Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm paying a virtual visit to the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law's newly restored campus, which played a big role in the events following JFK's 1963 assassination. Next up is a look at Yale Law School'sdecision to accept GRE scores in admissions and why elite law schools have been quicker to adopt the alternative exam than their lower-ranking counterparts. 

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

A Law School, And An Assassin

The University of North Texas Dallas College of Law is the newest law school to be accredited by the American Bar Association, but its freshly renovated campus has some serious history.

Here's the deal: UNT Law has been housed in a downtown university building since opening in 2013, but next month classes will commence in the school's new digs—the gorgeous 1914 Beaux Arts-style Dallas Municipal Building. If that name rings a bell, it's because that building played a big role in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It previously housed the old Dallas County Jail, where Lee Harvey Oswald was held for two days after shooting and killing Kennedy on Nov. 22. The building's basement garage is also where Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald days later. Like I said, that's some serious history.

In its (first) prime, the building also housed Dallas City Hall and the Dallas Police Department. Those entities eventually relocated and by 2003 only municipal courts remained in the partially abandoned structure. City officials began thinking about how it could be repurposed and reinvigorated. Fast forward to 2019, and a consortium of groups have pumped $71 million into the historic building to transform it into a modern law school—with a few twists, but I'll get to those in a minute. First, the city spent $14 million to restore the building's façade. And the University of North Texas invested $53 million to overhaul the interior—working closely with historic preservationists. Renovations on the more than 100,000 square-foot law campus took two years. It has all the bells and whistles you'd expect in a new law campus like a large trial courtroom and energy efficiency, with some historic bonuses, including:

➤➤A preserved block of jail cells on the fifth floor where Oswald was held, which look like a time capsule from 1963, complete with sea-foam green walls pocked with graffiti from inmates.

➤➤A preserved wall that served as the backdrop of Oswald's mugshot.

➤➤A preserved captain's office where Oswald was interrogated as well as a preserved elevator used to move inmates.

➤➤The former chambers of the Dallas City Council have also been restored and will now serve as a classroom.

➤➤Numerous other historic elements have been restored of preserved, including marble corridors, plaster cornices and wood doors and trim.

Now I haven't toured the renovated building yet, but the photos look incredible. (The university held an official ribbon-cutting ceremony last month.) It seems the school has struck the right balance between modernizing and giving students a 21st century legal education while also retaining what makes this new location so special and significant. The school plans to make the Oswald features open to the public, at least on a limited basis. Here's what Dean Felecia Epps had to say about that:

“Although we want the public to have access, we have to preserve the education of the students,” Epps said. “There will be a plan developed where the public, at very limited times, will have access to that.”

Not only that, but plans are in the works for a 2,500-square-foot museum housed in the basement, to open next year. You can imagine that it will be far less disruptive to the school's operations to have visitors directed to the basement, rather than traipsing through the middle of its campus. Kudos to the forward-thinking politicians and administrators who pulled this one off.

Yale Law Joins the GRE Party

Another day, another law school announces it will accept GRE scores from applicants. At least that's how I've been feeling lately, now that some 43 ABA-accredited law schools are allowing applicants to submit either LSAT or GRE scores. We're tantalizingly close to reaching the 25 percent threshold. All of which is to say it's hard to get excited about each new announcement.

Then again, Yale is not your run-of-the mill law school. So naturally I sat up and took note last week when the nation's No. 1-ranked law school casually dropped that it has boarded the GRE train. There wasn't much fanfare, but Yale Law's admissions office tweeted out that it would accept GRE scores once its next admissions cycle opens on Oct. 1. There isn't much information on the school's website, other than a clarification that it wants to see each of the applicant's GRE scores earned in the previous five years—a bid to maintain parity between those applying with LSAT scores.

Since we know the legal profession is obsessed with prestige, here's a stat that is bound to raise some eyebrows: Eight of U.S. News & World Report's top 10 law schools now accept GRE scores. (This is a little confusing because there are actually 12 schools in the top 10, thanks for a three-way tie at No. 10.) The holdouts are Stanford Law School; the University of Michigan Law School; Duke Law School; and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. If you extend that out to the much-discussed T-14 schools, we're at 10 of 14 accepting the GRE—edging up to three-quarters. Harvard became the first elite school to accept the GRE, in 2017.

My thoughts: While it's an interesting development, Yale's embrace of the GRE isn't going to create a sea change the way Harvard's did two years ago. (Harvard was the second to accept GRE scores, after the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law.)

There's a few reasons for that. As I pointed out earlier, the GRE horse left the barn a long time ago. Most top schools have already come around so there isn't much change left to spur. Second, Yale has always played in its own sandbox.It's a unique school with unique aims and a pretty small, eclectic student body. For better or worse, I just don't see other campuses rushing to emulate Yale in many ways, because it exists largely in its own sphere. And for the most part, the schools that aren't accepting the GRE are clustered in the middle and bottom of the law school rankings—which means they have even less common ground with elite Yale.

When you think about it, it makes sense that the top schools have been quicker to sign on to the GRE. They have lower acceptance rates and can afford to be picky about who they let in the door. That is—they'll be sure that anyone who gets in with a GRE score will also have other strong credentials and will be likely to thrive. But many lower-tier schools don't have the luxury of being so selective—thus accepting the GRE is a riskier prospect. We don't have any data thus far on how GRE scores compare with LSAT scores when correlated to, say, bar pass rates or law school completion rates. So if I'm the dean of a struggling law school, I'd think long and hard about what accepting the GRE could mean for my all-important bar pass rate, or even my academic attrition rate. 

Even with so many schools now accepting the GRE, the percentage of people getting in with the alternative exam is miniscule. That means it will be quite a while until we have robust data on how they fared. This is still very much a movement in its infancy.

Extra Credit Reading

Penn law professor Amy Wax took center stage last week, with dean Ted Rugercondemning her recent comments on immigration as racists and thrusting the school into a debate over campus free speech.

Would be law students seem fairly pleased with the new digital LSAT. The exam earned high marks from test takers for its technology, gripes about the stylus notwithstanding.

The State Bar of California released the topics of the upcoming bar exam essay questions to all takers over the weekend, apparently in an effort to level the playing field after accidentally disclosing the topics to some law deans.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]