Students interested in becoming Supreme Court advocates have always been well trained at Harvard, Yale and DC-area law schools. However, a new analysis of the lawyers whose appellate petitions are most often accepted for review puts Stanford on top.
Villanova Law School has become one of nearly 30 law schools to change its name to honor a major donor. Charles Widger, the founder of Brinker Capital and a 1973 graduate of the school, recently pledged $25M.
Brigham Young University Law School is under investigation for discrimination against LGBT students and professors, according to a report in The Salt Lake City Tribune. The school, owned by the Church of Latter Day Saints, is accused of expelling students who live in same-sex relationships or who leave the Mormon faith.
Teaching future lawyers a strategy that they can adapt to a variety of cases is Wes Porter’s mission as director of the Golden Gate University School of Law’s litigation center. Although the San Francisco law school has emphasized litigation for decades, the center that began when Porter started six years ago brings under one umbrella a coordinated panorama of doctrinal courses, extracurricular programs and real-world training to prepare future trial lawyers for the courtroom.
It seems fitting that a lawyer who litigated for the future of civil rights in the U.S. should now be working to remedy civil rights injustices of the past. Margaret A. Burnham, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, founded and directs the school’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which engages students in investigating every racial killing in the Jim Crow South from 1930 through 1970. The program’s goal is to work with victims’ families and communities to bring these cases to a just close. “We want to draw current meaning from this legacy of racial violence, which often involved local officials and the police,” Burnham said.
Mark Gordon, who becomes dean of William Mitchell College of Law on July 1, credits former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo with convincing him to go to law school. Gordon, who worked as an aide to Cuomo in Albany in the mid-1980s, is currently president of Defiance College in Ohio, where he has boosted freshman enrollment and completed a $26 million capital campaign.
Gillian Lester, Columbia Law School’s 15th dean, arrives as law schools nationwide grapple with sliding enrollment and an over saturated job market. Equipped with first-hand experience in academic leadership — she was formerly the acting dean at University of California-Berkeley Law — she will help Columbia flourish “at a time of great challenge and opportunity,” the university’s president said.
The first-year class at U.S. law schools last fall shrank the least since numbers began dropping three years ago, amid improving U.S. economic growth and speculation that waning enrollment combined with retiring baby boomers would lead to a shortage of attorneys. Altogether, 37,924 students began working toward juris doctorate degrees at the 204 institutions accredited by the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the government-designated regulator for law schools. That marked a 4.4 percent drop from the previous year and a 28 percent slide since the historic high of 52,488 in 2010.
The largest drop in bar exam scores in almost 40 years has virtually everyone involved asking whether it occurred because of the test or the test-takers. A group of law school deans has asked the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which administers the test, to turn over its data for an independent expert examination. The 83-year-old not-for-profit is conducting its own review in the meantime, but has so far found nothing to indicate the exam, given in July, was flawed.
Concordia University School of Law’s request for provisional accreditation, which would allow degree-holders to take the bar exam anywhere in the U.S., will be considered at an American Bar Association meeting almost a month after scheduled commencement ceremonies for its first graduating class.