AALS Opposes Proposed Revision to ABA Standard on Use of Part-Time Faculty After First Year of Law School

AALS Opposes Proposed Revision to ABA Standard on Use of Part-Time Faculty After First Year of Law School

News Release
Contact:
Jim Greif
[email protected]
(202) 296-1593

 

AALS Opposes Proposed Revision to ABA Standard on
Use of Part-Time Faculty After First Year of Law School

 

Law students likely to experience diminished access to faculty, assessment, and engagement under the revision.


 Washington, D.C. (August 3, 2017) – The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) submitted the following comment to the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar on the proposed revision to ABA Standard 403(a):
 

We write as the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools to express our opposition to the proposed revision to ABA Standard 403(a). The proposal would eliminate any restriction on using part-time faculty to teach after the first year of law school. In fact, as written, the new version of Standard 403(a) would permit more than two-thirds of all law school instruction to be provided by part-time faculty.

Full-time faculty are essential to providing quality professional legal education. Part-time law teachers enrich the curriculum, to be sure. Nonetheless, they cannot substitute for the focus of full-time faulty on teaching, availability to students, curriculum design and assessment, scholarship, and sustained engagement for educating professionals for the multiple roles they will play as lawyers and leaders.

A key distinction between ABA accredited and unaccredited law schools has been the role of full-time faculty. ABA accreditation has carried with it an imprimatur of quality that state supreme courts rely on. If the proposed change is enacted, this difference will erode, accompanied by a corresponding diminution in the significance of accreditation, and of quality in legal education.

We, of course, share the desire to facilitate innovations in legal education, especially those that will help law schools reduce their costs, but we respectfully suggest that not everything that is less expensive should be considered an “innovation.” Some changes are cheaper because they produce lower quality.

 

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About AALS
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS), founded in 1900, is a nonprofit association of 179 law schools. Its members enroll most of the nation’s law students and produce the majority of the country’s lawyers and judges, as well as many of its lawmakers. The mission of AALS is to uphold and advance excellence in legal education. In support of this mission, AALS promotes the core values of excellence in teaching and scholarship, academic freedom, and diversity, including diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints, while seeking to improve the legal profession, to foster justice, and to serve our many communities–local, national and international.