Early each January, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), a national organization that promotes interaction and shared values among law schools, especially with regard to faculty scholarship, hiring, and governance, holds its annual meeting. While the timing of the meeting (shortly after New Year’s Day) may not be convenient for all law professors (given family obligations, etc.), as a dean I have made it a point to attend each year, and I am always better informed about some important developments in legal education.
At last week’s annual meeting, there were two issues about which I was particularly happy to learn more and talk to other deans. The first issue concerns the GRE scores that an increasing number of law schools are allowing some applicants to submit in lieu of LSAT scores. The two big takeaways for me on this topic were: (1) notwithstanding that around three dozen law schools are making some use of the GRE, there remains considerable uncertainty about precisely what a school must demonstrate in order to accept GRE scores instead of LSAT scores and yet remain in compliance with ABA accreditation standards, which currently as a general rule mandate each school to “require each applicant for admission as a first-year J.D. degree student to take a valid and reliable admission test to assist the school and the applicant in assessing the applicant’s capability of satisfactorily completing the school’s program of legal education.” Last year a proposal to eliminate this ABA requirement of use of a “valid and reliable admission test” failed to win passage, and the question that plagues schools is exactly what kind of evidence adequately demonstrates that the GRE is a “valid and reliable” test for that particular school and its student body. Need a law school conduct a rigorous study of its own applicant pool and student body, or may a school rely on studies that have been done on other, perhaps similar, law schools? Many, if not most, of the nation’s 200 or so ABA-approved schools are still awaiting clear answers to these kinds of questions; (2) In the meantime, and this is perhaps surprising given the amount of media attention the GRE issue has garnered, the number of law entering law students enrolled these days who did not submit an LSAT score is extremely small, fewer than 150 nationally each year. That works out to under one student for each ABA-approved law school’s entering class. And note that even before the recent GRE discussion, some law schools had received, based on special circumstances, variances from the ABA that permitted them to enroll some students who lacked LSAT scores. So there has been no significant erosion yet in the dominance of the LSAT in law school admissions. To be sure, if the uncertainty about how to establish that tests other than the LSAT are “valid and reliable” were removed, the number of enrolled law students who don’t submit LSAT scores would likely rise, but the message for the overwhelming majority of pre-law students today remains clear: if you want to go to law school, best to take and do well on the LSAT.
The second issue, about which I had not heard much before last week’s meeting because the developments have been so recent, concerns another topic that, like admissions, has been challenging for many law schools in recent years — placement of law students into jobs. Like the AALS, the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) is a national organization that has sought to develop and promote best practices, this time concerning the way law schools and legal employers operate in the realm of entry-level legal placement and recruitment. Among the things that NALP has done over the years is to identify fair and ethical timelines regarding, for example, when law schools should begin formally counselling students on their job searches and how long employers should keep job offers open. But about three weeks ago, NALP announced significant changes in the kind guidance it will offer to schools and employers. As NALP put it, “[r]ecognizing that [our] member organizations are diverse and their needs are varied, we have grown past ‘one size fits all’ standards.” Accordingly, NALP has renamed it “Principles and Standards for Law Placement and Recruitment Activities,” to “NALP Principles for a Fair and Ethical Recruitment Process (Principles),” and abandoned “uniformity” in favor or “a standard of reasonableness that provides all members the flexibility necessary to innovate and thrive in an evolving marketplace.”
“Most notably,” NALP goes on to say, the “Timing Guidelines [which before set particular dates and time intervals for everyone to aspire to] have been replaced by guidelines that emphasize reasonableness. Specifically, the 28-day period during which offers for summer and permanent employment should remain open has been eliminated, and the October 15 and December 1 timing guidelines for advising and recruiting first-year students have been eliminated. The former interpretations have been retired and will be replaced by a set of shorter, more concise, frequently asked questions that we anticipate will grow over time.”
Perhaps NALP’s decision here was influenced by the prospect that their prior standards and specific guidelines, which virtually all schools and employers heeded, might, in the eyes of some federal regulators, have been seen as raising antitrust concerns. NALP has not said as much, but instead simply explained that it was adopting the “changes in accord with its fiduciary duty to the association and to support flexibility and encourage innovation.”
Whatever the motivation, NALP’s decision to eliminate specific timing guidelines might affect law students and law schools significantly. For example, some students who seek to explore public interest career options alongside law firm jobs might have benefited by NALP’s recommendation to law firms to keep permanent employment offers open for a significant period of time, given that many public interest organizations may make their offers a bit later in the yearly cycle. We will have to see how law schools, legal employers, and law students decide to proceed with NALP having pulled back a bit from its historical role.
Vikram Amar is the Dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, where he also serves the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law. His primary fields of teaching and study are constitutional law, federal courts, and civil and criminal procedure. A fuller bio and CV can be found at https://www.law.illinois.edu/faculty/profile/VikramAmar, and he can be reached at amar@illinois.edu.
First Monday Musings by Dean Vik Amar: A Few Interesting Topics At The January 2018 AALS Meeting curated from Above the Law
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