4 online law programs join forces to let students swap courses
Students at four law schools will be able to take high-level, specialized courses at the other three ABA-accredited schools for no cost and little paperwork hassle starting in spring 2026.
The Suffolk University Law School, St. Mary’s University School of Law, the Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law and the Southwestern Law School, each with well-established online programs, will put forward a few seats in some of their synchronous distance learning classes for students from the other schools, school administrators told the ABA Journal.
For instance, a student at Southwestern Law, which has a strong focus on entertainment law, might be interested in taking a legal innovation course available at Suffolk Law. “Those programs are hard to create,” says Gabriel H. Teninbaum, Suffolk Law’s assistant dean for innovation, strategic initiatives and distance education.
“These classes are also not just classes that we have an expertise in, but courses that we wouldn’t necessarily easily be able to offer ourselves,” Teninbaum adds. “We all take the pedagogy of online teaching seriously and these courses are heavily interactive, largely, if not completely synchronous.”
Says Matthew Lyon, dean of Lincoln Memorial Law, “Even though our part-time hybrid students already attend law school with students from all over the country, the opportunity to actually be enrolled in classes with students enrolled in different law schools will enrich their law school experiences.”
In October 2022, Suffolk Law Dean Andrew Perlman reached out to deans at schools with established online programs, asking who might be interested in exploring an exchange of online courses, says Patricia Roberts, dean at St. Mary’s Law. After an initial meeting at the Association of American Law Schools in early 2024, discussions among Perlman and the other three deans continued via Zoom meetings until an agreement was reached, she adds.
Students will find the other three schools’ offerings in their home-base school’s course catalogs, and registering for the course will be the same as doing so at their own school, Teninbaum says. Those enrolled in traditional as well as hybrid programs at the four schools can take advantage of the exchange at no cost, he adds.
“Early on, we decided that no funds would be paid by the student partaking of a consortium course to the partner school, only to the home school,” St. Mary’s Law’s Roberts says. “That took a lot of the complications out.”
Each school determines how many seats will be available to outside students on a semester-by-semester basis, says Darby Dickerson, dean of Southwestern Law, “with the idea that each school will offer a similar number of seats over a period of years.”
Some might offer unfilled seats while others might hold seats specifically for students from the other schools, the administrators say.
The agreement aims to balance the inflows and outflows over time, Suffolk’s Teninbaum says. “If we accept 10 student seats across a number of classes over the next two years, we want and expect 10 of our students to be able to go out elsewhere.”
Signs of success will include students reporting positive experiences taking courses at partner schools, Roberts says. “Ultimately, if we can, by partnering with other schools to offer more robust choices in online electives, we will have greatly benefitted our own students with minimal risk or added expense.”
There were no upfront costs to create the partnership other than the “intellectual labor to take this off the ground,” Teninbaum says. Logistical issues, such as ensuring students receive credit on their home schools’ transcripts, protocols for alerting the other schools of a student’s need to withdraw and pointing out to students that the other schools might observe different holidays, were hammered out.
Online law schools are a hot topic. There are 21 law schools with ABA-approved distance education programs, which combine online classes with limited on-site course work.
Eventually, more schools could join the consortium, Roberts says. “This initial group of leaders was collegial, determined and thoughtful in designing a framework that would be effective not only for the original partner schools, but also for those who may join moving forward.”
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