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 taking a closer look at the tumultuous world of California's law schools and whether we are poised to see an exodus from ABA accreditation among those campuses. Next up is a new study from a trio of professors at Roger Williams University focused on whether law students who take notes by hand get better grades.

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

 

 

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ABA-Accredited Law Schools in CA: An Endangered Species?

Last week was newsy one on the law school beat. There was the (temporary) return of "Penn Law"; the revelation that Confederate General Robert E. Lee's portrait actually appears on law school diplomas in 2019 (!!!); and Berkeley Law's John Yoo was back in the news after tangling with a key witness in the impeachment hearings.

But the thing that has really got me thinking is the fact California is losing not one but two ABA-accredited law schools. (Well, three if you take a more expansive view of the issue.) It makes me wonder if we're going to see a larger defection from the ABA among the Golden State's lower performing law schools, given that they can operate as California-accredited schools without having to meet the ABA's more-stringent standards. Schools in California are pretty much the only ones with the state accreditation option.

Think about this: The number of law schools in the Golden State was pretty evenly split between ABA-accredited and California-accredited for a long time. (I'm not going to delve into the state's unaccredited law schools, which is a whole different can of worms.) But with these upcoming changes, the number of law schools approved by the ABA will drop to 18 while the number of state-accredited schools will climb to 23. (That figure is a little loose, depending on how you count branch campuses.) That's a notable shift, given that ABA-accreditation is considered the gold standard in legal education. So how did we get here? Here's a quick recap.

➤➤In 2017, university officials decided to shut down Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa amid enrollment declines, financial challenges, and bar passage woes. The school's final class of students will graduate this spring, and that will mark the end of the 53-year-old school.

➤➤On Nov. 18, trustees at La Verne University in Ontario, Calif.—in the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles—voted to convert its ABA-accredited law school into a California-accredited campus. The school has struggled with its bar passage rate, and officials said the change will enable to campus to stay strong while also being financially stable. (Translation: It costs too much to meet the ABA's higher standards.)

➤➤On Nov. 21, the ABA announced that it's pulling accreditation from San Diego's Thomas Jefferson School of Law on Dec. 17—the culmination of years of problems centered on the school's finances, admissions, governance, and educational program. I won't detail everything that went wrong for Thomas Jefferson, but you can read more about it here. Like La Verne, Thomas Jefferson plans to remain open as a California-accredited school.

I think this move away from ABA law schools in California is the result of a number of factors. The most obvious is that there aren't as many people going to law schools these days and the model isn't a money generator the way it was 10 years ago. Then you've got two related things happening at the ABA level. The accreditor began to crack down on underperforming schools around 2016 after getting hammered by critics and the U.S. Department of Education for its lax oversight. (See: Thomas Jefferson.) Then last year, the ABA adopted a tougher bar passage standard which gives law schools just two years to ensure at least 75% of its graduates pass the bar exam instead of the previous five. Officials at La Verne cited the new standard as one key reason its law school is moving away from ABA accreditation. So the big question, to me, is whether other ABA law schools that are further down the California food chain will follow suit and ditch their ABA status. Are Thomas Jefferson and La Verne the ice breakers that will make it more palatable for other campuses to go that route?

My thoughts: That answer to that question, I hope, is no. The fact is that ABA-accredited law schools—due to the nature of having to meet higher standards—on the whole deliver better results for their students. Nothing stuck out more to me during the course of reporting these stories than this statistic: Just 26% of first-time bar takers from California-accredited schools passed the state's licensing exam in July of 2019. Among graduates of ABA-accredited law schools, that figure was 71%. That's a huge difference, and frankly that discrepancy that would frighten me if I were considering attending a California-accredited law school.

Do some graduates of those California-accredited law schools pass the bar and go on to successful law careers? Of course. And California-accredited law schools tend to serve more diverse students populations than their ABA-accredited counterparts. But I doubt the state needs more such schools, and I hope last week turns out to be an odd coincidence and not the beginning of a larger trend.

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Take Note: Maybe Ditch the Laptop in Class

I've written a number of stories over the years looking at laptop bans in the law school classroom, which are the subject of rich debate. Several studies have focused on whether or not laptops are distractions during class time. But a new article in the Journal of Legal Education caught my eye, because it drills down on a related topic: Do law students who take notes by hand do better in class than those who take notes on the computer?

It's an important question, because the laptop ban debate shouldn't just be about whether or not students are spending too much time on Instagram while in class. It should also take into account the best methods for learning. Enter a trio of professors from Roger Williams University, two from the law school plus a mathematician with their article, "Note-Taking Mode and Academic Performance in Two Law School Courses." They analyzed the grades of students in two required second-year courses (constitutional law and evidence) to see if there was a difference between those who took notes by hand and those who used computers. Prior studies in other academic settings have shown a relationship between taking notes by hand and better academic performance, but it had never been looked at before in law school. Students got to choose their note-taking method, and 67 of the 113 in the study opted to use laptops. Some students were given a memo at the beginning of the course strongly suggesting they take notes by hand, while others were not given that memo.

So what did the researchers find? The students who took notes by hand did, indeed, get higher grades. That difference largely held true even when the researchers controlled for the LSAT scores of the students in the study sample.

"Handwriters, whether in the Memo or Non-Memo group, outperformed laptop users in every LSAT quartile," the article reads. "Moreover, in the Memo group, handwriters in the top two LSAT quartiles drastically outperformed laptop users, outgaining laptop users by approximately one grade position (e.g., B to B+)."

Does this mean that laptop bans are the way to go? The authors don't quite go that far, but they note the need for larger-scale studies to gather more data.

"This study meaningfully contributes to the ongoing discussion about whether computer usage in the higher education classroom might be hindering academic performance and, in particular, performance on essay exams requiring conceptual applications," it reads. "Future studies on note-taking mode and academic performance in the law school setting, with larger sample sizes covering multiple semesters, would be illuminating—not only to test the generalizability of our results, but to challenge the trend of student laptop use in the law school classroom."

Extra Credit Reading

Law students across the country on Nov. 20 took on the so-called Tampon Tax, filing tax refund claims in states that levy taxes on menstrual products.

There are about 200 law-themed high schools in the United States, and a new network aims to help them collaborate and for law schools to recruit diverse students.

How two students from Yale Law School prevailed at trial before even collecting their J.D.s.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here. 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]