Law school in the United States
[5] Many law schools actively seek applicants from outside the traditional pool to boost racial, economic, and experiential diversity on campus.
In addition, individual state legislatures or bar examiners may maintain a separate approval system, which is open to non-ABA accredited schools.
California is also the first state to allow graduates of distance legal education (online and correspondence) to take its bar exam.
At most schools, the grade for an entire course depends upon the outcome of only one or two examinations, usually in essay form, which are administered via students' laptop computers in the classroom with the assistance of specialized software.
Depending upon the law school, practical training courses may involve fictional exercises in which students interact with each other or with volunteer actors playing clients, witnesses, and judges, or real-world cases at legal clinics.
This requirement was added after the Watergate scandal, which seriously damaged the public image of the profession because President Richard Nixon and most of his alleged co-conspirators were lawyers.
[4] Law students must take at least one course, or complete an independent study project, as a 2L or 3L that requires the writing of a paper for credit.
Critics cite the financial involvement of the Ford Foundation as the turning point when such clinics began to change from giving practical experience to engaging in advocacy.
Under the Harvard approach, law professors do not deliver lengthy lectures and instead use the Socratic method to force students to teach one another, based on their individual understanding of legal theory and the facts of the case at hand.
This process is intended to train students in the reasoning methods necessary to interpret theories, statutes, and precedents correctly, and argue their validity, both orally and in writing.
This style of teaching is often disorienting to first-year law students who are more accustomed to taking notes from professors' lectures[citation needed].
Most people entered the legal profession through reading law, a form of independent study or apprenticeship, often under the supervision of an experienced attorney.
Those who held these positions were the sole purveyors of legal education (per se) for their institutions—though law was, of course, discussed in other academic areas as a matter of course—and gave lectures designed to supplement, rather than replace, an apprenticeship.
Before 1870, there was nothing like a modern university in America, only a number of glorified liberal arts colleges which taught Greek, Latin, moral philosophy, and mathematics to undergraduates.
[36] For example, in 1904, Hugo Black was denied admission to the University of Alabama's Academic Department, the ancestor of its College of Arts and Sciences, but he got into its law school.
[35] It was also Harvard under Langdell which developed the modern concept of the American law professor, starting with the 1873 hiring of Ames: a career academic with limited practice experience "who was appointed for his scholarly and teaching potential".
The transition from traditional lectures to the interactive examination of cases became "the law schools' apparent passport to academic respectability".
"[39] Ames refined the approach further by contributing the ideas that casebooks should focus on cases selected for their "striking facts and vivid opinions", and group them together by subject.
[36] The underlying obstacle was that at the turn of the 20th century, public education was still in its infancy in most of the United States—a defect which the country was belatedly struggling to correct in what is now known as the Progressive Era.
[36] In 1909, Minnesota started to require a single year of college-level work as a prerequisite for law school admission and saw its entering class drop from 203 to 69.
[45] [47] When the University of California established a second law program in 1894, this time on the Berkeley campus, it was open to women and men on an equal basis.
[63] The legal department, led by John Mercer Langston, opened in 1869 to address "a great need to train lawyers who would have a strong commitment to helping black Americans secure and protect their newly established rights" of the tumultuous Reconstruction era.
[65] It is reported that Ray applied for admission to the bar using initials for her given and middle names, in order to disguise her gender, because she was "[a]ware of the school's reluctant commitment to the principle of sexual equality.
The vast majority of Supreme Court clerks either become academics at elite law schools, enter private practice as appellate attorneys, or take highly selective government positions.
[9][105][106][107] A number of critics have pointed out factual inaccuracies and logical errors in The New York Times' higher education coverage, especially related to law schools.
U.S. News ratings heavily emphasize inputs—student test scores and grades, law school expenditures—but includes some outcomes such as bar passage and employment shortly after graduation.
U.S. News rankings are heavily weighted toward "reputation", which is measured through a survey with small sample size and low response rates.
Leiter's rankings tend to emphasize the quality and quantity of faculty scholarship, as measured by citations in a select group of journals.
For students who are primarily interested in lucrative employment outcomes rather than scholarly prestige, this comparison may suggest which law schools are most undervalued by the market.
[135] Those 14 schools, alphabetically, are: Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, New York University, Northwestern, Penn, Stanford, Virginia, and Yale.
