Muller & Rodriguez On ABA Accreditation Of Law Schools

Derek Muller (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), Inside the ABA's Relentless Quest to Make Law School Accreditation More Tedious and More Expensive:

The ABA continues to place new requirements on law schools, reducing innovation or heterogeneity.

Its latest salvo of standards are of like kind. Here are some of the new rules in its latest batch:

1. Law schools have been required to list “learning outcomes” for their courses, but now sections of the same course must have the same learning outcomes, and individual sections may now add learning outcomes beyond those listed.
2. “All courses” in the first year “shall include at least one formative assessment” that includes “feedback” along with “academic support” for students who “fail to attain a satisfactory level of achievement.”
3. Schools must now review “learning outcomes at least every five years.”
4. Full-time faculty “absent extraordinary circumstances” “shall teach at least 80 percent” of the credit hours (it was previously “substantially all” all the courses).
5. Law faculty are now “required” “to participate every three years in educational activities that promote effective teaching.”

As with so many new requirements from the ABA, I anticipate fairly little actual change for students and fairly significant administrative costs of appearing to comply with these new requirements. ...

[N]owhere does the ABA assess the problems on the front end, and nowhere does it try to measure whether its new policies will improve student well-being at the back end—some irony given the amount of emphasis on “assessment” that it’s giving. Instead, it’s a series of rules that, like previous rules, are certainly admirable in the abstract. But they will likely result in significant and tedious record-keeping costs for schools—expensive propositions at that—with deep uncertainty about the payoffs.

In a time of deep disruption (yes, it’s an overused term) in the practice of law—the rise of artificial intelligence and large language models among them—the ABA is focusing on syllabus statements, teaching conferences, and entrenching full-time faculty. It’s not the move one would expect of an entity trying to provide more flexibility, innovation, and creativity in the curriculum. But perhaps this set of accreditation standards will be the set that advances the goals it aspires to pursue.

Daniel B. Rodriguez (Northwestern; Google Scholar), ABA Accreditation of Law Schools: Mend it, Don't End it:

The full-throated assault on university accreditation, which sweeps up law schools into the vortex is disturbing, disruptive, and fundamentally misunderstands the purpose and structure of accreditation in process. This observation begins with a key caveat, and that is this: Many elements of contemporary law school accreditation have been poorly constructed and implemented in ways that are cross ways with the well-being of law schools in this era. Many of us have made this point before, me most recently in connection with the ill-advised effort of the ABA Legal Education section to dig in on the diversity mandate, when a good off-ramp was presented to them, but rejected under the influence of a cadre of deans. But that, as we say, is presently water under the bridge. The more essential point is that the attack on accreditation reflects a misguided attack on a system that has as its core aspiration the protection of the public and the improvement of law school performance. We can and should interrogate the system in place about how it constructs its policies and systems, but we should not throw out the baby and the bathwater. ...

Weaponizing anti-DEI strategies and cherry-picking examples of accreditation gone awry teaches exactly the wrong lesson. Law school accreditation 2025 version can best be summarized by a poster that hangs in my law school faculty lounge: Mend it, don’t end it. The ill-considered substitutes which states such as Texas and Florida are lurching toward will not fit the bill, at least not with a coherent theory and practical approach to what is expected to replace the current regime of ABA accreditation. There seems precious little in what these (well-meaning) lawyers and judges are considering which would be an improvement on present accreditation modalities, even accounting for the deficiencies in current polices and performance. And if the unsuspecting public in these and other states imagine that the welfare of individuals in need and want of legal services will be better off with the wild wild west of accreditation lite than they have another think coming.

A better law school accreditation system is available if we take the initiative to design it. It is in the hands of able, experienced, and diligent individuals — motivated greatly by the myriad external attacks by folks who simply do not have the best interests of our law schools at heart. We must undertake serious reforms and then give these reforms a decent chance to succeed. Meanwhile, let’s pause the destructive force of those who will not understand the complexities of our present condition and cannot provide any reasonable substitute.

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