Study: Law School Grades and Bar Passage Rate Connected
ABA Journal: “Grades in law school do matter, at least as they relate to first-time bar passage, according to a new study.
Released Tuesday by the AccessLex Institute, the study, What Matters for Bar Success: Doctrinal Performance, Coursework Exposure, and First-Time Bar Passage, shows that doctrinal grade-point averages and first-year grade-point averages are more closely linked to bar passage than taking additional credits or specific bar-related courses.
The study was based on 13,115 law graduates from 36 ABA-approved law schools over nine years of bar exams.
Good grades in doctrinal and first-year courses show “substantially stronger associations with bar success” compared to merely taking the class itself, according to the study.
Law schools should note that rather than requiring additional bar-tested courses, offering academic support to strengthen students’ core reasoning and writing skills, helping students succeed in the types of classes that impact bar passage, and advising students to focus on academic performance and mastery of course material rather than taking additional credits should be the focus of advising.”
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Columbia University Law School
Columbia Law Boosts AI Education With New Initiative
Columbia Spectator: “The Law School announced a new initiative Wednesday designed to improve the integration of AI into students’ experiences.
The initiative, AI @ CLS, consolidates existing efforts to incorporate AI into the school’s curriculum and resources with a set of new programs, including the introduction of new faculty, academic courses, and AI tools, supported by a partnership with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a prominent global law firm.
“AI presents an extraordinary opportunity to bridge our proud tradition of rigorous, theoretical education with the realities of modern legal practice,” Daniel Abebe, dean of the Law School and Lucy G. Moses professor of law, said in a press release announcing the initiative.”
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University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
U.S. Supreme Court Lets UC Law San Francisco Name Change Stand
SF News: “The US Supreme Court declined Monday to review the case brought by six descendants of Serranus Hastings and a group of alumni of the UC law school arguing that the state violated its own law in stripping the Hastings name from the school three years ago.
Around 170 years ago, Serranus Clinton Hastings prompted and organized state-sponsored, military-style Indian “hunting” expeditions in California, expeditions that led to the genocide of people in order to take their land from them — and it was this very land that led to Hastings’s own fortune. This all was laid out in a Chronicle op-ed nearly a decade ago, which lead directly to a New York Times exposé on Hastings four years later, noting that California’s first chief justice and the namesake of Kamala Harris’s own alma mater was the mastermind of a genocide.
In multiple campaigns, at Hastings’ behest, hundreds of members of the Yuki tribe in California’s Round Valley, including children, were massacred, largely just so that Hastings and others could profit from the land. And in 1878, now a wealthy man, Hastings donated $100,000 in gold coins to establish the University of California school of law. The state of California established the school through legislation, saying that it would “forever” bear the name of Hastings.
But legislators wrote a new law repealing that one, which took effect in 2023, and since then, the school has been known (somewhat awkwardly) as UC Law San Francisco.
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