Denying Access to Legal Representation: The Attack on the Tulane Law Clinic

When people require assistance to advance public interests, rather than private interests, the lack of legal representation is even more severe—less than .001% of lawyers in the legal profession are public interest lawyers. “Although recent data are unavailable, the best available estimates suggest that the number of full-time public interest lawyers is less than one attorney for every 240,000 Americans.” Citizens advancing issues of public concern often have no choice but to turn for free assistance from law school professors or one of the nation’s law school clinics

Universal Clinic Legal Education: Necessary and Feasible

This Essay analyzes the data surrounding clinical education in law schools. Kuehn compares the legal education experience to other professional schools, noting that the legal field does not take the steps to prepare law students for the professional field that other schools do. Kuehn argues that a mandated clinical experience for all students is both not costly to obtain and feasible to immediately implement. Kuehn concludes his argument by calling for required clinical training in ABA-approved law schools to ensure practice-ready professionals

A Study of the Relationship between Law School Coursework and Bar Exam Outcomes

The recent decline in bar exam passage rates has triggered speculation that the decline is being driven by law students taking more experiential courses and fewer bar-subject courses. These concerns arose in the absence of any empirical study linking certain coursework to bar exam failure.This article addresses speculation about the relationship between law school coursework and bar exam outcomes. It reports the results of a large-scale study of the courses of over 3800 graduates from two law schools and the relationship between their experiential and bar-subject coursework and bar exam outcomes over a ten-year period. At both schools, the number of experiential courses or credits taken by a student did not correlate with bar passage, positively or negatively. Enrollment in bar courses correlated positively with passage, but the correlation was modest and significant only for students whose class rank placed them at heightened risk of bar failure. Even for those students, the marginal benefit of additional bar-related courses was not statistically significant once the student had taken approximately the average number of bar courses at that school. The study results indicate that efforts to improve bar passage rates by capping experiential credits are not supported by empirical evidence and that requiring bar-subject courses for students at comparable law schools would appear justified, if at all, only when targeted at students whose class rank places them at enhanced risk of bar exam failure

An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age

This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports on aspects of clinical legal education, including unique data developed by the authors, and comparing the results over time, this article presents a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to today’s middle age.This article seeks to inform the present and help legal educators shape the future role of law clinic and field placement courses in the preparation of law students for the practice of law. It provides an empirical history of clinical programs from the early 1970s to today and examines in detail those teaching law clinic and field placement courses, providing data on the nature of their jobs, demographics, and differences from others in the legal academy. The article then takes a close empirical look at clinic and field placement courses, their growth, size, structure, and content.This comprehensive, longitudinal empirical study will help legal educators make more informed choices about the role of law clinic and field placement courses within their own institutions and, more broadly, about the role of clinical courses in educating tomorrow’s lawyers and aiding underserved clients

A Study of the Relationship Between Law School Coursework and Bar Exam Outcomes

The recent decline in bar exam passage rates has triggered speculation that the decline is being driven by law students taking more experiential courses and fewer bar-subject courses. These concerns arose in the absence of any empirical study linking certain coursework to bar exam failure.This article addresses speculation about the relationship between law school coursework and bar exam outcomes. It reports the results of a large-scale study of the courses of over 3800 graduates from two law schools and the relationship between their experiential and bar-subject coursework and bar exam outcomes over a ten-year period. At both schools, the number of experiential courses or credits taken by a student did not correlate with bar passage, positively or negatively. Enrollment in bar courses correlated positively with passage, but the correlation was modest and significant only for students whose class rank placed them at heightened risk of bar failure. Even for those students, the marginal benefit of additional bar-related courses was not statistically significant once the student had taken approximately the average number of bar courses at that school. The study results indicate that efforts to improve bar passage rates by capping experiential credits are not supported by empirical evidence and that requiring bar-subject courses for students at comparable law schools would appear justified, if at all, only when targeted at students whose class rank places them at enhanced risk of bar exam failure

The 2019-20 Survey of Applied Legal Education

This report presents the results of the 2019-20 Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) Survey of Applied Legal Education. The survey was composed of two parts – a Master Survey directed to ABA accredited U.S. law schools and a Sub-Survey distributed to each person teaching in a law clinic or field placement course. Ninety-five percent of law schools and over 1,300 clinical teachers participated in the survey. The results provide valuable insight into clinical programs and law clinic and field placement courses in areas such as design, capacity, administration, funding, and pedagogy, and into the role and status of clinical educators in the legal academy. This is CSALE\u27s fifth triennial survey, following up on surveys in 2007-08, 2010-11, 2013-14, and 2016-17