Above the Law takes a deeper look at the American Bar Association’s recently released spreadsheet that tracks the two-year “ultimate bar pass rate” for law school graduates taking the bar exam — this time listing the schools with the worst pass rates.

Before naming the schools on the bottom of the list, senior editor Staci Zaretsky names the three schools at the top, all with 100 percent pass rates: University of Chicago, Concordia and Yale.

Then, way down the list at the very bottom is Arizona Summit with a 50 percent pass rate. The article rounds out the list of the bottom 10.

Read the Above the Law article.

A U.S. district judge has ordered Pepper Hamilton LLP to turn over materials tied to the law firm’s 2015-16 investigation that led Baylor University regents to report the school had fundamentally failed in its Title IX implementation duties, reports the Waco Tribune-Herald.

“The significance is we are continuing to get to the bottom of who, what, where and when in regard to the failures at Baylor,” said Jim Dunnam, a Waco attorney who represent the 15 plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers had filed for a subpoena in March 2017 seeking materials from Pepper Hamilton and in June filed a motion to compel the firm to comply, but the firm did not respond to the request, according to the Tribune-Herald‘s Phillip Ericksen.

Read the Tribune-Herald article.

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A study by U.S. News & World Report reveals that the 11 law schools with the highest scores on the  Law School Admission Test had average median scores of nearly 171.

That score compares with the national average median of 156, based on LSAT scores reported by 192 ranked schools to U.S. News in an annual survey.

Harvard University and Yale University tied for the top median LSAT score, with full-time law students entering in fall 2018 earning a 173 at both institutions, the magazine reports.

Read the U.S. News article.

Defendants in the college admissions cheating scandal case have been turning to Biglaw firms for representation, including Cooley, Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins, Boies Schiller Flexner, and Ropes & Gray.

Bloomberg Law reports that two of the latest hires are Cooley partners Randall R. Lee and William Schwartz, who have been hired by Jane Buckingham, the founder and chief executive of Trendera, a youth marketing consultancy. Prosecutors allege she paid $50,000 for someone to take the ACT college entrance exam in her son’s place.

And Jack W. Pirozzolo, a partner in Sidley Austin’s Boston office, is representing William McGlashan Jr., who worked at private equity firm TPG before being fired in the wake of the scandal.

Read the Bloomberg article.

The American Bar Association this week will take up the issue of poor performing law schools, considering a controversial proposal that would toughen the bar-pass standard for law schools.

“The proposal is likely to be vigorously debated and comes after criticism that the accrediting body has allowed schools to admit too many lower-achieving students who struggle to pass the bar,” predicts an in-depth article on the subject published by USA Today.

“Here’s what could change: Law schools have five years to show 75% of their graduates who take the bar exam have passed. The proposal would narrow that to two years,” the authors explain.

Some critics say the five-year rule has allowed schools to continue operating even with dismal bar-passage rates. “It’s virtually impossible to fail,” says Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency, “although some schools are managing to come close.”

Read the USA Today article.

The Faculty Lounge has studied the American Bar Association’s recently released Standard 509 reports from every accredited law school in the country and drawn some conclusions about which are the least selective.

In the report, David Frakt, who serves as chair of the National Advisory Council for Law School Transparency, writes that 2017 defending champion Western Michigan University Thomas Cooley Law School repeats for 2018, claiming the number 1 spot on the list of bottom 10 schools.

According to his analysis, Cooley enrolled at least 135 students with LSATs at 139 or below, the bottom 12 percent of all LSAT takers.

His article lists the other nine law schools in the bottom-10 list.

Read the Above the Law article.

A new study that ranks law schools by the quality of their overall faculty “team” puts New York University at the top of the list, reports Above the Law.

“It’s not an entirely new concept, but where J.B. Heaton’s project ‘Who Fields the Best Team? A (Better) Measure of the Top Ten U.S. Law Schools by Faculty Impact’ differs from prior stabs at this metric is in focusing on faculty excellence across specialties,” explains editor Joe Patrice. “Most law students don’t walk through the door knowing exactly where their career will take them — the law school with the best experts in a number of different specialties provides students with the best foundation for later success.”

Harvard’s law school takes the number 2 slot on the list.

Read the Above the Law article.

Former Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice and Penn State University general counsel Cynthia Baldwin was cleared Friday of any wrongdoing relative to her representation of university officials during the Jerry Sandusky investigation, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

She had been accused by the Pennsylvania Office of Disciplinary Counsel of violating several of the Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys as she represented Penn State, former PSU president Graham Spanier, and two other administrators while she served as university general counsel from 2010 to 2012, writes reporter Paula Reed Ward.

The case included an alleged conflict in representing the interests of the university as well as the three administrators before the investigating grand jury. All three administrators were convicted of child endangerment stemming from a case which resulted in a former university assistant football coach being convicted of sexually abusing children.

Read the Post-Gazette article.

The American Bar Association has published bar exam pass rates for all law schools in the United States, indicating those rates ranging from 98.58  percent to 26.53 percent.

Above the Law offers some comment on the ratings, along with a peek at the best and worst on the list. (The ABA has made available for downloading an Excel spreadsheet listing all the schools’ rates.)

The University of Chicago Law School tops the list with a first-time pass rate better than 98 percent. At the other end of the scale is the Arizona Summit Law School with a rate of 26.53 percent.

Read the Above the Law article.

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Above the Law has posted a leaked preview of U.S. News & World Report‘s U.S. law school rankings, from Yale University at number one to a six-way tie for spot number 74.

“The biggest winners here were Pepperdine, Denver, Miami, and Villanova, each gaining 12 places in the rankings,” writes Staci Zaretsky. “The biggest losers in this segment of the rankings were Utah and Rutgers, with 10- and 12-spot drops, respectively.”

Rounding out the top five, behind Yale, are Stanford, Harvard, University of Chicago, and Columbia.

The University of California-Berkeley cracked the top 10 by moving up three spots from last year’s list.

Read the Above the Law article.

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Times Higher Education has posted its latest rankings of the world’s 100 top law schools, and five American universities are in the top 10.

Leading the list is Duke University, followed by Stanford and Yale.

The highest ranking non-U.S. law school is the University of Cambridge in the UK, at number 5.

Thirty American law schools made the list, while the United Kingdom had 23. Other countries with schools in the top 100 were Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Read the article.

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In another attempt to change the admissions process at the University of Texas at Austin, a group — led by a man who unsuccessfully sued the university previously over its admissions process — has filed a lawsuit claiming UT violates state law by using race and ethnic considerations as factors in its admissions, according to a post on the website of Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

Edward Blum’s nonprofit organization, Students for Fair Admissions, says UT gives African-American and Hispanic candidates preference over white and Asian applicants.

Lynn Pinker Cox & Hurst partner Shonn Brown says this latest attempt is a step backward.

“The University of Texas still struggles to obtain a diverse student population,” Shonn says. “It proceeds under an admissions policy that has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Blum’s group and its actions seek to return to the ‘days of old’ and if put into place would likely take UT backwards in its attempts to utilize additional across-the-board process that assists in increasing diversity in the UT student population.”

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Generally speaking, law schools with low acceptance rates masterfully weathered the storm over the past decade, keeping their standards high, writes Staci Zaretsky for Above the Law.

This came during a time when applications plummeted and entering students’ qualifications sank, while law schools with high acceptance rates fared quite poorly, admitting almost anyone who applied in an effort to keep the lights on, she adds.

Her article covers the release of some data from U.S. News, which compiled statistics showing acceptance rates for American law schools.

The school with the lowest acceptance rate is Yale Law School, with 9.5 percent of its applicants gaining entry. At the other end of the list is Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School, which saw 85.8 percent of its applicants getting into class.

Read the Above the Law article.

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Above the Bar reported recently that Florida’s bar passage rate was an abysmal 57.7 percent for the February exam, but now they can report that another state has taken over the uncoveted distinction of having the worst exam results in the U.S.: Mississippi.

“Few things are certain in this life, but one of them is that Mississippi will find a way to be worse at everything,” writes Joe Patrice. “After Florida posted a 57.7 percent passage rate for the February exam, Mississippi pulled up and delivered a glorious 36 percent passage rate.”

Patrice puts much of the blame for falling passage rates on declining rates at schools across the country. “While many have begun the process of course correction — bringing in smaller, more credentialed classes — we’ve still got a few more years of this trend ahead of us,” he writes.

Read the Above the Law article.

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The renaming of George Mason University’s law school after Justice Antonin Scalia has erupted into a tense confrontation within its faculty: between professors embracing the move and scholars outside the law school offended by the association with the high court’s most influential conservative, reports The Wall Street Journal.

“Officials at the suburban Virginia public university say they have no intention of reconsidering the rebranding, which comes attached to not just controversy but a heap of money. The school is set to receive its largest combined gift, $10 million from a charity founded by billionaire conservative activist Charles Koch and a $20-million pledge from an anonymous donor who made the gift contingent on the name change,” according to the report.

More than 100 professors at George Mason have signed a petition condemning both the Scalia name and the legal ideas he espoused.

Read the article.