More Law School Shenanigans
SUNY-Buffalo’s Law School and the University of Iowa School of Law are doing a limited experiment in admitting students who did not take the much-hated LSAT.
Both schools are going to start admitting students from their “respective undergraduate colleges” based on grades and other standardized tests (I am guessing the SAT and SAT II). This is pouncing on a recent change by the ABA that allows schools to fill 10 percent of their classes with people who did not take the LSAT.
Both SUNY-Buffalo and the University of Iowa are not bad law schools. Iowa is currently ranked #27 and Buffalo is ranked #100. Both are the only public law schools in their respective states. The problem is probably one of markets. Iowa probably has a small legal market and there is plenty of competition for the Chicago legal market from the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, and national schools. Minneapolis-St.Paul also has plenty of draw for regional law schools. Upstate New York is not a huge legal market and SUNY-Buffalo grads probably have a hard time compared to people who went to law school in and around NYC and had three years to build up contacts and also with Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Stanford grads who want to work in NYC.
I imagine other schools are going to follow suit.
One radical solution to the law school market is to stop having different bars for different jurisdictions but rather have a national bar and allow lawyers to practice in every court in the United States if they get admitted. A lot of what you learn in law school or even for the bar exam is irrelevant to the actual practice of state law, most of that is learned on the job, so it doesn’t really make sense for every state to have its own bar exam.
A national bar might force the number of law schools to decrease to a more market appropriate number because the law schools of larger legal markets like Chicago can also provide lawyers for smaller legal markets like Iowa.Report
I actually thought of what would happen if there was a national bar exam. It is an intriguing idea but I don’t think it will fly because:
1. The States and the State Bar Agencies will resist it like hell.
2. There is probably a 10th Amendment Case against the idea generally.
3. Enough states do like to test on their own little quirks and do so frequently. New York tested a lot more New York law than California did for California law.
I suppose what could happen is that the Federal Government could create a National Bar that worked for all federal courts though….Report
There will be a lot of resistance against a national bar exam but the LSATs already act as a sort of national law school entrance exam so a national bar exam is the next logical step. I think that even in other federal countries, you just need to pass one bar exam to practice in every court in that country. There really isn’t a good reason for this to be different from lawyers. We don’t require doctors get fifty different licenses if they want to practice medicine through out the United States even though we could. We recognize that this would just be silly and would lead to a shortage of doctors. A national bar exam would lead to more logical placement of law schools and lawyers by allowing greater professional mobility.Report
/We don’t require doctors get fifty different licenses if they want to practice medicine through out the United States even though we could. //
Yes we do.Report
Will, really? I always thought that a medical degree was much more portable. A lot of the doctors and specialists I’ve been to were educated for their medical degrees outside of New York.Report
Degrees (and residency credentials) are portable, but licensure isn’t unless you work for the federal government. Clancy was prevented from starting one of her fellowships on time due to licensure delays.
And that was provisional licensure. We gave up on actual licensure after it hadn’t cleared after a year and they said we’d have to pay again – almost $1000 – because the original application expired after 365. She ended up working for IHS in the interim, and we had a long distance marriage, before we picked up stakes and moved to the northwest.Report
@will-truman , if I’m understanding you correctly you can get a medical license for the state by just paying a fee or something like that. Some bars allows lawyers already admitted in another jurisdiction to be sworn in but in many cases, if a lawyer wants to practice in another state than they will need to take that state’s bar exam again.Report
It’s true that there is no equivalent to the state bar, but there’s a lot more involved than waiting a year. you have to basically make your case that you are qualified to practice in the state. It would be the equivalent of the state bar asking to speak to all of your college professors and see transcripts of your moot court appearances.
There’s rarely any question that you will get it, in the end, assuming there’s not some active reason for you not to get it. But it’s not a very fun process. A test like board certifications might even be preferable. Maybe. Depends on the state. Where we are presently it was mostly a matter of waiting for the committee to meet, which they only do every other month.Report
This is a terrible and distressing development. I have no idea how we’re going to have competent attorneys in practice who can’t logically distinguish when a monkey is screeching or masturbating.Report
@burt-likko
I can’t tell whether you are being sarcastic or not considering your example…Report
Sarcastic.
In sobriety, I suspect LSAT results roughly parallel undergraduate grades, and a curriculum with lots of writing is adequate preparation for law school. In most cases. Report
@burt-likko
I suspect that you are correct but this is clearly being done because of declining enrollments and not because the test lacks merit (which it might). The distress is because of the reasoning behind the decision.Report
“Both are the only public law schools in their respective states.”
Thanks for meeting the standard of the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover.Report
CUNY is not part of the SUNY system but I concede the point.
I’d probably advise people to attend CUNY-Queens over SUNY-Buffalo interestingly.Report
Sometimes I think I must have come from a different planet than my law school colleagues. I didn’t hate the LSAT at all.Report
That would be a weird choice–I figure it’s much more likely that the schools will be looking at GRE scores.Report
@alan-scott
I disagree. I never took the GRE. Why would anyone take the GRA if they were not planning on going to graduate school?Report
Because it’d get them into law school without taking the LSAT?Report
Accepting the GRE will help the law schools attract strong students interested in continuing their education but not exclusively oriented toward law.
Accepting students who score well on SATs–seems to provide no useful barrier whatsoever. I mean, how many universities with attached law schools accept students with lousy SAT scores in the first place?
Although, reading through the article it seems like the standardized test requirement is part of the rules set by the ABA–so i suppose they could just be asking for SAT scores to check a box. In that case, though, I wonder why the ABA is bothering with them. I just don’t think that someone’s high school SAT scores say anything useful about someone’s suitability to attend law school that GPA and a Bachelor’s degree does not.Report