Wilmington University School of Law Launching

Who? Themselves?

 

Likely. Perhaps more lawyers to create Delaware Corporations - very popular with offshore degree mills.

 

Tell you what. I state for the record that this school will be dead in five years at most. I will not be surprised if they are unable to fill enough seats in their resident day division inaugural class to pay the operating costs. Once the university figures out that a new law school these days is the exact opposite of a cash cow they will close it.

 

Delaware lawyers don't do that work. New York law firms do it.

 

In Maryland and D.C. there exist TWELVE law schools.

 

Correspondence can be just a pure reading list with graded assignments. If you have a good memory, that system works fine for law. To pass the bar, it is just a matter of recalling data and canned essays. Real learning begins when you have clients with actual issues to resolve.

 

What do Delaware lawyers do? Incorporate New York corporations by reciprocity agreement?

 

The reason this school will fail is that nobody needs it. No students need yet another place to run up their debt and no one needs the additional law graduates this school plans on churning out.

 

Attention all lemmings. You heard the piper. You know what to do. Now DO it!

 

Those small places?? DC, well ok, but little bitty Maryland?

 

Lots of people in Maryland (and Virginia) who work in DC and want to avoid the cost of living in DC -and/or have a nicer life in a preferred area. Not that it makes this particular situation any more promising.

 

Slipped my mind, but that would explain things. Thanks.

 

So including Widener, there are TWENTY-SEVEN ABA approved law schools in and around Washington DC. Yeah, everyone is just champing at the bit to go to the all new Wilmington with zero reputation, zero alum network, zero Bar results history, and undetermined ABA accreditation status. Yup. This thing is someone's vanity project.

 

There are also new law schools launching, also B&M and pursuing ABA, at High Point University in High Point, NC and at Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, FL. (That city was home to Florida Coastal School of Law, the for-profit founded by Walden University co-founders Bernie and Rita Turner then sold to the private equity law-school chain InfiLaw, all of whose law schools ultimately closed.)

 

Maybe. But I'd want to see some evidence of that. Equally plausible: there's a reason yet to be discerned.

Most business ventures are not vanity projects; they're designed to generate wealth for the founders/owners. Just because we don't know how they'll monetize this doesn't mean they won't. It's how Kim Kardashian is a billionaire with no clear pathway to it.

 

Like what? Law schools are more like toasters than designer jeans. Inside they're pretty much all the same. The ABA sees to that. Nor is this sameness just superstition. Take another look at the differences in first time Bar passage rates in California (the only sizeable data set we have) and see what happens when schools wander far from the standard approach. It's all very well to "broaden access" for students with "alternative" preparation but look what happens when you do.

The schools don't control the Bar exam and Bar examiners do not (yet) offer alternatives to passing the standard exam. (Well, except for Wisconsin and their diploma privilege.)

Well, you may be right. I am no fan of the legal academy as you know by now. If Wilmington actually does present something new and effective after 150 years of Dean Langdell and the Case Method, more power to them.

 

Understanding the law is not very difficult. Passing the Bar exam is not intellectually difficult. But the Bar Exam does something no alternative could do. It tests knowledge of literally dozens of areas. No portfolio evaluation or period of supervised practice could possibly cover all the areas on the MBE alone. A lawyer in practice needs this breadth of knowledge to be minimally competent.

If someone decides to grant law licenses based upon portfolios or clerkship I think that the applicant should have to achieve a passing score on the MBE and MPRE to be sure the applicant has basic familiarity with law in general.

 

Sorry. MBE=Multistate Bar Exam. MPRE=Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam. These are well designed (they claim) multiple choice tests.

 

District of Columbia (D.C) (6)
Georgetown University's Law School
George Washington University's Law School
American University's Law School
Howard University's Law School
Catholic University of America's Law School
University of District Columbia's Law School

Maryland (2)
University of Maryland at College Park's Law School
University of Baltimore's Law School

Am I missing something?