CA Bill SB 1568 related to Law Schools

Hi all,

I learned from another forum that the CA State Bar plans to do the followings. Any comments???



1) Pass the bill giving BBPVE control to State Bar.

2) State Bar makes a requirement that correspondence
law schools have a real faculty admitted to the Calif
Bar, no more 1 man operations.

3) Give all correspondence law schools a time limit
to get DETC accredited or lose ability to operate
as a degree granting law school.

4) Make all residential unaccredited law schools
apply within a certain time period for State Bar
accreditiation, those that dont make it will be closed.

 

Is the plan applicable to unaccredited law schools and/or institutions that offer degree programs along with JDs?

 

I am not really sure, but I suspect it only applies to bar qualifying JDs. If the unaccredited law schools are not allowed to offer bar qualifying JDs, most of them will be out of business anyway.

 

The text of the bill is available here: http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/bill/sen/sb_1551-1600/sb_1568_bill_20060223_introduced.html

An analysis is posted here: http://www.aroundthecapitol.com/billtrack/analysis.html?file=sb_1568_cfa_20060404_155746_sen_comm.html

An interesting excerpt from above:

Over the past five years, the first-time pass rate for
the baby bar among correspondence law schools is 37.2%
(689/1851). Their pass rate for the general bar exam is
34.08% (167/490) for first timers and 14.89% (105/705)
for repeaters. While these numbers are higher than the
numbers for the unaccredited law schools, and in fact
also surpass the first-time pass rate average for
California accredited law schools, they still show that
there is a substantial rate of attrition...

Christopher

 

The 34% first-time pass rate on the general bar exam for correspondence schools superficially looks good. As noted above, it is higher than the first-time pass rate for California-accredited (but not ABA-accredited) law schools.

But this is a misleading comparison. The catch is the "baby bar" exam. Correspondence school students are required to take it, and most of them fail. In other words, most correspondence school students flunk out of the exam process before they even reach the general bar exam.

In contrast, students at CA-accredited law schools are typically exempt from the "baby bar" exam. The CA-accredited schools lose relatively few students that way.

So overall, you have a much better chance of becoming an attorney through a CA-accredited school than than from a correspondence school, even if the general bar pass rates are comparable. If you calculated "pass rates" based on both the "baby bar" and the general bar, the numbers for the correspondence schools would fall dramatically, whereas the numbers for CA-accredited schools would be largely unaffected.

I believe people have previously looked at attrition in correspondence schools, by comparing the numbers of "baby bar" candidates (i.e. people entering the exam pipeline) to the numbers of successful general bar candidates (i.e. people exiting the exam pipeline). If I recall correctly, the numbers for correspondence school students suggest attrition on the order of 90%; in other words, for every 10 correspondence students that take the baby bar exam, only one will eventually qualify as a lawyer.