Top Law Schools

University of La Verne Law school may not have enough funding to stay open. read an article on Law.com earlier and this may be a big hit to the market. Applicants may have one less choice if wanting to study in so cal.

Good.

Agreed w/ cavalier on this. California has a glut of underperforming law schools, and the ABA-accredited SoCal schools that have faced closing recently (Whittier, La Verne, Thomas Jefferson) have been at the back of the pack for years. Perhaps there's a debate to be had about access to the profession, but: (1) UoLV has a poor job placement record recently, so it doesn't provide much access as is; and (2) California's bar policies allow students who can't access schools like UCLA and USC a long list of alternatives to ABA-accredited law school.

decimalsanddollars wrote:(2) California's bar policies allow students who can't access schools like UCLA and USC a long list of alternatives to ABA-accredited law school.

Frankly California isn't doing any 0L any favors by allowing that "long list of alternatives to ABA-accredited law school". If you're Kim Kardashian, sure, you don't need a J.D. from an ABA-accredited school (or, even, any J.D. at all). But for Joe Schmoe, paying tuition dollars to a non-ABA-accredited law school is such a bad decision it ought to be banned by the state (as the lion's share of the other U.S. states already do) in the name of consumer welfare.

And, in any case, it's not like there aren't a number of good and decent law schools in California in between UCLA/USC and places like La Verne or TJ. There's, off the top of my head, Davis, Irvine, Loyola, Pepperdine, USD, Santa Clara, Hastings (not in any particular order). Add in Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and USC and that's at least eleven great/good/decent law schools in a single state (and keep in mind California residents, of course, aren't limited to attending law school in CA).

QContinuum wrote:

decimalsanddollars wrote:(2) California's bar policies allow students who can't access schools like UCLA and USC a long list of alternatives to ABA-accredited law school.

Frankly California isn't doing any 0L any favors by allowing that "long list of alternatives to ABA-accredited law school". If you're Kim Kardashian, sure, you don't need a J.D. from an ABA-accredited school (or, even, any J.D. at all). But for Joe Schmoe, paying tuition dollars to a non-ABA-accredited law school is such a bad decision it ought to be banned by the state (as the lion's share of the other U.S. states already do) in the name of consumer welfare.

And, in any case, it's not like there aren't a number of good and decent law schools in California in between UCLA/USC and places like La Verne or TJ. There's, off the top of my head, Davis, Irvine, Loyola, Pepperdine, USD, Santa Clara, Hastings (not in any particular order). Add in Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and USC and that's at least eleven great/good/decent law schools in a single state (and keep in mind California residents, of course, aren't limited to attending law school in CA).

That said, I'm all in favor of states making it easier to "read the law" by apprenticing. Just not with the attached fees and the atrocious bar passage rates. That path shouldn't be treated as an option solely for those who were too incompetent to get a passingly decent LSAT.

cavalier1138 wrote:That said, I'm all in favor of states making it easier to "read the law" by apprenticing. Just not with the attached fees and the atrocious bar passage rates. That path shouldn't be treated as an option solely for those who were too incompetent to get a passingly decent LSAT.

Agree. I'm all in favor of "reading the law", which after all is how people traditionally became lawyers before the ABA came on the scene. I'm not in favor of ruinously expensive law schools that provide their students with lousy employment outcomes.