Update: 2007 numbers here.

One of the most critical things law schools face, should a school choose to face it, is the American Bar Association's accreditation process. There are 196 ABA-approved law schools in the country. In order to gain approval, law schools must meet a number of standards. Some of these standards address number of class hours, full-time faculty, etc. Others address student quality, or, perhaps more accurately, the level of quality of the law school education based on student metrics. A huge metric is Standard 301(a):

(a) A law school shall maintain an educational program that prepares its students for admission to the bar, and effective and responsible participation in the legal profession.

On June 19, 2007, the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar introduced a new, much tougher, interpretation of standard 301(a). After considerable back-and-forth, the current ratified recommendation could have substantial impact on law schools in California.

This is not a complete description of the new requirements; that can be found in the documents. Some of this information is not readily available. However, the primary metric, bar passage rate, is made available by the California State Bar. And so, for current, fully approved schools, the new interpretation would roughly require the following for continued approval:

• Over the preceding five years of bar exam administrations, the first-time bar exam pass rate of each law school must meet a state-based rate for at least 3 of those years.
• The principal state-based rate is the bar passage rate of first-time bar exam takers who have graduated from ABA-approved law schools minus 10%. That is, schools must have a bar passage rate no more than 10 percentage points below the state average in 3 of the preceding 5 years.

I began wondering about what impact would this have on current ABA-accredited schools in California. More importantly, I wondered how bad the ripple effect of schools dropping out of the approved list could be moving up the chain.

The end result: As many as five current ABA-approved law schools could lose their accreditations. Four schools (Golden Gate University School of Law, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Whittier Law School, and Western State University College of Law) would immediately fail to meet this standard:

But the fallout may be greater. The loss of those schools bumps the ABA passage rate up, which causes some collateral damage, taking out Chapman University School of Law:

It's not hard to imagine a series of upcoming lawsuits, as well as some of these schools turning into clones of the non-ABA-approved law schools in California, which tend to focus largely on teaching to the bar exam. Things could get very messy.

It will be nice to have some of these mediocore schools not make the cut. There are far to many podunk law schools in CA. While they may still have CA accred. they will not be ABA approved which will either make them get up to par with acceptable standards or sink like many schools do. We need to train people to be lawyers, not just to pass the Bar. Some of the passage rates at these school are pathetic. If this was medicine people would not surely not allow this kind of thing to go on.

A 28% bar pass rate is just ridiculous. No school with such a low pass rate should be accredited.

You said "But the fallout may be greater. The loss of those schools bumps the ABA passage rate up..."

On your chart you go back in time and estimate what the ABA passage rate WOULD HAVE been if those schools were not included in the mix. However, the metric is "ABA-approved law schools taking the bar examination in that jurisdiction during the relevant year." If the school was ABA approved in the past, it stays in the mix for the relevant past year. In my humble opinion your "collateral damage" theory is not very well thought through. Very interesting post, though. Here is the text of the proposed rule you mention:

"Under the first option, a school would have to show that in three or more of the most recent five years, in the jurisdiction in which the largest proportion of the school’s graduates take the bar exam for the first time, they pass the exam above, at or no more than 10 points below the first-time bar passage rates for graduates of ABA-approved law schools taking the bar examination in that jurisdiction during the relevant year."

The point of this lightweight analysis was to show the impact of this new interpretation. Obviously, I have no idea whether the proposal will pass, nor do I know when the ABA would choose to implement. As I recall, it's only relevant to the year of the site visit and isn't a rolling requirement. This is hardly a definitive analysis, and I don't have access to the full range of information to make such an analysis, nor am I inclined to do so. Reading the full set of documentation the ABA has published shows that other people are so inclined. What's more, I obviously don't have 2007 information, which makes this whole analysis meaningless as anything other than an illustration.

The general conclusion remains. Several schools over the past five years wouldn't meet the requirement. From there, I was curious about the impact on other schools. There wasn't any suggestion that this would have an immediate impact on Chapman (which I assume is the school you're concerned about, as it matches your Google search for this topic), but rather what impact it might have on other schools. The fact is, the removal of the lower level schools will likely bump the state's first-time passage rate at ABA accredited schools up. My goal with the "collateral damage" test was simply to see if there would be such damage. Apparently, without other changes either from above or at Chapman, there would be a risk of losing accreditation.

If the language was unclear about what I was suggesting, all I can say is that this a blog post. I was just posting about a fairly significant change in ABA standards that had seen little coverage regarding its impact.

i was wondering what some of you think about new college of california, school of law in san francisco, ca. it is a non-aba law school

The words "May" and "Could", are just that. It may or could happen, but it very unlikely that this will happen.

The ABA chose to delay consideration of the interpretation change during the recent annual meeting.

As far as I know Chapman's pass rate for July 2007 was 72%. If the school keeps that trend up, then the proposal will not be of any concern in a couple years (assuming it even passes).

yea, the whittie law schools make it -- while the others that give minorities a chance like WSU fail.

Racist pig!