Law School Applicants Research Articles

LSAT® scores of economics majors: The 2022–23 class update and 7-year history

In this article, the author updates his prior studies of LSAT® scores (Nieswiadomy 1998, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2017) using current data for 2022–23 law school applicants, finding that economics majors remain at or near the top of all applicants. Results of the previous studies showing economics majors scored well on the LSAT® have often been posted on economics (and other) departments’ Web sites. Economics majors (mean LSAT® score of 161.7) had the highest score of the 20 largest disciplines (in terms of the number of law school applicants). Economics places second behind math/physics (164.3) out of 30 discipline groupings created to contain students with similar majors. Also, data from the past seven years (2016–17 through 2022–23) reveal similar rankings.

Dynamic Decision-Making under Rolling Admissions: Evidence from US Law School Applications

Dynamic Decision-Making under Rolling Admissions: Evidence from US Law School Applications

Criminal history inquiries and minority threat in the legal profession: An analysis of law school and state bar admission applications

While all but one U.S. law school and every state bar ask about criminal history on their admissions application, such inquiries vary considerably in the depth of information sought. One potential explanation for variations in the depth of criminal history inquiries among law schools and state bars relates to minority threat dynamics. Drawing on data quantifying the depth of criminal history inquiries for 190 ABA-approved law schools and all state bars, as well as school and state demographics, this study explores the issue for the first time. Negative binomial regressions reveal that law schools and state bars located in states with larger Black and Latino populations employ more probing criminal history inquiries. We also find that this relationship is parabolic – where the minority threat effect is negative in states with a critical mass of Black/Latino residents. Finally, minority threat effects for law school criminal history inquiries are moderated by state bar criminal history inquiries, suggesting that law schools are cued by state bar policies. These results provide some support for minority threat theory, informing debates about the continued use of criminal history inquiries to screen prospective law students and lawyers, and the inclusiveness of the legal profession generally. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Curricular Change in Legal Education

This article surveys basic changes in legal education from 1973 to 2017-2018, using a comparison of the sizes of the student body with the professoriate, and changes in the allocation of faculty resources over this period. It offers evidence on the reasons for declining bar passage rates and the decline in preparation for business and transactional law practice. The paper documents law school enrollments over this period. In summary, student enrollments have been on a roller coaster, and now have declined to 1973 levels after a 40% increase. At the same time, faculty numbers have increased by 70%. While this has resulted in more favorable faculty-student ratios, bar passage rates nationally have declined from 82% to 72%. This is a classic picture of a failing industry, which high fixed costs due to the fixed cost of tenured faculty and cyclical revenues, forced to raise tuition to support what has become a bloated faculty. It also raises questions of whether declining bar passage rates are caused by the declining academic credentials law school applicants, or modern failures in teaching. I will not cover the blame placed on U.S. News ratings or ABA changes (expansion) in costly curricular requirements, so ably covered by Professor Victor Gold. The study documents that resources have been diverted (disproportionately) from foundational and required courses to more academic and “boutique” courses. Some of this may be attributed to the increased number of law faculty members who hold advanced degrees in other fields, which may divert part of their teaching to courses with an affinity for their graduate training, rather than professional preparation. The proliferation of such courses, and of courses driven by political and cultural choices dilutes any focus on preparation for the practice of law or bar passage. It also sends a message that professional preparation is no more important than the research interests of various teachers, or than their interest in “social justice.”

Fairness in machine learning with tractable models

Machine Learning techniques have become pervasive across a range of different applications, and are now widely used in areas as disparate as recidivism prediction, consumer credit–risk analysis and insurance pricing. The prevalence of machine learning techniques has raised concerns about the potential for learned algorithms to become biased against certain groups. Many definitions have been proposed in the literature, but the fundamental task of reasoning about probabilistic events is a challenging one, owing to the intractability of inference.The focus of this paper is taking steps towards the application of tractable probabilistic models to fairness in machine learning. Tractable probabilistic models have recently emerged that guarantee that conditional marginal can be computed in time linear in the size of the model.In particular, we show that sum product networks (SPNs) enable an effective technique for determining the statistical relationships between protected attributes and other training variables. We will also motivate the concept of “fairness through percentile equivalence”, a new definition predicated on the notion that individuals at the same percentile of their respective distributions should be treated equivalently, and this prevents unfair penalisation of those individuals who lie at the extremities of their respective distributions.We compare the efficacy of this pre-processing technique with an alternative approach that assumes an additive contribution. It was found that when these two approaches were compared on a data set containing the results of law school applicants, the percentile equivalence method reduced the average underestimation in the exam score of ethnic minority applicants black applicants at the bottom end of their conditional distribution by about a fifth. We conclude by outlining potential improvements to our existing methodology and suggest opportunities for further work in this field.

Future in Law? A Profile of Graduating College Seniors Interested in Legal Education and Careers

The recent decline in law school applicants is well-documented. Despite a slight increase in 2018, the number of law school applicants remains substantially lower than levels observed prior to 2011. This decrease in the demand for legal education presents an opportunity to better understand the pathway to law school and the formation of interest in pursuing a law degree or career. The American Association of Law Schools pioneered inquiry in this area with their groundbreaking study, Before the JD: Undergraduate Views on Law School, which surveyed undergraduates from 25 four-year institutions and first-year law students from 44 law schools, to learn more about what attracts and deters undergraduate interest in legal education and other advanced degrees. This report aims to build on this work by analyzing a broader dataset of undergraduate students — specifically, college seniors — to further describe the characteristics, academic behaviors, goals and career path considerations of those who report an interest in law compared to those who have other career and degree aspirations. Utilizing 15 years of data from the College Senior Survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles, our study offers insight about the traits of college seniors aspiring to a law degree and/or career, when their interest in law develops, and the extent to which their interest in law changes during college.

Law School Applicants by Degrees: A Per Capita Analysis of the Top Feeder Schools

Law School Applicants by Degrees: A Per Capita Analysis of the Top Feeder Schools

LSAT® scores of economics majors: The 2015–16 class update and 15-year history

ABSTRACTIn this article, the author updates his prior studies of LSAT® scores (Nieswiadomy 1998, 2006, 2010, 2014) using current data for 2015–16 law school applicants, finding that economics majors remain at or near the top of all applicants. Results of the previous studies showing economics majors scored well on the LSAT® have been posted often on economics (and other) departments' Web sites. Economics majors (mean LSAT® score of 158.8) had the highest score of the 16 largest disciplines (with more than 950 law school applicants). Economics places second behind math/physics (161.7) out of 29 discipline groupings created to contain at least 325 students with similar majors. Also, the past 15 years (2001–2 through 2015–16) reveal similar rankings across time.

The Case for an ABA Accreditation Standard on Employment Outcomes

Students graduating from American Bar Association (ABA)-accredited law schools over the past ten years have faced a declining entry-level legal employment market, stagnant or decreased starting salaries, and increased tuition debt burdens. While most law schools report strong legal employment rates, some consistently place fewer than 40 or 50 percent of their graduates in law jobs (roughly defined as those full-time, long-term jobs for which bar passage is required or the J.D. degree is an advantage in obtaining or performing the job) within 9-10 months after graduation. At least partly in response to the declining legal employment market, law school applications and enrollments have decreased sharply in the past six years. However, some law schools with persistently very weak graduate employment outcomes have lowered admissions standards in order to minimize reduction in class sizes. In doing so, they almost inevitably exacerbate existing problems because their bar passage rates suffer and their graduates’ employment prospects are further diminished. The perfect storm of increased student debt and diminished employment outcomes has drawn a wide range of responses, including two reports from American Bar Association presidential task forces, and extensive analysis and commentary by a range of legal education observers. This paper builds on the preexisting analyses by assembling the data and reviewing the literature, and then advocating the adoption of a new ABA accreditation standard on law graduate employment outcomes. The standard fills the gap in the current standards that allows law schools to pursue admissions policies that minimize enrollment reductions without regard to the impact on employment outcomes. An employment outcomes standard and could be adopted in addition to or in lieu of the bar passage standard.

Beyond Learning Objectives: A Taxonomy to Maximize Outcomes

If Paul Revere were part of the contemporary legal academy, he might ride out of Boston warning the legal academy, “Outcome Measurements are Coming!” The shift from past accreditation standards to current and future accreditation standards requires such warning and preparation. It is a fundamental shift that could cajole law schools to fundamentally revise their curricula, courses, teaching methods, and assessments. This article will provide a framework of learning objectives that will help law schools revise curricula and courses to meet the coming outcome measurement accreditation standards in the new legal education marketplace.In the past, the ABA has accredited law schools based on inputs. Specifically, law schools needed to attract a certain caliber of student as measured by GPA and LSAT score. Currently, the ABA has moved toward accreditation standards based on outcome measurements rather than inputs. Law schools will no longer be able to provide curricula as the primary means for judging the quality of the educational program. Rather, schools are going to have to produce data that students met the learning objectives of the curricula. This shift is subtle, yet fundamental. It is no longer acceptable to simply teach the learning objectives. Students must also learn. And law schools must be able to prove that students learned. With the recent decline in law school applications, faculty are faced with a student body that is less and less prepared to begin a traditional legal curriculum. Thus, law schools must provide more training and prove more results with students who struggle more. And, this task must be done in an economically viable manner. This “new normal” might seem to present the academy with an insurmountable challenge. However, with curricula that are optimally structured to follow the natural progression of human learning, this otherwise overwhelming challenge becomes possible. This article provides a Taxonomy of Cognitive Legal Learning Objectives and Outcome Measurements. The taxonomy can help both the ABA and schools develop standardized language used to communicate learning and assessment objectives. The taxonomy provides a guide as to how to write curricular and course learning objectives. The taxonomy also guides law schools to structure curricula and courses to meet these learning objectives to create positive outcome measurements. Specifically, by creating curricula that mimics the natural progression of adult human learning, law students will be able to learn more efficiently and law professors of all experience levels can avoid misalignment between instruction, learning, and assessment. Additionally, by setting learning objectives that internalize the shift to measuring what students should be able to do (the measurable outcomes), the learning objectives could more closely align with measuring and proving student learning. In this article, I discuss what learning objectives, assessment objectives, and outcome measurements are and how to write them. Then I review existing taxonomies of learning objectives and discuss why the legal academy could benefit from a discipline-specific taxonomy of cognitive legal learning objectives. I then provide an introduction to Taxonomy of Cognitive Legal Learning Objectives and Outcome Measurements with descriptions of each of the general levels of legal learning objectives. Detailed descriptions of each dimension of the taxonomy will follow in subsequent papers, as will teaching and assessment tips that address specific and discreet learning objectives.

From the Bachelor's to the Bar: Using College Completion Data to Assess the Law School Pipeline

The story of declining law school applications is well known among the legal education community. Over 100,000 individuals applied to law school for admission in fall 2004, but demand for legal education has since declined — only 54,000 applicants sought admission in fall 2015. The Access Group Center for Research & Policy Analysis® examined college completion data to determine whether undergraduate interest in fields most popular among law school applicants has also waned in recent years. In particular, this research brief summarizes bachelor’s degree completion in the top 10 law school feeder majors over the last 10 years, and compares degree production in these fields to those in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

How Law Schools Are Failing Minority Students: The Insidious Consequences of Ignoring Stereotype Threat

A psychological phenomenon may be a significant cause of academic underachievement by minorities in law school. This phenomenon, called stereotype threat, occurs as a result of the fear of confirming a negative group stereotype (such as African-Americans are not as intelligent as Whites). When subject to this threat — as a consequence of being confronted with environmental or explicit triggers — people do worse in academic settings than they otherwise are capable of doing. In this article, I explore the implications of the research on stereotype threat for law schools and make several recommendations to deal with the threat.There are natural implications for law school admissions, of course. If a portion of our applicant pool is affected by stereotype threat, then we cannot trust the accuracy of the metrics we typically use in law school admissions, i.e., prior academic performance and LSAT scores of law school applicants. Indeed, those credentials actually may under-evaluate the academic potential of these applicants, who are often minority students. This should cause law schools to reevaluate their admissions policies.After students are admitted, law school provides fertile ground within which stereotype threat can flourish. This, of course, means that the performance of minorities in law school — in class, on exams, and in other areas — is likely to be diminished, such that many minorities will not perform up to their academic capacity. And, obviously, we would expect this same dynamic to play out on the bar exam.Law schools can address stereotype threat at each of these levels, and they should do so. This article lays out a framework for understanding and dealing with the threat.

Pre-Law Advising and the Political Science Major: Evidence from Pre-Law Advisors

ABSTRACTPolitical science is one of the most popular majors for law school applicants, and studies show that political science majors have high rates of law school admission. In addition, many political science departments have a pre-law advisor. However, little is known about the status of pre-law advising on college campuses or the views of pre-law advisors on political science. This article presents the results of a February 2015 survey of 313 college pre-law advisors from across the United States. The authors discovered that the majority of pre-law advisors hold faculty appointments and serve as pre-law advisors without additional compensation or course releases. Pre-law advisors also rate political science as the second-best major, among 14 popular majors, for preparing students for both admission to and academic success in law school. These findings should be of interest to political scientists as well as other faculty and administrators who are concerned with pre-law advising.

Who Responds toU.S. News&World Report's Law School Rankings?

U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) publishes annual rankings of ABA-approved law schools. The popularity of these rankings raises the question of whether they influence the behavior of law teachers, lawyers and judges, law school applicants, employers, or law school administrators. This study explores some indicia of USN&WR influence. Using data purchased from USN&WR, we attempt to determine whether USN&WR might have influenced (1) law faculty members who respond to the USN&WR survey of law school quality, (2) lawyers who respond to USN&WR surveys, (3) law school applicants choosing a school, (4) employers who hire law school graduates, and (5) administrators who set tuition. We find significant effects on the first three groups, particularly with respect to lower-rank schools. That is, there may be “echo effects” of USN&WR rankings that are folded back into subsequent rankings and tend to stabilize them. We also find that rankings may exert some influence on tuition at law schools outside the top 40. We do not find evidence that employers hiring law graduates respond to changes in USN&WR rankings, either in median salaries paid or in employment percentages reported by law schools.

Ongoing Innovation in Legal Education

The impact on the global economy of the financial services meltdown in 2008 and the resulting “Great Recession” can only be described as far reaching. All industries, including the legal services industry, were affected, with the pressures for cost containment causing profound disruption and changes in virtually every segment of the legal services market.In the wake of the Great Recession, corporate legal departments saw intensified pressure not only to do more with less, but also to experiment with new approaches for acquiring and delivering legal services. This dynamic, in turn, affected large law firms dramatically, with clients now sending less work to them and placing greater constraints on how that work gets done and billed for. In turn, law firms have undergone significant consolidation and have tightened their hiring practices dramatically.Law schools, who train the lawyers of the future, likewise felt the impact. With reduced law firm hiring, law school graduates saw reduced demand for their services, all while tuitions and debt levels continued to rise. Law school applications, not surprisingly, plummeted.In the face of (and because of) these changes, certain segments of the legal services industry continue to grow. Alternative legal service providers, such as eDiscovery vendors and Legal Process Outsourcers (“LPOs”), have prospered during this period, as have Legal Operations groups within corporate legal departments.

The Metaculture of Law School Admissions: A Commentary on Lazarus-Black and Globokar

What does it mean for law school applicants to become, as Mindie Lazarus-Black and Julie Globokar put it, “what the ranking[s] count[]”?1 What does it mean for foreign applicants to develop responses to the application process by writing essays in certain ways, to project themselves (again as Lazarus-Black and Globokar put it) as “commodified persona[s]”?2 The application process analyzed by Lazarus-Black and Globokar exemplifies what Greg Urban calls metaculture: cultural forms that point actors toward recognizing and understanding what they do as exemplifying a particular cultural pattern.3 Metaculture is the mechanism by which culture is reproduced, moving through time and space. The admissions process is metacultural because it defines who one should be as a law student while spreading that definition (quite literally) throughout the world. Lazarus-Black and Globokar lay out the entextualization4 of law school admissions essays by illuminating the details of that process, which, as Mertz shows us, is just the beginning of an extended project concerning engagement with

No At-Risk Law Student Left Behind: The Convergence of Academic Support Pedagogy and Experiential Education

As the economic downturn in America takes its toll on law school applications, analysts predict that law schools will admit candidates with low performance indicators. Reports of decreasing law school entrance exam takers, dwindling applications and even declining credentials of college graduates who take the law school admissions test may signal an increasing number of students who enter the legal academy as “at-risk” learners. These law students will not only swell the rolls of traditional academic support programs, but their academic and professional needs may place them at risk in the legal job market. As underperforming students garner attention from academic support faculty to promote their scholastic success, they are left behind in areas key to their professional success. These vulnerable law students require experiential learning opportunities to meet current demands for “practice-ready” law school graduates who need minimal training. Unfortunately, many law schools exclude underperforming students from legal clinics, and other experiential learning courses, that offer skills training in a legal practice setting. Arguably, academic support students require more skills training courses than their high performing peers whose scholastic achievements enhance their employment prospects.This Article addresses the anticipated surge of at-risk and underperforming law students who will be ineligible for law school clinics and externship placements. The authors explore the call for law schools to yield more practice-ready law graduates, despite the new reality that many matriculates will likely fall short of academic standards. In particular, the authors discuss the urgency surrounding expanded experiential course offerings in light of two recent proposals to revise law school accreditation standards. To ease this tension, this article proposes a union of experiential learning and academic support that enables law schools to leave no law student behind in practice skills training. The article details how an innovative course, In-House Clinical Externship, represents the intersection of experiential learning and academic support pedagogy to satisfy mounting appeals for curricular reform to produces the next wave of practice-ready law graduates.

LSAT® Scores of Economics Majors: The 2012–13 Class Update

Using 1994–95, 2002–3, and 2008–9 data, the author found that economics majors scored well on the LSAT® (1998, 2006, 2010). These results are often posted on university economics (and other) department Web sites. The author, who updates the prior studies using current data for law school applicants for the 2012–13 class of students entering law school, finds that economics majors continue to perform at or near the top of all majors applying for law school. Economics majors (LSAT® score of 159.1) had the highest score of the 16 largest disciplines (those with more than 1,000 students entering law school). Economics places second behind math/physics (161.8) in a set of 29 discipline groupings that contain at least 325 students with similar majors.

Law-Firm Competency Models and Student Professional Success: Building on a Foundation of Professional Formation/Professionalism

Both law students and law schools have an opportunity created by the convergence of (1) significant employment market changes for law graduates, (2) sharp declines in law school applications, (3) increased applicant attention to each school’s employment outcomes, (4) law firm development of competency models to assess associate development, and (5) the high probability of accreditation changes emphasizing each student’s competency to represent clients and participate ethically in the profession. A law student who understands legal employer competency models can differentiate him or herself from other graduates by using the three years of law school to develop (and to create supporting evidence to demonstrate) specific competencies beyond just knowledge of doctrinal law, legal analysis, and some written and oral communication skills. Indiana law professor Bill Henderson notes that “there is a glut in the market for entry level law graduates. Further, virtually all lack the skills needed to differentiate themselves . . . .” In Part I below, this essay analyzes all available empirical research on the values, virtues, capacities and skills in law firm competency models that define the competencies of the most effective and successful lawyers. Part II examines empirical evidence on the competencies that clients evaluate. Part III evaluates the competencies that make the most difference in fast-track associate and partnership promotions. These data and analyses lead to several bold propositions developed in Part IV: 1. Law students and legal educators should identify and understand the values, virtues, capacities and skills (the competencies) of highly effective and successful lawyers in different types of practice (one major example is law firm competency models analyzed below in Part I); 2. Each student should use all three years of experiences both inside and outside of law school (including the required and elective curriculum, extracurricular activities, and paid or pro bono work experiences) to develop and be able to demonstrate evidence of the competencies that legal employers and clients want in the student’s area of employment interest; 3. Law schools should develop a competency-based curriculum that helps each student develop and be able to demonstrate the competencies that legal employers and clients want; and 4. Both law students and law schools should understand that the values, virtues, capacities and skills of professional formation (professionalism) are the foundation for excellence at all of the competencies of an effective and successful lawyer.

Failing Law Schools by Brian Z. Tamanaha

Reviewed by: Failing Law Schools by Brian Z. Tamanaha Michael A. Olivas Failing Law Schools. Brian Z. Tamanaha. 2012. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 216 pp. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-226-92361-1 ($25.00). Most professors are blissfully unaware of recent structural developments that literally threaten the college enterprise. Such cannot be said of Professor Brian Z. Tamanaha, whose apocalyptic book Failing Law Schools is a shrill call to arms, a substantial work of powerful charges and dire solutions, well-written and arriving at a crucial time in legal education in the U.S. and worldwide. Although I believe he holds powerful diagnostic skills and has a storyteller's narrative, I also believe his solutions are substantially wide of the mark and would violate the code that remedial actions should, at the least, do no harm. If he were simply overstating issues or being a provocateur for the sheer sake of being one, I would simply let him stew in his own juices. But his devastating critique has a number of accurate observations, ones I share, so laying out his arguments and his critical architecture is necessary to see how the analytic second step—his remedies—can be so wrong. There is a surprisingly large body of study in legal education—most, but not all of it, by legal scholars. And there is a remarkable convergence on what the major issues and problems are. A number of states, faced with ruinous economic conditions, are reducing their subsidy to public collegiate institutions. This development and the rising cost of private education have meant that it is harder to finance education without resorting to substantial student debt burdens. Many students already arrive at law schools with large financial obligations and compromised creditworthiness. Some states have privatized their public law schools, rapidly increasing the tuition prices. Private law school tuition costs have continued to outstrip the consumer price index. Both these features have meant that law student debt loads have also increased substantially. Professor Tamanaha is at his best in chronicling these developments, carefully laying out the way that debt issues arose and giving examples of the extraordinary amounts being incurred by the increased costs of legal education—ones that have affected students at all levels of law schools. And he lays this dire assessment at the feet of the requisite ABA accreditation process, which he feels forces law schools to meet higher (and more expensive) standards: "Now, however, students must pay a premium that attaches to accreditation, not just because it costs more to run an accredited law school but also because the market-based tuition price of an accredited law school is at least $10,000 higher than an unaccredited school" (p. 19). Even while thoroughly noting and critiquing these contrasting differences in law schools, at the [End Page 739] same time, he develops a major premise that the accreditation process flattens them and requires a cookie-cutter accreditation regime, one that is too costly and borne largely by students: Proposals to loosen some of the important ABA standards "would allow . . . greater flexibility and variation among law schools" (p. 31). If there is a single point at which his logic fails, one need look no further than these mutually exclusive assertions about the variability of the 200 or so U.S. (ABA-accredited or provisionally-accredited) law schools and the accreditation provisions that have enabled so many styles and approaches to flower and bloom, looking nothing at all alike. Professor Tamanaha does provide a useful service in his substantive analysis of enrollment and application data, perhaps the most detailed and balanced exposition of any single issue in this complex book. He believes that the number of qualified law school applicants will shrink, due to what he believes will be the declining market for lawyers, and that the entire apparatus will fall down, due to the inability of these graduates to support their loan debt loads. Every institution has its own admissions trajectory and narrative, and there have been years where schools defied gravity—and there will be years where they return to earth. In addition, these national aggregate data are very volatile and cyclic. There are many interlocking features to...