The unaccredited Harvard and Yale...

No, I'm not a lawyer or law student.

The Hastings JD program is not unaccredited, it's ABA accredited, as stated previously. It just doesn't happen to have regional accreditation. The Hastings LLM program is unaccredited, since ABA does not accredit such programs and since Hastings has no other form of accreditation.

The Hastings JD program is currently ranked at #39 nationally by US News & World Report, which puts it in the "Top Tier" of US law schools. It is one of the top 10 public JD programs in the western US.

Yes. In fact, Hastings is the oldest law school in California, so Hastings graduates have probably been taking the California bar exam longer than anyone else.

Sometimes it's helpful to repeat things because new people with limited understanding show up in the forum.

 

UC Hastings is not accredited by WASC, despite the quote cited above that says: "All UC campuses are accredited by California's regional accrediting agency, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC)." If you look at the table of accredited UC campuses further down on that same page, you will see that Hastings is absent.

Furthermore, you will also find that Hastings is absent from WASC's directory of accredited institutions, although every other UC campus is explicilty listed.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this. There are other perfectly legitimate "standalone" law schools, such as Albany Law School and Brooklyn Law School, that are ABA-accredited but have no other form of accreditation. As a standalone professional programs, they really only need professional accreditation. In fact, Thomas Jefferson School of Law in California once had WASC accreditation, but decided to drop it and go with ABA accreditation only.

 

The reason for this discrepancy is that UC Hastings College of the Law, while part of the UC system, is technically not a "UC campus".

You can see this at the official UC website. The website highlights the 10 "UC campuses": Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, LA, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. Note that Hastings is not included as a "campus". Hastings is technically a "UC location".

 

Technically, UCMerced isn't accredited by WASC either. It's still a candidate. I think that it's a 100% certain lock on eventual accreditation, but it hasn't received that accreditation yet.

 

Furthermore, it appears that the Harvard Psychology Department ultimately reversed the decision to drop APA accreditation, and re-applied. The department is currently listed as accredited at the APA website, as of June 2008.

 

Hastings would seem to illustrate that students can still receive an excellent legal education, despite it not being RA or NA accredited, which is a departure from most law schools.

 

I guess an argument could be made that there are exceptions to the RA and NA law school model.

 

An argument could be made that there is no "RA and NA law school model". In reality, law schools revolve around ABA accreditation. Nothing else matters, not even RA or NA.

If a law school is ABA-accredited, then its JD degrees are universally accepted. It makes no difference whatsoever whether the school is also RA (e.g. UC Berkeley) or not (e.g. UC Hastings). They are equally valid, because ABA accreditation is the determining factor.

If a law school is not ABA-accredited, then their JD degrees have severe limitations. Again, it makes no difference whatsoever whether they are also RA (e.g. Concord), or NA (e.g. Taft) or neither (e.g. California Southern University). They are equally limited, because the lack of ABA accreditation is the determining factor.

Law schools are either ABA-accredited, or they are not. That's the model.

 

How many other traditional law schools would you say just don't happen to be regionally accredited?

There is nothing limited about my understanding insofar as your rehashing the same law school topics from thread to thread. What's with the fixation on law schools?

 

As stated above, this is actually not unusual for "standalone" law schools; i.e. law schools that are not affiliated with a more comprehensive university. I don't claim to have a comprehensive list, but I believe that other examples of ABA-accredited, non-RA law schools include:

- Albany Law School (NY)
- Appalachian School of Law (VA)
- Ave Maria School of Law (FL)
- Brooklyn Law School (NY)
- California Western School of Law (CA)
- Florida Coastal School of Law (FL)
- John Marshall Law School - Atlanta (GA)
- New England School of Law (MA)
- New York Law School (NY)
- South Texas College of Law (TX)
- Southwestern Law School (CA)
- Thomas Jefferson School of Law (CA)
- Thomas M. Cooley Law School - Lansing (MI)
- Thomas M. Cooley Law School - Ann Arbor (MI)
- Thomas M. Cooley Law School - Grand Rapids (MI)
- Thomas M. Cooley Law School - Oakland County (MI)
- William Mitchell College of Law (MN)

There are some 200 ABA-accredited law schools; I would estimate that some 5-10% of these lack RA.

Law schools and their accreditation seem to be topics of interest to many posters on this forum. This apparently includes you, given the previous question that you just posed.

 

lchemiust: "This is true: Two toilets located in the antipodes of each other, will flush in the opposite direction."

John: Uh, would that be one up and one down?

Actually, this ad has been running in Popular Science ever since I was a kid. Seemed funny then, and still does.

 

Okay, you are saying that law schools don't need to be regionally accredited according to your ABA model. It would seem, however, that in the case of Hastings, that the ABA has created an "exception" to it not being regional accredited, since pretty much the majority of traditional law schools are in fact, regionally accredited.

That the ABA creating an exception for Hastings is in some ways similar to the exception that the California Committee of Bar Examiners has shown to DETC law schools, including other California unaccredited law schools, where graduates are permitted to sit the bar exam.

In short, the final determination hinges on the California Committee of Bar Examiners, notwithanding ABA accreditation or not.

 

That seems like a reasonable number, which would serve to illustrate my point that the majority of traditional law schools are in fact, RA.

My interest in the subject matter is because I studied law and happen to work in it. I find it somewhat unusual that you seem to rehash law threads, even when the topic has nothing to do with it. I haven't noticed that with any other posters, which is why I mentioned it.

 

When we were tourists in Quito, Ecuador two years ago, we visited three different manifestations of the "real equator; those other guys have it wrong." Gift shops and little museums with broad yellow stripes painted across the property, which we were assured was the real thing. Two of the three had "scientific" demonstrations of the coriolis effect, in which the basin was moved only 8 or 10 feet on either side of the line (one actually by a man wearing a white lab coat).

What can I say. It appeared to work. The Amazing Randi may well have figured out what was really going on.

Here's a 2-minute video someone posted on YouTube of one of those places:
http://tinyurl.com/CoriolisEffect

 

It's not his ABA model. It's just a fact of life that every state bar in the US recognizes, and in most cases requires, law degrees from ABA accredited law schools. They aren't typically concerned with whether those law schools have any other accreditations besides ABA.

It's not an exception. The ABA is able to serve as the institutional accreditor of stand-alone law schools. That means that it's going to be looking at things like institutional finances and governance. Typically the regional accreditors handle that and the ABA just concerns itself with the law program. But in cases where schools are only awarding degrees in law, the ABA is willing to handle the whole thing.

The California bar examiners haven't made any exceptions for DETC. For their purposes, the DETC DL law schools are unaccredited. Interestingly though, they do recognize Calbar-accredited law schools as accredited, despite the fact that the California Bar Association isn't a US Dept. of Education recognized accreditor.

Writers of degree-use legislation currently pending in US Congress don't take these Calbar schools into account, implicitly declare their peculiar Calbar accreditation an "unfair business practice" (because the California Bar Association isn't recognized by the US Secretary of Education) and direct the Federal Trade Commission to file legal actions. That would open up a nice Constitutional can of worms if the Feds start (even unintentionally) to interfere with state laws governing admissions to state bars, turf that the states can be expected to jealously protect.

Its the California bar examiners who decided to recognize ABA accreditation.

For in-state California law schools, they also accept Calbar-accredited law schools as accredited and have procedures for admitting graduates of California unaccredited law schools (which as we've just seen, might be RA like Concord or DETC like Taft, or in most cases accredited by nobody at all).

When it comes to admitting graduates of out-of-state law schools to the California bar, ABA accreditation is pretty much required. California doesn't recognize unaccredited (by the ABA or Calbar) schools in other states and Calbar accreditation isn't applicable out there in the uncharted darkness beyond the Sierras. Which leaves the ABA.

 

Back in distant 2004, PaulC asked:

"Can anyone offer if there are any US unaccredited universities that carry recognized program accreditation?"

I replied:

"I think that several specialized accreditors can serve as institutional accreditors of specialized institutions. In a few fields, this is the norm.

Chiropractic colleges are accredited by the Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE). Acupuncture colleges are accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (ACAOM).

It's not unusual for theological seminaries to not be RA but rather receive their instituional acceditation from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). Few of the AARTS rabbinical and Talmudical schools are RA.

As I understand it, the specialized accreditors that are Dept. of Education/CHEA recognized to do this kind of institutional accreditation have the capacity to evaluate stuff like institutional finances and governance that isn't directly instructionally related."

Things rested there for six years, until some spammer resurrected the thread last night. Then Lerner posted on the subject and Caldog produced Hastings as another example.

That's when you became kind of combative. The fact remains that Hastings is a fine example of the phenomenon - schools that aren't accredited by one of the typical general institutional accreditors, whose specialized accreditation is their accreditation.

It's unusual, but not tremendously so. In a few fields, it's the typical situation.

 

It's not an exception, because ABA has no requirement or policy favoring regional accreditation. It's true, of course, that most ABA law schools do have regional accreditation. But that's just because most traditional law schools are associated with traditional universities, and traditional universities normally have RA.

ABA policy is RA-neutral. ABA is well aware that some law schools are independent, and not associated with traditional universities. They don't expect or require such schools to have RA, so there is no need to make exceptions. In fact, the largest ABA-accredited law school in the US doesn't have RA (the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan).

 

No, it's quite different.

As far as ABA is concerned, all JD degrees from accredited schools are on an equal footing. A Hastings JD degree has exactly the same legal status as a Berkeley JD degree. The fact that the former school lacks RA is irrelevant.

But CalBar, in contrast, does not treat all JD degrees equally. It's certainly true that you can qualify for the California Bar Exam with a DETC JD degree (from a school like Taft) or with an RA non-ABA degree (from a school like Concord), or even with non-ABA, non-DETC, non-RA degree (from a school like California Southern). But these degrees are not on an equal footing with ABA degrees, in CalBar's eyes. CalBar requires all students at these schools to pass a preliminary screening exam, the First-Year Law Student's Examination (popularly known as the "Baby Bar"). Most of them flunk.

In contrast, CalBar normally exempts students at ABA schools (like Hastings or Berkeley) from the FYLSE requirement. So ABA schools get preferred treatment.

In fact, CalBar even extends this preferred treatment to a third class of law schools, the so-called "CalBar-accredited schools". These include schools like Santa Barbara College of Law, or Ventura College of Law. These schools aren't ABA, and they aren't DETC or RA either. Yet because they have CalBar approval, they also are exempted from the FYLSE. In California, CalBar accreditation has the same legal value as ABA accreditation (although it is worth much less in other states).

So in California, RA/DETC accreditation is not only of secondary importance, it's of tertiary importance. The best thing is ABA accreditation, and the second best thing is CalBar accreditation. If a law school has either or those, then RA or DETC accreditation is irrelevant.

If a law school has RA or DETC accreditation, but lacks ABA or CalBar accreditation, then it has distinctly inferior status under California law. Yes, graduates of such schools can still qualify for the California Bar, but only after passing the difficult FYLSE exam. This is not required for students at ABA and CalBar schools.