Arizona Summit Law School sues the American Bar Association, claiming ABA accreditors treated it unfairly: Showdown in "Death Valley"

Earlier this month, Arizona Summit Law School sued the American Bar Association after the ABA's accreditors put the school on probation. Don Lively, Arizona Summit's president, claims the ABA's accrediting standards are "vague, indeterminate, and subject to manipulation"; and Penny Wilrich, the law school's interim dean, accused the ABA of creating a "false narrative" about the school.

False narrative? Without a doubt, Arizona Summit is a lousy law school. Last February, only one out of five Arizona Summit graduates passed the Arizona bar exam (25 out of 126 test takers).  Among repeat exam takers, only one out of seven passed it (11 out of 81).

And Arizona Summit is an expensive school to attend. According to Law School Transparency, the total non-discounted cost of getting a JD degree from this crummy law school is $248,000. Wow! A quarter of a million dollars buys a graduate a one-in-five shot of passing the Arizona bar exam.

No wonder one student thinks the school is misnamed. "It's not a summit," the student observed. "It's Death Valley."

Arizona Summit is one of three law schools owned by a for-profit company named Infilaw, and all three schools have sued the ABA claiming they were treated unfairly. I gather the law schools' main argument is that other law schools are even crappier and the ABA isn't sanctioning them.

Unfortunately, the Infilaw schools may be right. Law School Transparency's reports on law-school quality consistently show a number of schools with very low admission standards and poor pass rates on bar exams--including some historically black law schools.  ABA may find it hard to explain why it is sanctioning the for-profit law schools and not the HBCU law schools.

Without a doubt, legal education is in shambles. Inferior law schools are charging students obscene tuition rates and graduating too many students who cannot pass their bar exams.

But the solution is not for the ABA to ease up on regulating dodgy schools, which is what the Infilaw schools apparently want it to do. On the contrary, the ABA needs to crack down harder. In my estimation, at least 20 law schools should be closed.

References

Arizona Supreme Court. February 2018 Examination Results.

Anne Ryman. Arizona Summit Law School sues American Bar Association, claims abuse of power. The Republic, May 24, 2018.

Staci Zaretsky. Law School Completely Wrecks State's Bar Exam Pass Rate, As Usual. Above the Law, May 15, 2018.

The Rooster Bar: Why Won't the ABA Shut Down Bottom-Tier For-Profit Law Schools ?

John Grisham's latest novel, titled The Rooster Bar, tells the story of Mark Frazier, a law student who attends a for-profit institution called Foggy Bottom Law School. By the time he is a senior, Mark has accumulated $195,000 in student loans and concludes he made a bad investment.

FBLS's bar pass rates are embarrassing low, and few of its graduates obtains jobs that justify their enormous student-loan debt. By the time FBLS students are seniors, their morale has plummeted, and some even spare verbally with their professors in class. In fact:

To varying degrees, almost everyone Mark knew believed that (1) FBLS was a sub-par law school that (2) made too many promises, and (3) charged too much money, and (4) encouraged too much debt while (5) admitting a lot of mediocre students who really had no business in law school, and (6) were either not properly prepared for the bar exam or (7) to dumb to pass it.

Foggy Bottom Law School is a fictional for-profit law school, but it closely resembles the real ones. Infilaw, owned by an equity group out of Chicago, runs three for profit law schools; and all three are in trouble. Charlotte School of Law closed in August after it lost its license to operate. Arizona Summit Law School was placed on probation last March by the American Bar Association, and the ABA warned Florida Coastal School of Law in October that it was "significantly out of compliance" with the ABA's accreditation standards.

Not surprisingly, Infilaw wants to sell its two law schools that are still open. But why did the American Bar Association ever accredit these schools in the first place? The answer is illusive, but here is a key fact. In the 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, the U.S. Justice Department sued the ABA, claiming it was in violation of federal antitrust laws.  The suit was settled in 1996, and the ABA agreed not to deny accreditation to a law school solely because it was a for-profit entity.

That same year, a law professor named Don Lively started Florida Coastal Law School in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2004, Lively sold out to Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sterling created Infilaw as a holding company for the law schools and lined up additional investors, allegedly including Harvard University's endowment fund.

By almost any measure, all three Infilaw law schools are sub-par institutions. If you want to see the data, visit Law School Transparency's web site.  All three schools charge high tuition rates similar to reputable law schools like Harvard and Yale. Yet these three schools have low bar pass rates and very few graduates find law jobs that justify the enormous student-loan debt they accumulated to get their law degrees.

The for-profit advocates say schools like the Infilaw trio offer opportunities to minority students who are often rejected by reputable schools because of mediocre undergraduate GPAs and low LSAT scores. But the top-tier schools bend over backward to attract minority students and have plenty of scholarship money to recruit them. Too often the people who enroll at for-profit law schools are not academically prepared to study law and often fail their bar exams.

As has been often reported in the media, the job market for recent law graduates is terrible; and the bottom-tier law schools are producing lawyers who run a high risk of failing the bar while facing dismal job prospects.

In short, the integrity of legal education has been seriously undermined by a herd of poor-quality law schools, including the Infilaw schools and several public law schools as well.  Apparently, even Harvard University contributed to this train wreck, although Harvard wouldn't confirm that its endowment fund invested in Infilaw's schools.

The American Bar Association is primarily responsible for this disaster, but is it taking steps to shut down the bottom-feeding law schools? No it is not. In fact, the ABA is considering a measure that would allow law schools to make LSAT scores an optional criteria for law school admission. The purpose of that action, perhaps, is to make it harder to measure just how low some law schools' admission standards really are.

References

John Grisham. The Rooster Bar. New York: Doubleday, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum. ABA Backs Testing Choices on law Admissions, Inside Higher Ed, November 7, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum. Report: For-Profit Looking to Sell 2 Law Schools. Inside Higher Ed, November 29, 2017.

Josh Mitchell. The Rise and Fall of a Law School Empire Fueled by Student Loans. Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2017.

Law School Transparency web site.

Angela Morris. GRE or LSAT? ABA Council's Latest Move Could Nix Tests Altogether. Law.com, November 3, 2017.

United States v. American Bar Association, 934 F. Supp. 435 (D.D.C. 1996).