Legal Education
Bar candidates without ABA-accredited degree more likely to flunk, new study finds
Aspiring lawyers who head to the bar exam without earning a law degree from an ABA-approved law school are more likely to flunk the bar exam, are less likely to find jobs at a law firm and are more likely to face professional discipline later, according to a new study. (Image from Shutterstock)
Aspiring lawyers who head to the bar exam without earning a law degree from an ABA-approved law school are more likely to flunk the bar exam, are less likely to find jobs at a law firm and are more likely to face professional discipline later, according to a new study.
Taking a different route to the bar exam, such as supervised learning or nonaccredited schools, results in “drastically lower rates than graduates of ABA-approved law schools,” and lawyers who “have meaningfully worse careers and pose a greater risk to the public than other lawyers,” according to the study, titled Alternative Educational Pathways into the Legal Profession.
“Although usage of alternative pathways is arguably meaningful, ultimate success in using them to enter the profession is substantially lower than through the conventional pathway,” according to the study.
Most jurisdictions require applicants to the bar to be graduates of an ABA-accredited law school.
The authors from the University of Chicago Law School, the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, the Cleveland State University College of Law and the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law used available data from between 1984 and 2019 to look at alternative educational pathways.
“Bar passage rates are systematically lower for graduates of non-ABA-approved law schools than for graduates of ABA-approved law schools in every state that allowed for this pathway,” according to the paper, showing that “states have not demonstrated an ability to regulate them effectively.”
The study comes as the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar’s exclusive accreditor status is changing. Since the beginning of this year, the state supreme courts of Alabama, Texas and Florida made moves to break ties with the council. Other state supreme courts, including Tennessee and Ohio, currently are reevaluating ABA accreditation.
California allows graduates of state-approved and non-state-approved law schools to take the bar exam and is home to the majority of non-ABA approved law schools.
“The bar passage rate for graduates of ABA-approved law schools is just 58%, but it is only 20% for graduates of non-ABA-approved law school,” according to the study.
Nationwide, those with alternative legal training account for 4.2% of lawyers who pass the bar exam but 22.5% of those who didn’t pass, according to the paper.
And those with alternative training are more likely to practice in underserved communities but receive professional discipline at twice the rates, according to the study authors.
All but 11 states have, at some point, allowed entry through an alternative pathway, and more than 100 non-ABA-approved law schools have operated at some point, according to the study.
Law.com also had coverage.
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