Campus Chronicle

Issue date: 9/15/03 Section: Legal

Media Credit: Photo provided UDC-DCSL students pose with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

UDC's law school may have to bargain with the devil - or, more accurately, the American Bar Association - if it wishes its graduates recognition and respect in their fields of practice. But will the school have to abandon its activist roots to seal the deal?

The David A. Clarke School of Law was denied ABA accreditation last spring after the ABA declared its bar passage rates too low. News sources have reported the first-attempt bar passage rate as low as 25 percent, though school officials have quoted it as high as 48 percent. Its overall passage rate is approximately 68 percent.

The ABA extended the school's provisional accreditation for another two years. It's been under such a status since 1998, two years after it merged with the University of the District of Columbia as the former D.C. School of Law.

It took that name in 1988, when it reopened its doors after - under the name of the Antioch School of Law - it was forced to close in 1985 when the ABA revoked its accreditation because of "low academic credentials," according to the Washington Times.

Antioch was founded in 1972 with the goal of educating minorities in legal advocacy so that they may help those normally neglected by the legal process.

Under provisional accreditation, the school's graduates are treated the same - at least officially - as those who come from approved schools, according to the ABA. However, the school is subjected to intensive self-reviews and a yearly inspection. The school will reapply for accreditation next year.

The school has attempted to honor its history of activism and increased opportunity. Approximately 61 percent of its students are members of minority groups, and approximately 57 percent are women, according to UDC-DCSL's Web site. The school offers substantial grants to help soften the burden of tuition. More than 45 percent receive half-tuition grants or higher, according to the Law School Admission Council.

The school also is committed to public service, requiring that all students provide a minimum of 700 hours toward the clinical program, as well as a total of 40 hours toward community service during their first year.

As many as 25 percent of graduates go on to practice public interest law, excluding government practice, according to the ABA as reported by LSAC.

WCL - considered by many to be focused on public interest - can only boast 8 percent, according to the Princeton Review.

However, the needs of the ABA may directly collide with such goals.

Prior to this spring's decision, school officials made many changes to accommodate the ABA. UDC - a public school - now spends $11,043 per law student, according to the Washington Times.

The national average is $5,687.

Much of this - $1.2 million last year - was used to expand the law library. The school also increased its spending on faculty and now boasts a 6-to-1 student-teacher ratio.

This low ratio is partially due to the fact that the school accepted fewer students, from 168 in 1999 to 128 as of last spring. The school once had as many as 300 students. It would be willing to go that high again "as long as they meet the higher standards," Dean Katherine S. Broderick told the Washington Post.

These "higher standards" are the primary problem with the ABA requirements. In order to comply for accreditation, UDC-DCSL raised its GPA and LSAT requirements, despite its past policy of looking at the "whole person" in lieu of such numerical standards.

The raising of such standards will in effect keep the school from performing one of its primary goals - educating minorities who may otherwise not obtain legal training.

Minorities statistically do worse on standardized tests like the LSAT. According to a report from the University of California-Berkeley, between 1996-1998, African-American applicants of its law school scored an average of 9.3 points lower on the LSAT than white applicants.

The report cited several factors that contribute to such diminished success, including an ethnic bias in the test itself, an expectation of poor performance that causes added stress during the test, and the fact that minorities overall have less access to expensive preparatory programs like Kaplan or Princeton Review, which can cost as much as $1,000.

Similar arguments can be made about the bar exam. Bar prep programs like BarBri can cost thousands of dollars on top of the cost of taking the exam itself.

Then there's the subjects tested on the bar. A school focused on the public interest is less likely to have students taking bar courses like Business Associations or Sales and Secured Transactions.

In order to obtain ABA accreditation - and the respect desperately needed by practicing lawyers that comes with it - UDC-DCSL must sacrifice many of the techniques it has used to give the underrepresented access to a legal education. The rigid ABA requirements - a certain LSAT average, GPA, bar passage rate - could rob the school of its ability to continue to achieve its mission.

Related Links:
UDC-DCSL Factsheet
American Bar Association
Law School Admission Council
Princeton Review
Study Highlights Disparities in LSAT Scores - The Daily Californian

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