Law Schools

The ABA Claps Back Against Cooley Law In Fight Over Admissions Standards

The ABA is trying to 'protect students from investing in an education that does not deliver.'

By Staci Zaretsky on January 10, 2018 12:15 pm

Back in November, the American Bar Association (ABA) notified the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, colloquially known as the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, that it was out of compliance with an accreditation standard having to do with its admission of students. Typically, these public letters are published online within 24 hours of the offending law school’s receipt, but Cooley Law was unwilling to have its name dragged through the mud by the ABA — so the school essentially did so itself, by filing a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in an attempt to prevent the ABA from publishing the letter online. One month later, a federal judge slapped down Cooley’s request for a temporary restraining order, countering that the fact that Cooley had filed such a suit drew more attention to the school’s accreditation woes than the ABA’s public posting of the letter ever would have.

Now, the ABA, seeking to “protect students from investing in an education that does not deliver,” has filed a motion for summary judgment in a no-holds-barred effort to kick Cooley’s lawsuit to the curb, detailing the law school’s weaknesses — from admitted students’ declining LSAT scores to graduates’ plummeting bar exam passage rates — all within the comfort of the public record of a court filing.

Here are some highlights from the ABA’s motion, courtesy of Karen Sloan of Law.com:

The ABA’s motion for summary judgment recounts some of the factors that prompted its conclusion that Cooley was out of compliance with rules meant to ensure that law schools admit students who are likely to succeed on campus and pass the bar exam. Among them:

  • Cooley’s first-time bar pass rate dropped from 76 percent to 48 percent over a seven-year period and hovered between 15 and 22 percent below the state average from 2012 to 2015.
  • Many of the school’s students with low LSAT scores and grade-point averages were not even sitting for the bar.
  • The percentage of students coming to Cooley with LSAT scores of 143 or lower more than doubled over six years, accounting for more than half of the class.

Cooley General Counsel James Robb said the school plans to respond to the ABA’s motion in kind, but that its accreditation admissions standard — that “[a] law school shall not admit an applicant who does not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar” — is “unlawfully vague” because there’s no definition provided for which students “appear capable” of doing such things. According to Robb, “This leaves the law school to guess what it must do to comply with [the admissions standard]. The ABA’s approach is akin to ticketing the driver of a car for speeding when no speed limit is posted.” Hmm… perhaps Cooley students’ increasingly poor entering statistics have something to do with it.

Cooley Law has until February 1 to submit more information to the ABA to establish that the school is in compliance with accreditation mandates. If that information fails to show that the school is complying with the ABA’s admissions rules, Cooley Law administrators will be asked to appear before the Accreditation Committee at its meeting in mid-March, where the school may be formally sanctioned.

Will Cooley, a school that once ranked itself as the second-best law school in the nation, finally receive the comeuppance that it deserves from the ABA? Stay tuned…

(Flip to the next page to see the ABA’s motion for summary judgment.)

ABA Hits Back Against Cooley Law School in Accreditation Suit [Law.com]

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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