Legal Commentary

University of Miami Law Tops Florida Bar Pass

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Congratulations to the UM Class of 2008, which recorded a stellar bar pass rate on the Florida bar exam. According to the official list, our grads achieved the highest pass rate of all Florida law schools, with a 92.4% pass rate among first-time test-takers. (More bragging at the official UM announcement.)

I’ve reproduced the full table below, sorted by percentage passing, based on the raw data (sorted by number passing) contained in a .pdf from the Bar Examiners.

But first, a few words of warning: Bar Pass Rates are Over-Rated As A Measure of Law School Quality.

It would be sort of interesting to extend this table with a column showing percent of class taking the exam, and also percent of class taking out of state exams.

The percent in-state vs. out-of-state tells you something about how national/regional/local the law school is. A large number taking no bar at all raises the question whether the law school is steering some students away from the summer bar exam in order to prop up its statistics, although there are also other very innocuous explanations. It may be that many students go on to LL.Ms and put off the bar, or that the school prepares them for other sorts of careers. The no-bar-anywhere number only raises a question, rather than answering it.

The first number is probably easy to get, but I don’t know about the second. We graduated 442 JD’s last year, making the 236 Florida test takers just 53.3% of the UM graduating class. My impression is that just about all of our JDs took a bar exam somewhere, and that the numbers reflect a reality that we run a school with both national and Florida ambitions, but I could be wrong about that. Indeed, if you’d asked me, I’d have guessed that the Florida-national ratio was more like 2:1 than 1:1, which suggests either that anecdotal evidence is not worth much, or that the school is becoming more national.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).