Paulette Caldwell discussing the future of affirmative action

June 2008 Update:  The Interim Outcome Measures Report, dated May 12, 2008, was issued in which serious discussion regarding how to appropriately evaluate law students' readiness to begin their apprenticeships as professionals included references to the points raised by SALT in its comments.  The focus of the Report: "recommends that the Section re-examine the current ABA Accreditation Standards and reframe them, as needed, to reduce their reliance on input measures and instead adopt a greater and more overt reliance on outcome measures. As the report shows, such a shift towards outcome measures is consistent with the latest and best thinking of U.S. legal educators and legal educators in other countries and is also consistent with insights gleaned from legal practice and from accreditors in other fields of professional education."

March 2008 Update: The Bar Exam Committee continues to work with the ABA Outcome Measures Committee sending research and articles that the ABA committee should consider in making its recommendations. For those interested in more information about Outcome Measures, the Georgia State University website has papers posted from a recent conference on the Future of Legal Education. Papers by Sally Kift, Richard Johnstone and Paul Maharg contain interesting information about what other countries are doing in terms of Outcome Measures. The Bar Exam Committee is sponsoring a workshop at the SALT Teaching Conference in which issues of assessment and assessment validation will be discussed.

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Once again the Department of Education has been pressuring the ABA to enact a "bright-line" bar passage rate as an acceditation standard, the impact of which might be devastating to those law schools whose missions include a commitment to diversify the legal profession. The United States Supreme Court's decision in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the use of race as a factor in public law school admissions. However, the Department of Education continues to find ways to assault the integrity of this principle. First, the DOE restricted the ABA's authority to accredit law schools to a term of eighteen months rather than the customary five years.

The latest response to Department of Education pressure is proposed ABA Standard 301-6 for Approval of Law Schools, which creates a "bright-line" institutional bar passage rate as a criterion for accreditation, although with ameliorations that responded to prior concerns raised to a more rigid proposed standard.

SALT objects to the proposed Standard 301-6 for these reasons:

• It is acknowledged that the legal profession is less diverse than medicine and accounting. Therefore, it seems more appropriate for the ABA and the DOE to be collaborating to find ways to make the profession, the bench, and the ABA more diverse rather than using accreditation to close down law schools whose missions include diversification.
• There is nothing in the Department of Education's own regulations that requires use of a "bright-line" test for licensing. The DOE only proposes use of passage of licensing exams, "as appropriate."
• If protection of consumers of education is truly a justification for using a "bright-line" bar passage standard, then a more effective, and considerably less patronizing approach would be to require law schools to post their annual bar passage rates on all recruitment materials, including their websites.
• If protection of legal services consumers is the justification, then the impact of imposition of this standard foreseeably is to narrow the scope of the curriculum to focus more on bar exam subjects and exam preparation, and less on the deeper jurisprudential subjects and the clinical and practice courses that help attorneys understand their clients, especially clients who have been traditionally underserved by the profession.
• Any imposition of institutional bar passage rates should be studied, with data collected, to ensure that legal education does not suffer from curriculum and admissions standards that might lean too much towards exam preparation and "safe" admissions.

For the full text of SALT's reponse to proposed ABA Standard 301-6, click here:

For a download of SALT's Supplemental Comments on Contested Standard 301-6 and Proposed Interpretation 301-6, dated February 1, 2008, which was submitted to the Council of the Section of Legal Education & Admisison to the Bar, click here.

For access to the statements SALT has submitted regarding ABA Standards, click here.