Back in the 1990s, the ABA got slapped across the mouth by the Justice Department for engaging in all sorts of anti-competitive practices, like mandating that every professor work no more than 3 hours a day, get summers and alternating semesters off, and have access to no fewer than three adorable puppies twice a week. The DoJ filed suit, and the ABA folded and entered into a consent decree that would govern their actions for the next ten years.

Among the new regulations were rules that the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the Accreditation Committee, and the Standards Review Committee would be composed of no more than 50% deans and professors. It's a pretty good rule. You do need deans and profs on these committees, because they bring important insight and expertise to the whole legal education thing, but the consent decree wanted to make sure that there wasn't regulatory capture.

So, years after the consent decree stopped being in force, what happened to the composition of these three bodies?

Section of Legal Education

Kent Syverud - Dean, Washington University School of Law

Solomon Oliver, Jr. - Chief Judge, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio [Also professor from 1982-1994 at Cleveland Marshall College of Law, and associate dean there from 1991-1994]

Joan Howland - Associate Dean and Professor, University of Minnesota Law School

Raymond C. Pierce - Partner, Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP [Also dean of NCCU from 2005-2012]

John F. O'Brien - Dean, New England Law|Boston

Jane H. Aiken - Professor and Director of the Community Justice Project, Georgetown University Law Center

Rebecca White Berch - Chief Justice, Arizona Supreme Court [Also Director of the Legal Writing Program at Arizona State from 1986-1991 and 1994-1995]

Leo A. Brooks - Retired Army General, and formerly assistant professor of military science at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio

Paulette Brown - Partner and Chief Diversity Officer, Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP

Edwin J. Butterfoss - Associate Dean and Professor, Hamline University Law School

Michael J. Davis - Professor, University of Kansas School of Law

Antonio García-Padilla - Dean Emeritus and Professor, University of Puerto Rico School of Law

Tracy Allen Giles, Esq. - Partner, Giles & Lambert, P.C.

James M. Klein - Distinguished Visiting Professor, Charleston School of Law

Cynthia Nance - Dean Emeritus & Nathan G. Gordon Professor of Law, University of Arkansas School of Law (Fayetteville),

Jequita H. Napoli - Special Judge, Cleveland County District Court, Norman, Oklahoma

Gregory G. Murphy - Attorney, Billings, Montana

Maureen A. O’Rourke - Dean, Boston University School of Law

Erika Robinson - Law Student Division Member, University of South Carolina School of Law, J.D. Candidate, 2013

Morgan T. Sammons - Dean, California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University

Edward N. Tucker - CPA/ABV, Ellin & Tucker

Total

Current law profs/deans: 11

Former law profs/deans: 3

Non-law profs: 2

Other: 6

Being generous to the ABA, the Section is 50% law profs and deans. But, counting current and former law profs we get 64%.

The Accreditation Committee is 9 current law profs and deans, 2 former, 3 non-law professors, and 5 others. So, 47% current, and 58% current and former.

For the Standards Review Committee, things are even worse. 8 current law profs and deans, 1 former, 1 non-law professor, and 4 others. 57% current profs, and 64% current and former. And two of those non-professors hold executive offices at universities that have a law school. So if you want to count current profs, former profs, and others with a direct interest in law schools, we're up to 79%.

Anyone who's ever studied corporate governance will know that it doesn't even take 50% of the votes to have control. 50% means that the rest of the people in the room need to be a united front against you, which is rare, and you can effectively exercise control with a pretty small voting block. Not that professors are necessarily a united front, but when proposals are on the table that will slash their pay and result in massive layoffs (such as reducing law school to a 2 year program) you can bet that the Department of Justice was right not trust professors to govern themselves.

Small Drink

Fair deal / Fair shake / Fair play (drink for any)

Assault weapon

Newtown

Our children

Brothers and sisters

Deficit

An impediment to voting not explicitly attributed to willful voter suppression

Israel

God

Big Drink

Magazine capacity

Newtown (pronounced "Newton")

Republican party

His children

Stonewall

Deficit (as less than 1 trillion)

Detroit

Syria

Any reference to voter intimidation/suppression

Reference to non-Christian Americans

Shot

Fair deal / Fair shake / Fair play (all three within 1 minute)

AR-15

Machine gun ban

Imminent threat

Reference to atheist or agnostic Americans

"The state of our/the Union is strong."

Drink until you pass out and wake up back in reality

Extrajudicial targeted killing of American citizens without due process

Flying Spaghetti Monster / Bertrand Russel's tea cup / Acknowledging that the invisible sky dictator is fake and a ridiculous basis for forming national policy

Sputnik moment

Last week, the ABA held its mid-year meeting in Dallas, and one of the big events was the meeting of the Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. During the period when about 15 speakers testified, two themes continued to come up (in addition to the overall theme that the cost of tuition is too damn high): the third year is useless and experiential education is awesome.

That the third year is useless should be a no-brainer. Of course professors defend it, but there's the no brain element...

The third year is plainly useless because there are absolutely no guidelines for what it must contain. Aside from professional responsibility and con law, there's really nothing mandated for students outside of the 1L curriculum. You can spend your third year doing clinics, taking black letter law classes, or you can fill it with nothing but Law and Literature, Law and Film, Feminist Jurisprudence, Animal Rights, and What the Jews are Supposed to do About the Gentiles.

The question facing the ABA now is whether to allow schools to ditch the third year, but the professors who want to protect their incomes and who have a great deal of influence over the ABA are likely to not let it happen. So now the question is passed to the schools: how to make the third year valuable.

The answer that keeps coming up is experiential learning, and specifically externships. And here comes the new ripoff.

Are externships (and don't ask us how they differ from internships) valuable to students? We're willing to give that an unqualified Yes. It's probably the most valuable thing you can do in law school. The problem is the cost model.

Externships are cheap, but they're not free. There are some administrative overhead costs, such as having a staff to help students get placed into programs. It's cheaper than a full-time tenured professor though. The problem is that schools are likely to keep both. They'll offer externships and still keep all their other classes, despite those other classes having much lower demand because students are spending their time elsewhere. So, we get this great new low-cost model for filling out the third year, and it ends up increasing the cost of operating a law school.

And just to make matters worse, students still pay the same amount of tuition.

Many undergraduate programs have already figured out this scam. They require 6+ hours of internship credits, place the entire responsibility for finding an internship on the students, and then charge them the full rate of tuition for a class that costs the school nothing. Watch for this coming to a law school near you. Half the third year will be externships, students will still pay the full price, and professors will find their class sizes cut in half, leaving them with a more enjoyable work environment and many fewer papers and exams to grade.

As far as the schools are concerned, it's win-win. As for the students? Whatever, they can just go on government welfare to pay off their loans.

Last week a California judge issued a preliminary injunction on enforcement of a bill that would ban the LSAC from reporting to law schools when LSAT test takers received extra time on the exam.

At the risk of being redundant, this kind of reporting, often called flagging, is not new for the LSAC.  It’s business as usual. When an applicant receives extra time for the LSAT, the LSAC already sends a statement along with the applicant’s score “advising that the applicants score(s) should be interpreted with great sensitivity and flexibility.”

This is something that test takers seeking this accommodation are aware of when they apply for the accommodation; it’s all located on the same page, with clever headings like “additional considerations.”

The injunction was issued in large part because the law banning flagging directly targeted the LSAC: no other standardized testing organization was mentioned (not even the organization that administers the MCAT, which also flags scores).

The singling out of the LSAC aside, there’s a pretty reasonable argument on behalf of continuing to flag LSAT scores. While the specifics aren’t uniform across the spectrum, law school grades are at least in part graded on a curve, meaning students are constantly compared to one another for purposes of determining grades.

The LSAT is not much different, nor should it be. If you buy into the argument that the LSAT is a good indicator of law school success – and law schools do – then maintaining the integrity of the LSAT “curve” is critical to the accuracy of the score.

Sure, there’s the argument that flagging isolates test takers who receive extra time, and that’s correct. But the LSAT, just like law school and much of legal practice is a competition, and if you’re competing under a different set of rules then the people evaluating you based on your score ought to know. In fact, if you’re taking the LSAT with extra time, you’re not just taking it with different rules – the time pressure is essential to the LSAT, so you’re really taking a materially different exam. Harder to argue that this fact shouldn’t be disclosed.

And it’s even harder to argue that you’re being harmed by the disclosure. Law schools are incredibly liberal institutions and aren’t exactly known for discriminating against people with disabilities. Besides, schools really only care about LSAT numbers for reporting to US News and improving their rank, so they don’t care how you got your score so long as it raises their median.

If you’re worried about being treated differently because of your disability, there’s a very easy solution. Just don’t request extra time. If you want to be treated the same, then really be treated the same. Or even better, you can just not take the LSAT, avoid law school, and go do something productive with your life instead. Sure beats complaining that your masochistic career goals aren’t accommodating enough.