Predicting First-year Law School Performance: The Influences of Race, Gender,...
We use regression analysis and proprietary data from three top 30 law schools to test the relationships of race, gender, and undergraduate major to first-year law school performance, as measured by...
View ArticleAdmission to Law School: New Measures
Standardized tests have been increasingly controversial over recent years in high-stakes admission decisions. Their role in operationalizing definitions of merit and qualification is especially...
View ArticleMeasuring Outcomes: Post-Graduation Measures of Success in the U.S. News &...
The U.S. News & World Report annual rankings play a key role in ordering the market for legal education, and, by extension, the market for entry level lawyers. This Article explores the impact and...
View ArticleWhat Predicts Law Student Success? A Longitudinal Study Correlating Law...
Despite the rise of "big data" empiricism, law school admission remains heavily impressionistic; admission decisions based on anecdotes about recent students, idiosyncratic preferences for certain...
View ArticleAchieving Externship Success: An Empirical Study of the All-Important Law...
With law school externships more popular than ever, the need for an empirical evaluation of externship success is timely and essential. The promise of getting closer to practice readiness propels many...
View ArticleAssessing the Experiential (R)evolution
For more than a century, law schools have resisted substantial reforms relating to experiential education. Yet, in 2014, the ABA mandated a six-credit experiential course graduation requirement for...
View ArticleBuilding a Better Bar Exam
In the wake of declining bar passage rates and limited placement options for law grads, a new bar exam has emerged: the UBE. Drawn to an allusive promise of portability, 36 U.S. jurisdictions have...
View ArticleThinking Out of the Bar Exam Box: A Proposal to "MacCrate" Entry to the...
Although the written bar examination is of relatively recent vintage, for those of us who practice law or work in legal education, it seems always to have been there. I have encountered the bar exam...
View ArticleDiploma Privilege and the Constitution
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdowns are affecting every aspect of society. The legal profession and the justice system have been profoundly disrupted at precisely the time when there is an...
View ArticleA Better Bar: Why and How the Existing Bar Exam Should Change
Despite the fact that competent lawyers should possess a wide range of knowledge, skills, and qualities and the fact that different kinds of lawyers need different strengths, the entire process used...
View ArticleThe Roosevelt-Cardozo Way: The Case for Bar Eligibility After Two Years of...
This paper argues for a revision of the rules of the New York Court of Appeals to allow students to sit for the bar after two years of law school classes. This revision, reflecting what the rule had...
View ArticleWhen and Where We Enter: Rethinking Admission to the Legal Profession
This essay uses several lenses, including professionalism, lawyer competence, and widespread concern about high stakes testing to question why the bar examination should be virtually the only means of...
View ArticleStudents with "CLAS": An Alternative to Traditional Bar Examinations
CLABA is a proposed public service alternative to the traditional bar examination in Arizona. The goal of CLABA is to interactively assist the community by helping to build it rather than simply...
View ArticleImproving the Signal Quality of Grades
We investigate how improving the signal quality of grades could enhance the matching of students to selective opportunities that are awarded early in academic programs. To do so, we develop methods to...
View ArticleReexamining Relative Bar Performance as a Function of Non-Linearity,...
One might think that if a law school’s graduates do better on the bar exam than their credentials on entering law school would have predicted, the law school’s faculty must have done a good job....
View ArticleBattling Biases: How Can Diverse Students Overcome Test Bias on the...
Drafters of standardized tests, such as the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), strive to eliminate biases in multiple-choice questions by assembling...
View ArticleWhat Law Must Lawyers Know?
What constitutes the body of legal knowledge that every lawyer must possess? I used to know, or think I did, but no longer. I suspect no one else knows either. This difficult question is not just an...
View ArticleHow Should We License Lawyers?
What would a licensing regime designed around client protection look like? This Article proposes that it would include a narrower but more active judicial role. A one-size-fits-all exam would no...
View ArticleEnhancing the Validity and Fairness of Lawyer Licensing: Empirical Evidence...
A two-day written bar exam cannot test a prospective lawyer’s ability to counsel clients, investigate facts, research novel issues, negotiate with adversaries, and perform other tasks that are...
View ArticlePerformance Changes on the California Bar Examination: Part 2
Passage rates on the California Bar Exam (CBX) have declined steadily over the past decade. A 2017 study (Bolus, 2017) found that between 2008 and 2016, the percentage passing the exam declined from...
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