Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

ABA Committee recommends dropping the requirement of standardized testing (e.g., the LSAT) for law school admission

Here.  While the ABA has some power, the real power rests with USNews.com:  if they still want LSAT scores, law schools will still use them.  If USNews.com drops the LSAT scores, then the race to get the highest median GPA, regardless of the difficulty of the undergraduate course of study, will accelerate, since that will be the only numerical measure left for student admissions.  That would be a disaster.  Comments are open for thoughts from readers on this development and what it portends; submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Applications and applicants are down a bit this year

From the ABA Journal:

As of March 7, 50,375 applicants had submitted 363,581 applications to law schools for the 2022 school year, Law.com reported. Last year at this point in time, 55,680 applicants submitted 395,870 applications to law schools.

That’s a 9.5% decline in applicants since last year and an 8.2% decline in applications.

The applicants and applications are higher than two years ago, however.

LSAC acquires "Law School Transparency [LST]"

Here.  At a time when the LSAT is at risk of being displaced by the GRE, this was not a smart move, given LST's dubious history:  e.g., here, here, or here.

ABA may mandate bias training for law students

Story here.  It is a shame there is no solid evidence such training is effective in reducing bias.

Halfway through the 2021-22 admissions seasons, applications are now down about 5%

Blog Emperor Caron has the details.

Law school application season: total applicants down slightly, high-end LSAT scores down more

Blog Emperor Caron reports on the state of the law school application season about one-third of the way through.  Given how strong last year's applicant pool was, this slightly downturn (if it holds) should not be of great concern to the vast majority of law schools.

UIC's John Marshall Law School should lose its accreditation if it continues with this "witch hunt" against a faculty member

Professor Andy Koppelman (Northwestern) comments at CHE (do read the full account):

In January the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Law disgraced itself with its foolish persecution of Jason Kilborn, a professor who was accused of racism for asking students to address an ordinary hypothetical, of a kind they are likely to encounter in normal legal practice. That episode has now ballooned into calls for his firing, with an ill-informed Rev. Jesse Jackson leading protests against him. And the university, while it refuses to fire Kilborn, is continuing to punish him for things it knows he didn’t do.

 

The trouble started when, in a “Civil Procedure” exam, Kilborn asked whether a hypothetical company, sued for discrimination, must disclose evidence to the plaintiff. In the test’s scenario, a former employee told the company’s lawyer “that she quit her job at Employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a ‘n____’ and ‘b____’ (profane expressions for African Americans and women) and vowed to get rid of her.” The exam did not spell out those words, which appeared exactly as you just read them. (This was just one of the test’s 50 questions.)

Continue reading

Two Yale law students sue Yale and various Deans...

...for their actions during L'Affaire Chua.   The full complaint is here.  As paragraph 21 notes, the absence of grades at Yale "means that Yale Law School students are in high competition over non-grade signifiers of merit."  How much this competition has to do with "merit" is questionable, of course.  Coming on the heels of the "Trap House Affair" (and the earlier expose of the class divide), this has not been a good year for Yale Law School.

ADDENDUM:  A comparison of allegations about administrator conduct in the two cases.

 

Fall 2021 law school admissions

The Blog Emperor has the final statistics.

"Record-breaking diversity at top law schools"

So this news story announces, but when you look at the details, all you find is reference to "students of color," which presumably includes students of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Bengali, South American, and Cuban descent, as well as African-Americans; and it probably also includes non-American students from China, Japan, India etc..  That the actual representation of African-Americans is now rendered invisible by the triumph of "diversity" (thanks to a mistaken SCOTUS opinion by a Southern corporate lawyer!) tells us how much we have betrayed affirmative action's original goal:  namely, as remediation (indeed, reparations) for the world-historic injustice and cruelty visited upon African-Americans for hundreds of years in the United States, from slavery to de jure apartheid in the South and de facto apartheid in much of the North.  Compensating the victims and their descendants for this grotesque history was the real purpose of affirmative action, not "diversifying" schools with anyone non-white to allegedly improve the educational experience of everyone else.  Of course, the current SCOTUS is unlikely to restore affirmative action's original purpose, let alone follow Bakke and Grutter.  Yet another reason to rein in the super-legislature known as the Supreme Court!