Learning Without Grade Anxiety: Lessons From The Pass/Fail Experiment In North American J.D. Programs

John Bliss (Denver) & David Sandomierski (Western), Learning without Grade Anxiety: Lessons from the Pass/Fail Experiment in North American J.D. Programs, 42 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 555 (2022):

One of the core goals of legal education is to help students learn. A conventional assumption is that hierarchical grading, as a motivator for student effort, is a key factor that promotes learning. This assumption should be rigorously assessed rather than taken for granted. Our findings, in the unique Spring 2020 context of Pass/Fail grading in North American J.D. programs, only weakly support the notion that grades incentivize effort. And, to the extent that grades do somewhat incentivize effort, our findings do not support the conclusion that extra effort is necessarily supportive of learning. Moreover, we find that grades may negatively impact student anxiety to an extent that is detrimental to learning. In sum, our analysis provides little support for the notion that hierarchical grades support learning in legal education.

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Re-Evaluating GPT-4's Bar Exam Performance

Following up on my previous post, GPT-4 Beats 90% Of Aspiring Lawyers On The Bar Exam:  Eric Martínez (MIT; Google Scholar), Re-Evaluating GPT-4's Bar Exam Performance:

Perhaps the most widely touted of GPT-4's at-launch, zero-shot capabilities has been its reported 90th-percentile performance on the Uniform Bar Exam, with its reported 80-percentile-points boost over its predecessor, GPT-3.5, far exceeding that for any other exam. This paper investigates the methodological challenges in documenting and verifying the 90th-percentile claim, presenting four sets of findings that suggest that OpenAI's estimates of GPT-4's UBE percentile, though clearly an impressive leap over those of GPT-3.5, appear to be overinflated, particularly if taken as a “conservative” estimate representing “the lower range of percentiles,” and moreso if meant to reflect the actual capabilities of a practicing lawyer.

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Assessing Heinonline As A Source Of Scholarly Impact Metrics

Karen L. Wallace (Drake; Google Scholar), Rebecca Lutkenhaus (Drake; Google Scholar) & David B. Hanson (Drake), Assessing Heinonline as a Source of Scholarly Impact Metrics, 114 Law Libr. J. 395 (2022):

After the February 2019 U.S. News & World Report announcement of a planned law school scholarly impact ranking based on HeinOnline data, law schools accelerated efforts to ensure that HeinOnline captured their faculty’s work product and citations to these publications as accurately and completely as possible. In summer 2021, U.S. News abandoned its plans, but the endeavors undertaken by law schools during the two and a half years the proposal was live, reveal much about the scope and accuracy of HeinOnline ScholarCheck metrics, as well as the power U.S. News exerts over law schools. This article notes some of the actions law libraries pursued during that period, specifically detailing an extensive citation analysis project conducted by the Drake Law Library. 

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Applying Universal Design In The Legal Academy

Matthew L. Timko (Northern Illinois), Applying Universal Design in the Legal Academy, 114 Law Libr. J. 343 (2022):

Too often barriers to access in the form of physical, technological, and cognitive environments play a large role in keeping many people out of law school. While federal and state laws address these barriers, universal design provides the clearest policy change for law schools to remedy these issues.

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GPT-4’s Law School Grades: Con Law C, Crim C-, Law & Econ C, Partnership Tax B, Property B-, Tax B

Andrew Blair-Stanek (Maryland; Google Scholar), Anne-Marie Carstens (Maryland), Daniel S. Goldberg (Maryland), Mark Graber (Maryland), David C. Gray (Maryland) & Maxwell L. Stearns (Maryland; Google Scholar), GPT-4’s Law School Grades: Con Law C, Crim C-, Law & Econ C, Partnership Tax B, Property B-, Tax B:

GPT-4 performs vastly better than ChatGPT or GPT-3.5 on legal tasks like the bar exam and statutory reasoning. To test GPT-4’s abilities, we ran it on our final exams this semester and graded its output alongside students’ exams. We found that it produced smoothly written answers that failed to spot many important issues, much like a bright student who had neither attended class often, nor thought deeply about the material. It uniformly performed below average—in every course. We provide observations that may help law professors detect students who cheat on exams using GPT-4.

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1L Curricula In The United States: 2023 Data And Historical Comparison

Prentiss Cox (Minnesota; Google Scholar), 1L Curricula in the United States: 2023 Data and Historical Comparison:

This article reports on a survey of the first year (1L) curricula at U. S. law schools. We were able to obtain data on the 1L course requirements, including credits for each course, at 191 of 196 ABA-accredited law schools. We compared this data to six other surveys of 1L curricula from 1919 to 2010. Important findings include the following: [1] credits for four almost universally required “Big 4” 1L courses (contracts, torts, property and civil procedure) continue a fifty year decline; [2] credits for legal research and writing continue to increase, so that legal writing is now the highest- credit course across 1L curricula 

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What Law Schools Must Change To Train Transactional Lawyers

Stephanie Hunter McMahon (Cincinnati), What Law Schools Must Change to Train Transactional Lawyers, 43 Pace L. Rev. 106 (2022):

Not all lawyers litigate, but you would not know that from the first-year curriculum at most law schools. Despite 50% of lawyers working in transactional practices, schools do not incorporate its legal doctrines or skills in the foundational first year. That the Progressives pushed through antitrust laws and the New Dealers founded the modern administrative state reframed how people use the law, particularly in transactional practices, and should be given equal weight as the appellate-based common law in any legal introduction. Nevertheless, the law school model created by Christopher Columbus Langdell in the 1870s remains dominant. As this review of fifty-four law schools’ required curricula shows, law schools have largely retained Langdell’s curriculum. This negatively affects young transactional lawyers because their critical first year does not show them the law as a preventative, problem-solving practice. 

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Catholic Legal Education And The Formation Of Conscience

Daniel T. Judge (Notre Dame), Catholic Education and the Formation of Conscience, 96 Notre Dame L. Rev. Reflection 248 (2021):

Before all else, Catholic schools are “a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth. This relationship elicits a desire to grow in the knowledge and understanding of Christ and his teaching.” Accordingly, Catholic schools are called to assist in the formation and development of their students’ moral conscience. This, in turn, necessitates an inclusive environment; one that emphasizes human dignity in all its forms.

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Putting The Bar Exam On Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, And The Public Good

Scott Johns (Denver), Putting the Bar Exam on Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, and the Public Good, 45 Seattle U. L. Rev. 853 (2022): 

Nothing to see here. Season in and season out, bar examiners, experts, supreme courts, and bar associations seem nonplussed, trapped by what they see as the facts, namely, that the bar exam has no possible weaknesses, at least when it comes to alternative licensure mechanisms, that the bar exam is not to blame for disparate racial impacts that spring from administration of this ritualistic process, and that there are no viable alternatives in the harsh cold world of determining minimal competency for the noble purpose of protecting the public from legal harms. All a lie, of course.

But rather than challenging our assumptions, state bar associations and bar examiners keep going as business as usual. We might even say that it’s just the cost of doing business. Yes, some bar applicants will pay the price, they admit, by not passing bar exams, but protecting the public good demands that we be demanding, that we not yield to temptation to soften our approach. We can never be too cautious when it comes to protecting the public. After all, the public good is at risk. Or is it?

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Mental Health, Law School, And Bar Admissions: Eliminating Stigma And Fostering A Healthier Profession

Natalie C. Fortner (J.D. 2023, Arkansas), Comment, Mental Health, Law School, and Bar Admissions: Eliminating Stigma and Fostering a Healthier Profession, 75 Ark. L. Rev. 689 (2022):

In October 2018, Gabe MacConaill, a junior partner at Sidley Austin, died by suicide in the firm’s parking garage. Gabe and his wife, Joanna, had been planning a ten-year anniversary trip for over a year, which was to take place just one month from that October day. Colleagues described Gabe as a “natural born leader” who had the ability to “make you feel like you were the smartest person on earth,” which is why he was “the obvious choice” to take over the firm’s bankruptcy team when two senior partners, Gabe’s mentors, left Sidley Austin in early 2018.

However, this meant Gabe had very little guidance when he took on the massive Mattress Firm bankruptcy case in summer 2018.  The firm told him “in no uncertain terms” that they would not hire any lateral support, even when he had other significant responsibilities, including chairing the firm’s summer associate program.  Gabe worried he would be sued for malpractice for lack of sufficient debtor experience but was afraid to show his bosses any weakness.  He proceeded to work himself to exhaustion:  he no longer laughed, went to the gym, or slept regularly.  Joanna asked him to see a therapist, but Gabe could not even find enough time to finish his work.  When Gabe began showing cardiac symptoms, Joanna decided to take him to the emergency room, but Gabe responded, “if we go, this is the end of my career.”  He took his own life a week later.

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The U.S. News Law School Academic Reputation Scores, 1998-2022

Robert L. Jones (Northern Illinois), After Twenty-Five Years, Academic Reputation Scores for Law Schools Remain Below Their 1998 Levels:

This Article summarizes the results of the U.S. News & World Report rankings published in 2021 and 2022 with respect to the academic reputation scores of law schools. In addition to analyzing the most recent results for the U.S. News rankings, the Article supplements the more extensive longitudinal study published by this author in 2013 [A Longitudinal Analysis of the U.S. News Academic Reputation Scores Between 1998 and 2013, 40 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. (2013)]. The Article also includes updated appendices from the prior study that catalog the U.S. News academic reputation scores for every law school between 1998 and 2022. ...

[O]nly twenty-one law schools have managed to improve their academic reputation scores by .3 or more during the twenty-five year period between 1998 and 2022. That represents a mere 12.4% of the data set. Table 2 (below) lists this relatively small subset of schools in the data set that have succeeded in raising their scores significantly over the studied period.

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NY Times Op-Ed: In Defense Of Merit And Rigor In Academic Journals

New York Times Op-Ed:  Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up., by Pamela Paul:

[The belief] that science is somehow subjective and should be practiced and judged accordingly has recently taken hold in academic, governmental and medical settings. A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge.

This sounds entirely reasonable.

Yet the paper was rejected by several prominent mainstream journals, including The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another publication that passed on the paper, the authors report, described some of its conclusions as “downright hurtful.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issue with the word “merit” in the title, writing that “the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow as currently implemented.”

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Dividing Law School Faculties Into Academic Departments: A Potential Solution To The Gendered Doctrinal/Skills Hierarchy In Legal Education

Larry Cunningham (Dean, Charleston; Google Scholar), Dividing Law School Faculties into Academic Departments: A Potential Solution to the Gendered Doctrinal/Skills Hierarchy in Legal Education, 67 Vill. L. Rev. 679 (2022):

Most law school faculties in the United States are organized in internal hierarchies. At a given school, those professors who teach doctrinal subjects have the most power and benefits, while those who teach skills courses, such as legal writing and clinics, have the least. At many schools, this hierarchy has a gendered dynamic. Tenured doctrinal faculty are more likely to be male, while legal writing and clinical professors are more heavily female. This illegitimate status hierarchy is detrimental to students. The hierarchy is also well-documented through decades of scholarly articles on the subject.

This Article proposes a structural solution to the problem: the creation and use of academic departments in law schools. Modern universities organize themselves in this way in recognition that teaching and scholarship are often specialized. The teaching and research in the Physics Department are different from that in the Philosophy Department. Departmentalization allows for the development of specialized teaching and scholarship standards while treating those with teaching roles as equals, regardless of subject matter.

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An Empirical Study Of The Bar Examination’s Disparate Impact On Applicants From Communities Of Color

Following up on yesterday's post, An Empirical Analysis Of Racial Bias In The UBE: A Law School’s First-Time Bar Pass Rate Decreases As Its Percentage Of Students Of Color Increases: Scott Devito (Ave Maria; Google Scholar), Kelsey Hample (Furman; Google Scholar) & Erin Lain (Drake; Google Scholar), Onerous Disabilities and Burdens: An Empirical Study of the Bar Examination’s Disparate Impact on Applicants From Communities of Color, 43 Pace L. Rev. ___ (2023):

This Article provides the results of the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the correlation between bar passage and race and ethnicity. It provides the first proof of racially disparate outcomes of the bar exam, both for first-time and ultimate bar passage, across jurisdictions and within law schools. Using data from 63 public law schools, we found that examinees from Communities of Color underperform White examinees by between 12.3 and 72.72 percentage points with all but one racial/ethnic group underperforming by more than 20 percentage points.

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Let’s Talk About Grading, Maybe: Using Transparency About The Grading Process To Aid In Student Learning

DeShun Harris (Memphis), Let’s Talk About Grading, Maybe: Using Transparency About the Grading Process to Aid in Student Learning, 45 Seattle U. L. Rev. 805 (2022):

Talking about grades and grading in law school can feel as taboo, if not more, than talking about sex. Among law faculty, there is often no training and no discussions about how to grade other than being asked to moderate final grades to meet a curve. Students often seek information from each other or online sources where numerous blogs provide them with advice on how to talk to professors about grades, how not to disclose grades to others, and other advice about dealing with grades. What is not as forthcoming for many students is how exactly their professors evaluate their work product. But without discussions about grading practices among faculty and students, are law schools missing an opportunity to use grading discussions as part of their assessment efforts?

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An Empirical Analysis Of Racial Bias In The UBE: A Law School’s First-Time Bar Pass Rate Decreases As Its Percentage Of Students Of Color Increases

Scott Devito (Ave Maria; Google Scholar), Kelsey Hample (Furman; Google Scholar) & Erin Lain (Drake; Google Scholar), Examining the Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Bias in the Uniform Bar Examination, 55 U. Mich. J.L. Reform 597 (2022):

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). We find that higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students in a law school’s entering class are associated with lower first-time bar passage rates for that school in its reported UBE jurisdictions three years later.

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Can You Be A Legal Ethics Scholar And Have Guts?

Cynthia Godsoe (Brooklyn), Abbe Smith (Georgetown) & Ellen Yaroshefsky (Hofstra; Google Scholar), Can You Be a Legal Ethics Scholar and Have Guts?, 35 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 429 (2022):

Recent efforts to hold lawyers accountable for their actions—including lawyers who sought to overturn the 2020 Presidential election based on false evidence, and New York City prosecutors who have committed serious misconduct—failed to draw a significant number of legal ethics scholars. The authors of this Essay are troubled by this. We understand why practicing lawyers might be reluctant to join such an effort; calling out other lawyers in positions of power can be bad for clients. But it is less understandable when it comes to law professors who, except for those who teach in law clinics or otherwise engage in law practice, have no clients. Legal ethics scholars write and teach—often from a secure academic position—about the importance of legal ethics.

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Leadership Evolution: The Rise Of Lawyers In The C-Suite

Garry Jenkins (Dean, Minnesota; Google Scholar) & Jon J. Lee (Oklahoma), Leadership Evolution: The Rise of Lawyers in the C-Suite, 96 Tul. L. Rev. 695 (2022):

The traditional thinking about the path to the top corporate executive leadership posts, reaching the so-called C-suite, is that it begins with earning an MBA degree. By contrast, the JD degree is thought of as one that prepares graduates for the practice of law, for government service, or for public interest advocacy. Since lawyers have historically been trained to protect clients from risk, law is not associated with senior business leadership. Yet, an evolving and accelerating trend is emerging: more lawyers are reaching or crossing over to become part of top corporate management teams. We present findings from our empirical study on corporate leadership profiles that documents a rise in the status of and opportunities for corporate lawyer-leaders and tracks major shifts in lawyers holding senior executive posts over time, thereby challenging the conventional wisdom on corporate talent management.

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Professional Discipline And The Labor Market: Evidence From Lawyers

ABA Journal, Using Data, Law Prof Finds Many Disciplined Lawyers Represent Consumers—With No Oversight:

A new working paper claims that for attorneys with records of public discipline, many are sole practitioners who opened firms following lawyer regulation decisions.

Titled “Professional Discipline and the Labor Market: Evidence from Lawyers” and written March 7, the working paper was written by Kyle Rozema, an associate professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.

Kyle Rozema (Washington University; Google Scholar), Professional Discipline and the Labor Market: Evidence from Lawyers:

I investigate the labor market outcomes of American lawyers after they are professionally disciplined. To do so, I match employment data for 672k lawyers in 2012 and 2020 to novel data on public disciplinary measures imposed by state licensing bodies since 1990. I use this data to study discipline and employment in three ways. First, I document the prevalence and distribution of discipline. I find that 4.4 percent of lawyers are professionally disciplined and that half of disciplined lawyers who are not disbarred go on to reoffend. I also find that disciplined lawyers are not representative of the legal profession in terms of the type of law firms they work for and their practice areas.

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Leading Law Schools: Relationships, Influence, And Negotiation

Michael T. Colatrella Jr. (Pacific), Leading Law Schools: Relationships, Influence, and Negotiation, 91 U. Cin. L. Rev. 82 (2022):

Quality relationships with one’s constituents, especially faculty, lie at the heart of effective law school leadership. Achieving meaningful institutional goals is a group endeavor, and a law school leader must have the skills and abilities to marshal faculty energy and enthusiasm in support of a unified vision. As discussed previously, strong relationships with faculty engender trust, mutual respect, and make interpersonal problem solving through negotiation more productive. Law school faculty members are highly empowered participants in nearly all aspects of the law school enterprise, and meaningful institutional advancement is possible only with their consent and support. Thus, law school leaders must embrace them as partners.

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The Color of Law Review

Gregory Scott Parks (Wake Forest; Google Scholar) & Etienne C. Toussaint (South Carolina; Google Scholar), The Color of Law Review, 103 B.U. L. Rev. 181 (2023):

Of the approximately sixty-five Black law review Editors-in-Chief (“EICs”) throughout U.S. history, at least thirty-eight—more than half—were elected in the past ten years. What inspired the dramatic increase in the diversity of law review leadership in recent history, and why has it taken so long? This question—what this Article calls law review’s ongoing “diversity problem”—does not have an easy answer. 

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Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege

Milan Markovic (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Protecting the Guild or Protecting the Public? Bar Exams and the Diploma Privilege, 35 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 163 (2022):

The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state that recognizes the privilege today. The bar exam is so central to the attorney admissions process that all but a handful of jurisdictions required it amidst a pandemic that turned bar exam administration into a life-or-death matter.

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COVID And Bar Admissions

Steven R. Smith (Cal-Western), COVID and Bar Admissions, 75 Ark. L. Rev. 527 (2022):

The COVID-19 pandemic, killings of George Floyd and others, and civil unrest created dislocation, hardship, and uncertainty. For millions of people, it included deaths in family, unemployment, and serious mental and physical illness. Graduates of professional schools preparing to take licensing examinations faced unexpected obstacles in meeting licensing standards for their chosen professions. It quickly became apparent, for example, that the usual licensing examination arrangements were problematic. 

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When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment On Sander And Steinbuch's 'Mismatch And Bar Passage'

Following up on Friday's post, Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought:  Sherod Thaxton (UCLA), When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch's “Mismatch and Bar Passage”:

Mismatch theory—which posits that race-conscious admissions policies harm racial minorities by admitting students into challenging schools where they cannot succeed—has figured prominently in the debate over affirmative action during the last half century. The recent challenges to Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina’s consideration of race as a factor in admissions decisions have argued, inter alia, that universities “can eliminate this harmful mismatch and allow students to excel at schools for which they are most prepared by eliminating the use of racial preferences.” The persistence of the idea of mismatch in both policy discussions and litigation is puzzling given that the empirical evidence in favor of mismatch is not only sparse, but has been deemed unreliable by the vast majority of analysts who have rigorously investigated the matter. In an effort to preserve the legal and political relevance of mismatch in light of these mounting critiques by many of the most prominent statisticians and social scientists in academia, proponents of mismatch posit that the limitations of available data hamper the precise measurement of key variables and that better data would reveal stronger support for mismatch.

Richard Sander and Robert Steinbuch’s “Mismatch and Bar Passage: A School-Specific Analysis” presents a statistical analysis of the “law school mismatch hypothesis” in an effort to explain racial differences in the likelihood of passing the bar examination on the first attempt.

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Big Law's Immigration Advocates

Jayanth K. Krishnan (Indiana; Google Scholar), Megan Riley (Indiana) & Vitor M. Dias (Butler), Big Law's Immigration Advocates, 2024 U. Ill. L. Rev. __ :

This study examines lawyers working in the federal appellate courts who represent immigrants seeking relief from deportation. By analyzing over 23,000 appellate cases during the Trump and Obama Administrations, the research here uncovers crucial findings. To begin, there was a statistically significant difference in the win rates of lawyers working pro bono and coming from the largest and most profitable, corporate “Big Law” firms compared to lawyers based in other, typically more specialized immigration practice settings. 

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GPT-4 Beats 90% Of Aspiring Lawyers On The Bar Exam

Daniel Martin Katz (Chicago Kent), Michael James Bommarito (Michigan State), Shang Gao (Casetext) & Pablo Arredondo (Casetext), GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam:

In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the zero-shot performance of a preliminary version of GPT-4 against prior generations of GPT on the entire Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), including not only the multiple-choice Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), but also the open-ended Multistate Essay Exam (MEE) and Multistate Performance Test (MPT) components. On the MBE, GPT-4 significantly outperforms both human test-takers and prior models, demonstrating a 26% increase over ChatGPT and beating humans in five of seven subject areas. On the MEE and MPT, which have not previously been evaluated by scholars, GPT-4 scores an average of 4.2/6.0 as compared to much lower scores for ChatGPT. Graded across the UBE components, in the manner in which a human tast-taker would be, GPT-4 scores approximately 297 points, significantly in excess of the passing threshold for all UBE jurisdictions. These findings document not just the rapid and remarkable advance of large language model performance generally, but also the potential for such models to support the delivery of legal services in society.

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Sander: Law-School 'Mismatch' Is Worse Than We Thought

Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought:

With the Supreme Court poised to rule on affirmative-action in admissions, the time to spread the word is now.

Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools [A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, 57 Stan. L. Rev. 367 (2004)]. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had grades in the bottom 10th of their class; and Blacks were six times as likely as whites to take the bar exam multiple times but never pass. ...

Robert Steinbuch (a colleague at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock) and I eventually secured the public release of data from 12 cohorts of law students at four law schools, covering about 6,500 students in all. And after a multi-year review process, the Journal of Legal Education—the official organ of the Association of American Law Schools—has now agreed to publish the first set of our results in its next issue.

Our findings are even stronger than we expected. A student’s degree of mismatch in law school is by far the strongest predictor of whether he or she will pass a bar exam on a first attempt. ...

Most of our results are in regression analyses that can be hard for those without a technical background to interpret. But one of our tables, reproduced below, makes the basic pattern clear. It shows first-time bar-passage rates for several thousand law graduates, grouped by their LSAT score and whether they attended an elite, somewhat-elite, or non-elite law school. Unsurprisingly, students with high LSAT scores had high bar-passage rates at all schools and did particularly well at the elite school in question. But students at the elite school with LSAT scores 12 to 14 points below the median of their fellow students (i.e., LSAT scores of 150-152) had only a 22 percent first-time bar-passage rate, while students with the same LSAT score at the non-elite school in question had a 79 percent first-time bar-passage rate. In other words, lower mismatch translates into dramatically better performance.

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• ABA Journal, Does ChatGPT Produce Fishy Briefs?
• ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Council Decision, Notice of Finding Significant Noncompliance With Standard 202 (University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law) (Feb. 2023)
• Vikram David Amar (Dean, Illinois), Some Thoughts on the Recent Controversies Concerning Law (and Med) School Rankings: Part I in a Series
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), ABA Finds 4 Law Schools Back In Compliance With Accreditation Standards: Hofstra (Faculty Diversity), Ave Maria, UDC & Vermont (2-Year Bar Passage)
• Chronicle of Higher Education, ChatGPT Is Everywhere
• Florida Politics, Trial Delayed; Proffer Stays Sealed: Paradoxical Evidence That Justice Is Afoot in Dan Markel Murder Case
• Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University) & David A. Santacroce (Michigan), An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age

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An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education At Middle Age

Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University; Google Scholar) & David A. Santacroce (Michigan), An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age, 70 J. Legal Educ. __ (2023):

This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports on aspects of clinical legal education, including unique data developed by the authors, and comparing the results over time, this article presents a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to today’s middle age.

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Reckoning With Structural Racism In Legal Education: Methods Toward A Pedagogy Of Antiracism

Doron Samuel-Siegel (Richmond), Reckoning with Structural Racism in Legal Education: Methods Toward a Pedagogy of Antiracism, 29 Cardozo J. Equal Rts. & Soc. Just. 1 (2022):

There is an empty quality to much of what passes as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” work in legal education. Despite a robust body of scholarship on teaching law consistent with the goals of antiracism, many legal educators struggle to put theory into practice. This Article responds to that struggle, offering a holistic, methodical approach to a pedagogy of antiracism whose goal is twofold: create conditions in which racially minoritized students learn to their full potential, free from the harms of traditional legal education; and equip all students, regardless of identity, to contribute to the dismantlement of structural racism. Absent such pedagogy, legal educators fail to carry out our commitments to students and to equal justice under law, and ignore central duties imposed by ABA accreditation standards.

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AALS Call For Papers: Continuing Legal Education And The Professional Education Of Lawyers

AALS, Symposium on Continuing Legal Education and the Professional Education of Lawyers:

The AALS Journal of Legal Education invites abstract submissions for a symposium on “Continuing Legal Education and the Professional Education of U.S. Lawyers.” The Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law and the Pennsylvania Continuing Legal Education Board will host the in-person symposium on Friday, October 6, 2023, at the Inn at Villanova University. Accepted final articles will be published by the Journal of Legal Education in a symposium issue.

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It’s Not Just Our Students: ChatGPT Is Coming For Faculty Scholarship

Chronicle of Higher Ed Op-Ed:  It’s Not Just Our Students — ChatGPT Is Coming for Faculty Writing, by Ben Chrisinger (Oxford; Google Scholar):

Almost immediately after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November, people began wondering what it would mean for teaching and learning. A widely read piece in The Atlantic that provided one of the first looks at the tool’s ability to put together high-quality writing concluded that it would kill the student essay. Since then, academics everywhere have done their own experimenting with the technology — and weighed in on what to do about it. Some have banned students from using it, while others have offered tips on how to create essay assignments that are AI-proof. Many have suggested that we embrace the technology and incorporate it into the classroom.

While we’ve been busy worrying about what ChatGPT could mean for students, we haven’t devoted nearly as much attention to what it could mean for academics themselves. And it could mean a lot. Critically, academics disagree on exactly how AI can and should be used. And with the rapidly improving technology at our doorstep, we have little time to deliberate.

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Imposter Syndrome & The Law School Caste System

Sara Ochs (Louisville), Imposter Syndrome & The Law School Caste System, 42 Pace L. Rev. 373 (2022):

For decades, legal academia has been structured around a hierarchical caste system, with tenured and tenure-track doctrinal law professors—many of whom are men—occupying the highest caste, and professors of legal skills courses—who more often identify as women—relegated to the lower castes. The status of these “lower caste” professors is routinely reinforced through weaker job security, less respect, and lower pay than received by their doctrinal, “upper caste” colleagues. Given this inequality, imposter syndrome plays a pervasive role in the lives and careers of professors of legal skills courses. Relying on qualitative data obtained from teaching faculty and staff at ABA accredited and approved law schools nationwide, this article analyzes how the law school hierarchy manifests as imposter syndrome in professors of legal skills courses, which impacts their relationships with colleagues; teaching; relationships with students; publication and promotion of scholarship; and personal health and wellbeing.

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Osofsky Reviews Field's Flipping The Tax Law Classroom

Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Flipping Classrooms in an In-Person World (JOTWELL) (reviewing Heather Field (UC-San Francisco; Google Scholar), How the Pandemic Flipped My Perspective on Flipping the Tax Law Classroom, 19 Pitt. Tax Rev. 267 (2022)):

In this illuminating article, Heather Field describes her adoption of a flipped classroom model for teaching tax law during the pandemic. Like many, Field learned lessons from her pandemic teaching that will continue to be instructive now that we are (hopefully) back to an in-person teaching world. Field’s thoughtful article is well worth a read for those (like me!) wanting to do more with flipped classroom teaching. ...

Field’s flipping of classes involved providing students before-class mini-lecturettes, which gave students an overview and explanation of the material. Class time was then spent going through problems, potentially with polls and additional bonus problems added in to the class to better gauge student understanding. Overall, her experience was a positive one. Students appreciated the opportunity to review the content at their own pace and potentially revisit it, students had more time in class to work on problems, Field was better able to direct students to the important parts of the course, weaker students were able to participate more fully in the class, Field could cover more difficult material much more efficiently, and Field had the opportunity to think more carefully though all her explanations of the course material. ...

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Bilek & Merritt: ChatGPT Almost Passed The Bar, But Competent Lawyers Do Much More

Bloomberg Law Op-Ed:  ChatGPT Almost Passed the Bar, But Competent Lawyers Do Much More, by Mary Lu Bilek (CUNY) & Deborah Merritt (Ohio State):

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s provocative artificial intelligence program, has come close to passing the multiple-choice portion of the bar exam. The bot has also earned passing grades on law school essays that resemble ones written for the exam. ...

Yet, even in a bill-by-the-hour world, clients who can afford it will still seek out human lawyers. Why? Because humans are far better than bots at eliciting facts and goals from clients, identifying new avenues of research, and solving multi-dimensional problems. Human experts will supplement those advantages by knowing when to consult AI, how to assess AI responses, and how to integrate AI knowledge with the human dimensions of a client problem. ...

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Law Clerk Selection And Diversity: Insights From Fifty U.S. Court Of Appeals Judges

Jeremy Fogel (Berkeley Judicial Institute), Mary Hoopes (Pepperdine) & Goodwin Liu (California Supreme Court), Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights From Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals, 137 Harv. L. Rev. ___ (2023):

Judicial clerkships are key positions of responsibility and coveted opportunities for career advancement. Commentators have noted that the demographics of law clerks do not align with the student population by law school, socioeconomic background, gender, race, or ethnicity, and that ideological matching is prevalent between judges and their clerks. But extant studies draw on limited data and offer little visibility into how judges actually select clerks. For this study, we conducted in-depth individual interviews with fifty active judges of the federal courts of appeals to learn how they approach law clerk selection and diversity. Our sample, though not fully representative of the judiciary, includes judges from all circuits, appointed by Presidents of both parties, with average tenure of fourteen years. The confidential interviews, which drew in part upon the peer relationship that two of us have with fellow judges, yielded rich and candid insights not captured by prior surveys.

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Barring Diversity? The American Bar Exam As Initiation Rite And Its Eugenics Origin

Mary Szto (Syracuse), Barring Diversity? The American Bar Exam as Initiation Rite and its Eugenics Origin, 21 Conn. Pub. Int. L.J. 38 (2022): 

The American bar exam is an initiation rite that bars diversity in the legal profession.

According to the 2020 census, the US population is over 42% minorities. However, only 14% of the legal profession is. In 2020 the American Bar Association released data that the first-time bar exam pass rate was 88% for Whites, 80% for Asians, 78% for Native Americans, 76% for Hispanics, and 66% for Blacks.

Initiation rites often involve a separation from society, a liminal period, an ordeal, and then reincorporation into society. The bar exam follows this pattern. However, many minority candidates cannot afford months of unpaid isolated study, much less further bar attempts.

Racial disparities in first time bar passage rates are not coincidental, but rooted in the eugenics origin of the bar exam. Bar admissions standards arose amid teachings about Anglo-Saxon white supremacy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Eugenics theory was then mainstream science and held that nonwhites should be denied access to property ownership, education, and the legal profession. Minorities were excluded from most law schools, and there was widespread fear of immigrants diluting the US white population and the legal profession.

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Utah Symposium On Rethinking, Reimagining, And Reshaping Legal Education

Symposium, #IncludeTheirStories: Rethinking, Reimagining, and Reshaping Legal Education, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 709-890:

• Leslie P. Culver (Utah; Google Scholar) & Elizabeth A. Kronk Warner (Dean, Utah; Google Scholar), #IncludeTheirStories: Rethinking, Reimagining, and Reshaping Legal Education, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 709 
• Danielle Conway (Dean, Penn State-Dickinson), Antiracist Lawyering in Practice Begins with the Practice of Teaching and Learning Antiracism in Law School, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 723
• Tom I. Romero II (Denver), A Brown Buffalo’s Observations on Color (Blindness), Legal History, and Racial Justice in the Rocky Mountain West, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 751
• Robert Razzante (Western Washington) & Breanta Boss (Palmer Law), DEI in the Legal Profession: Identifying Foundational Factors for Meaningful Change, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 785
• Steven A. Dean (Brooklyn), Filing While Black: The Casual Racism of the Tax Law, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 801 
• Phyllis Taite (Oklahoma City) & Nicola "Nicky" Boothe (Boston University), Teaching Cultural Competence in Law School Curricula: An Essential Step to Facilitate Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion in the Legal Profession, 2022 Utah L. Rev. 813

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The Buffalo Model And ABA Standard 303(c): Bias, Cross Cultural Competency, And Antiracism

Kim Diana Connolly (SUNY-Buffalo) & Elisa Lackey (SUNY-Buffalo), The Buffalo Model: An Approach to ABA Standard 303(c)'s Exploration of Bias, Cross Cultural Competency, and Antiracism in Clinical & Experiential Law, 70 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol'y __ (2023):

This essay offers initial contemplations shortly after the inception of a new opportunity for clinical and experiential legal education in the United States: the addition of 303(c) to the ABA standards, requiring that law schools “shall provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” This new law school accreditation obligation concretizes what many clinicians, externship directors, and other experiential teachers have been doing for decades: teaching inclusion, justice, and belonging. Clinical Legal Education programs historically have centered teaching student attorneys about cultural competency, anti-bias, diversity, difference, and related issues.

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Oklahoma Symposium: A Life’s Work—In Memory of Professor Jonathan B. Forman

Symposium, A Life’s Work: In Memory of Professor Jonathan B. Forman, 74 Okla. L. Rev. 527-732 (2022):

• Katheleen Guzman (Dean, Oklahoma), Opened Doors: A Tribute to Jon Forman, 74 Okla. L. Rev. ix (2022)
• Leslie Book (Villanova; Google Scholar), Keith Fogg (Harvard) & Nina E. Olson (Center for Taxpayer Rights), Reducing Administrative Burdens to Protect Taxpayer Rights, 74 Okla. L. Rev. 527 (2022)
• Patricia A. Cain (Santa Clara), Taxation of Tort Damages, 74 Okla. L. Rev. 587 (2022)
• Susan N. Gary (Oregon), Conflicts and Opportunities for Pension Fiduciaries in the ESG Environment, 74 Okla. L. Rev. 607 (2022)
• Kimberly S. Krieg (San Diego; Google Scholar) & Stephanie L. Tang (Baylor), Calculating “Income” for Domestic Support Obligations in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic, 74 Okla. L. Rev. 653 (2022)

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Hofstra Hosts Symposium Today On Freedom Of Expression At American Law Schools

Hofstra hosts a symposium today on Freedom of Expression at American Law Schools (registration): 

Commitments to principles supporting the freedom of expression are found in statements of policy at public and private institutions of higher education throughout the United States. American law schools, either as parts of larger universities or standing alone, have embraced similar policies adhering to the principle that free intellectual inquiry is at the core of a law school’s educational and research mission.

General statements about free expression, however, do not always resolve actual controversies. When does expression "go too far?" Are controversies over free expression at law schools different from those elsewhere on campuses? There have been powerful reminders, in recent years, that law school free expression has limits — that at some point it can collide with other values and interests of concern to deans, faculty, and students.

Agenda:

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Bishop Posts Two Papers On ChatGPT

Lea Bishop (Indiana-McKinney): 

Can ChatGPT 'Think Like a Lawyer?' A Socratic Dialogue:

A witty socratic dialogue with a language-generation model, exploring the aims of legal education in the new era of machine writing.

If you are a lawyer, a law student, or a law professor, you already have a good understanding of what it means to “think like a lawyer.”

For everyone else, there is ChatGPT. Hey, ChatGPT, give me a hand here…Let’s have a Socratic Dialogue. I’ll type a question, and you do your best to answer it. Your answers don’t need to be perfect. Because I want my readers to see exactly how you do what you do, I am not going to edit your responses at all. Okay, let’s go…

A Computer Wrote this Paper: What ChatGPT Means for Education, Research, and Writing:

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The Travesty Of The US News Rankings: How Legal Education Should Be Measured

Reuben Guttman (American) & Gregg Ivers (American), The Travesty of The US News Rankings: How Legal Education Should be Measured, 10 Emory Corp. Governance & Accountability Rev. __ (2023):

The authors analyze the detrimental impact on legal education attributable to the chase for US News rankings and tell the story of how one law school—Howard University Law—forged its reputation on the success of alumni who litigated cutting edge civil rights cases. It is the Howard experience that provides a model for how legal education should be measured. ...

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Bad Math Bar Sauce And The ABA As A Shill For The NCBE

Rory D. Bahadur (Washburn) & Kevin Ruth (PhD Mathematics, Miami), Bad Math Bar Sauce and the ABA as a Shill for the NCBE, 66 How. L.J. __ (2023):

Recent scholarship purporting to employ sophisticated mathematics to decipher the pedagogies which improve institutional bar examination performance and to identify which schools over and underperform on the bar examination has been widely accepted. Despite this wide acceptance the scholarship is largely erroneous. Law reviews are incapable of discerning the errors in the scholarship when authors do not comport with scientific publication norms which require publishers to “show their work,” and produce supporting data so that the study may be replicated and peer reviewed. Additionally, the authors of these studies make fundamental mathematical errors impeaching the validity of their conclusions. For example, the authors confuse odds ratios with probability and use linear regression for data that is unsuitable for linear regression.

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Ryznar: Exams In The Time Of ChatGPT

Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-McKinney), Exams in the Time of ChatGPT, 80 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online __ (2023):

This article offers various methods to administer assessments while maintaining their integrity—after asking artificial intelligence writing tool ChatGPT for its views on the matter. The sophisticated response of the chatbot, which students can use in their written work, only raises the stakes of figuring out how to administer exams fairly.

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The Case Against Commercial Casebooks

W. David Ball (Santa Clara; Google Scholar) & Michelle Oberman (Santa Clara; Google Scholar), The Case Against Commercial Casebooks, 71 J. Legal Educ. __ (2023):

Open-source, online casebooks are a free alternative to the for-profit commercial casebooks that dominate the legal academy. They offer a host of benefits for students and professors alike. Online casebooks are surprisingly easy to create: literally the click of a button allows you to “clone” existing open-source casebooks, many of which closely track the cases and flow of the most popular commercial casebooks. Once “cloned,” it is simple to incorporate your own or others’ material, enabling professors to center their personal pedagogical goals and values as they train the next generation of lawyers.

Open-source casebooks are also free, permitting professors to meaningfully offset some of the educational costs incurred by our students. As law schools reflect on how they might build institutions that are more diverse, equitable and inclusive, open-source casebooks stand out as an obvious, attainable way to make meaningful progress towards those goals.

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The 50 Most Downloaded U.S. Law Professors Of 2022

Rank	Name	School	Downloads
1	Cass Sunstein	Harvard	43,282
2	Daniel Solove	George Washington	28,479
3	Lucian Bebchuk	Harvard	27,727
4	Mark Lemley	Stanford	21,131
5	Orin Kerr	UC-Berkeley	19,608
6	Roberto Tallarita	Harvard	15,229
7	Brian Frye	Kentucky	14,991
8	Bernard Black	Northwestern	13,599
9	Brandon Hasbrouck	Washington & Lee	13,456
10	Danielle Keats Citron	Virginia	13,417
11	Greer Donley	Pittsburgh	12,490
12	Herbert Hovenkamp	Penn	12,086
13	Rachel Rebouché	Temple	11,833
14	Reuven Avi-Yonah	Michigan	11,679
15	David Cohen	Drexel	11,670
16	Brian Leiter	Chicago	11,411
17	J. Mark Ramseyer	Harvard	10,743
18	Stephen Bainbridge	UCLA	10,708
19	Dan Kahan	Yale	10,527
20	Mitu Gulati	Virginia	10,472
21	Michael Klausner	Stanford	10,252
22	Adrian Vermeule	Harvard	9,420
23	Michael Ohlrogge	NYU	9,375
24	Woodrow Hartzog	Boston University	9,236
25	Wulf Kaal	St. Thomas-MN	9,202
26	Eric Posner	Chicago	8,967
27	Eric Goldman	Santa Clara	8,819
28	Richard Albert	Texas	8,522
29	Kevin Tobia	Georgetown	8,160
30	Richard Leo	San Francisco	8,154
31	David Kopel	Denver	8,023
32	Neil Richards	Washington University	7,890
33	Chris Brummer	Georgetown	7,886
34	Hilary Allen	American	7,588
35	Peter Menell	UC-Berkeley	7,584

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ChatGPT Gets C+ Grade On Four Minnesota Law School Exams (C- In Tax)

Following up on this morning's post, ChatGPT Gets B|B- Grade On Wharton MBA Exam:  Jonathan Choi (Minnesota; Google Scholar), Kristin Hickman (Minnesota; Google Scholar), Amy Monahan (Minnesota) & Daniel Schwarcz (Minnesota; Google Scholar), ChatGPT Goes to Law School:

How well can AI models write law school exams without human assistance? To find out, we used the widely publicized AI model ChatGPT to generate answers on four real exams at the University of Minnesota Law School. We then blindly graded these exams as part of our regular grading processes for each class. Over 95 multiple choice questions and 12 essay questions, ChatGPT performed on average at the level of a C+ student, achieving a low but passing grade in all four courses. After detailing these results, we discuss their implications for legal education and lawyering. We also provide example prompts and advice on how ChatGPT can assist with legal writing.

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ChatGPT Gets B|B- Grade On Wharton MBA Exam

Following up on this morning's post, ChatGPT Gets C+ Grade On Four Minnesota Law School Exams:  Christian Terwiesch (Wharton; Google Scholar), Would Chat GPT3 Get a Wharton MBA?:

OpenAI’s Chat GPT3 has shown a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants. Chat GPT3 has demonstrated the capability of performing professional tasks such as writing software code and preparing legal documents. The purpose of this paper is to document how Chat GPT3 performed on the final exam of a typical MBA core course, Operations Management. Exam questions were uploaded as used in a final exam setting and then graded.

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How A Person Of Faith Can Overcome Imposter Syndrome In Law School

David Grenardo (St. Thomas-Minnesota), How A Person of Faith Can Address Imposter Syndrome in Law School, 37 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol'y ___ (2023):

Imposter syndrome makes people feel as if they are frauds and others will soon find out that they do not belong. Imposter syndrome typically affects high achievers, which includes law students and lawyers. Law schools can provide resources and tools for law students to address imposter syndrome, but a person of faith can approach imposter syndrome in unique ways. This Article sets forth the various ways a law student of faith can confront and overcome imposter syndrome.

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