ABA Legal Ed council proposal to increase experiential learning credit requirement faces pushback
The proposal to double the required number of experiential learning credits from six to 12 by the council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has met fierce opposition, with the majority of comments received arguing against it.
The changes would impact ABA accreditation Standards 303, 304 and 311.
The council will consider the 343 pages of comments at its meeting Aug. 21-23. If approved, the proposal would head to the ABA House of Delegates in the future for a vote.
One letter signed by 52 deans of ABA-accredited law schools—including New York University School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Yale Law School, and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law—requested that the council slow down and make incremental changes, as law schools are already facing funding cuts and several other challenges.
Trying to make these changes “at a moment of unprecedented change for both higher education and the legal profession,” the letter states, “is counterproductive at best and may be self-destructive to our shared goal of delivering high quality education and expanding experiential opportunities.”
In addition, deans and professors from the University of California College of the Law at San Francisco, Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Michigan Law School, Yale Law School and the University of Washington School of Law, among others, individually raised objections, including about the costs of creating the classes and the lack of flexibility with curriculum.
“Rather than a top-down doubling of the number of required credits, the ABA should encourage the development of increased experiential learning opportunities as a best practice, allowing law schools to determine the appropriate amount, type, and timing of experiential learning to require above the current requirement based on their institutional mission, student population and the needs of the legal communities they serve,” according to a memo signed by University of Washington School of Law Dean Tamara Lawson and two of the school’s associate deans.
Part-time students who often take classes at night while working during the day would struggle to meet the proposed requirements, Erin Buzuvis, associate dean for academic affairs at Western New England University School of Law, noted in her comment.
Meanwhile, the Clinical Legal Education Association, the Society of American Law Teachers and Deborah Jones Merritt, professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, wrote in support of the increase.
“It is very hard to argue that a school conferring JD degrees based on less than 12 upper-level credits in experiential courses is offering a minimally qualified program of professional education,” wrote Merritt, the primary author of the Building a Better Bar study. “Law schools must embrace that reality and make the limited adjustments necessary to develop the quality education that students and clients deserve.”
The current requirement, written into Standard 303(a)(3), was adopted in 2014 despite significant support at the time for mandating 12 to 15 credits, according to a May 2 memo to the council from the Standards Committee.
Clinics are more expensive than traditional courses to conduct, prompting concerns that more experiential credit hours would mean higher law school tuition. The Standards Committee sent out a survey in January yielding responses from 83 law schools that showed 53% of law schools could meet nine experiential learning credit hours without needing to expand current course offerings; an additional 19.3% stated they would need to expand offerings but believed that to be manageable.
The current required six experiential credits have scarcely made an impact on bar exam pass rates, according to the memo. But the impending move to the NextGen UBE Bar Exam—which focuses on testing a range of lawyering skills that help newly licensed lawyers perform common entry-level skills without supervision—might change that, the memo states.
The section’s council, a separate and independent entity from the bar association, is recognized by the Department of Education as the sole accrediting body for U.S. law schools. Most states require applicants of the state bar to be graduates of an ABA-accredited law school.
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