What's Wrong With an Objective Bar Passage Standard for Law School Accreditation?

Check out Gary Rosin's (South Texas) Reports and Comments on Proposed ABA Interpretation 301-6 on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar has proposed to add Interpretation 301-6 of its Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools. Interpretation 301-6 would impose Bar-based outcome measures of the quality of a law school's academic program. This paper collects letters or reports submitted by the author to the ABA that comment on each of the three versions of 301-6 proposed to date. These comments not only provide an empirical evaluation of 301-6, they also suggest changes to 301-6.

The Interpretation, if approved by the ABA, would impose a bright-line test: over a five-year period, 75% of a school's graduates must have passed the bar and the school's annual first-time bar passage rate in its home state must not be more than 15 percentage points below the average first-time bar passage rate in that state. 

Paul Caron (Cincinnati) has done a great job covering this issue on TaxProf Blog. See his ABA to Impose 75% Bar Passage Requirement as Law School Accreditation Standard and his Law Schools in Jeopardy of Failing ABA's New 75% Bar Passage Accreditation Standard which identifies law schools that could fail this test. [JH]