24 January 2012

The ABA and the Cost of Legal Education Part 3

Back in December I posted here and here on David Segal's jeremiads about legal education in American. The second post in particular responded to his reporting about the precarious status of the Duncan School of Law in Knoxville, Tennessee. Segal wondered aloud about the ABA's denial of Duncan's provisional accreditation and particularly its anti-competitive effects. I replied by wondering what Segal would say if Duncan's graduates were ultimately unable to pass the bar exam.

Today's National Jurist has an article giving more detail on why the ABA did what it did. You can read it here. Suffice it to say that I believe the ABA's gate-keeping role seems warranted:
A major concern to the ABA was that the school readmitted one-third of the students who failed out of the school. Eighteen students were dismissed for a GPA below 1.25. Six of them, however, were readmitted based on “extraordinary circumstances,” a percent the ABA found unlikely.
Unlikely? Yeah. I guess you could say that. Despite its mission, Duncan is doing no service to students whose only purpose seems to be to pay the tuition to keep the school's doors open.

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