Comments on Texas and Florida Courts Studying Continued Reliance on the ABA Law School Accreditation Process
I submitted comments today to the Texas Supreme Court and a Florida Supreme Court Work Group on the question of whether the bar admissions process in those jurisdictions should continue to require graduation from an ABA-approved law school as a condition of eligibility to sit for the bar examination and for admission to practice in the state. The comments are attached below.
I do not know of other state courts that are considering this question, but one would have to believe that there are or will be others. As I asseted in an earlier post, the argument for some sort of national system is compelling. As I suggested in another post, it is important to have the conversation about the need for reforms in this area, wherever that may lead.
If nothing else, if the Council’s de facto national legal education regulatory system fragments into a number of pieces, the costs of regulation would significantly increase. Keeping it simple and at a very high level to make the point, if there needed to be one full-time employee in each of 200 law schools and 50 bar admissions office to do all this keeping up and monitoring of what is going on in each law school and in each bar admitting jurisdiction, and that employee cost an average all-in (salary, benefits, space, other expenses for support), of $150,000/year, then the total cost of regulation would be $37.5 million.
From my experience, that is a low estimate of the total cost of a fully fragmented system. Unless the Council budget has changed dramatically in the several years that I have been gone, that cost is several times the Council’s budget. Who will absorb that increased expense? Most likely new lawyers as those costs are passed along in higher law school tuition and bar application fees.
There would be ways for schools and jurisdictions to share these expenses. I have seen a suggestion that like-minded states could enter compacts to recognize each other’s systems, for example. Maybe I would start a service for schools to keep up with changes in the state rules that would spread the costs of monitoring over my client schools! There would be, I am sure, other better ways to address this problem.
At the end of the day, however, as has been the experience with the bar exam where the NCBE emerged as a national solution to limitations on problems of each state maintaining its own bar exam (subjects, question development, grading), one primary system of regulation for law schools, whether at the ABA or elsewhere, would seem to benefit us all.
I hope that the Texas Supreme Court and the Florida Work Group will hear from many of you. This is an important discussion.
