Several Law Schools Gave Their Applicants A Chance To Study For Their Spot. Will This Be A New Trend?

It is a special kind of suck to discover that the law school you spent hours pouring yourself into a personal statement for has rejected you. And while it would sting either way, I’m sure that the pain would be lessened with an opportunity to study your way into law school. For a handful of students, a program called LexPostBacc was just that. Now, they’re headed to law school. From Reuters:

Among the 38,000 or so first-year law students nationwide who are kicking off their studies this month are 51 who didn’t quite make the cut when they applied two years ago.

[I]nstead of rejecting them outright, 22 law schools sent those aspiring lawyers — most of whom are racial minorities underrepresented on law campuses — into a new year-long program to prepare them for the rigors of legal education with a promise of admission and a scholarship if they finished. While law school pipeline programs are plentiful, the guarantee of a spot in the class is unique.

Now that’s a way to show investment in your students! The classes went over pretty well — about 70% of the students that took the opportunity matriculated into law school through the program.

Despite the program’s successes, they are already preparing for backlash. Given SFFA v. Harvard, the program’s intended audience may run afoul of the Supreme Court’s new standards on equality and equity in schools:

[LexPostBacc] participants must either be from an underrepresented racial group; be the first in their families to have graduated from college; or have received a need-based federal Pell Grant as an undergraduate. They must also have scored in the bottom 25 percent of national LSAT takers in order to qualify.

The Tom Cotton brigade is itching to sue organizations that factor race and its proxies into admittance decisions. Being from an underrepresented racial group is an obvious ear raiser, but LPB would likely face similar threats of lawsuits if they catered just to 1st Gens or Pell Grant recipients. Remember back when the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty sued Biden over his debt forgiveness plan because Pell Grant recipients — who were often Black — benefitted too much? Same argument here.

That said, this is too great of an achievement to let anyone from Wisconsin put a damper on it. Congratulations to the LPC graduates! We wish you the best in law school! Hopefully, other law schools will adopt similar programs in the years to come.

This New Pipeline Program Turned Rejected Applicants Into New Law Students [Reuters]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.