted under the lower standards start taking the bar exam, we see record breaking bar exam failure rates. Accepting the GRE rather than the LSAT is another way to lower the standards at a time when many believe the profession is in free fall, then having a gatekeeper charged with slowing the descent sounds like a good thing.

Arizona Law Faces Fight Over LSAT Policy [Wall Street Journal via Morning Docket]
Earlier: The Great Law School Brain Drain Is Why More People Are Failing The Bar Exam Than Ever Before


Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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