Ethics

Here?s recent news about succeeding in the legal profession.    . . . .    Ms. JD points us to this article from the New York Times, about how women?s participation in sports correlates with (and perhaps causes) professional success.  That?s not too surprising, given the prior study, discussed by Paul Caron here, showing that participation in collegiate sports is a better predictor of biglaw success than school rankings.    . . . .     The most recent issue of the Journal of Legal Education had a must-read article for anyone interested in bar passage, exclusion and diversity in the legal profession.  Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to it.  Donald Ziegler, Joanne Ingham, and David Chang describe the curricular innovations at New York Law School that were designed to tackle the bar exam passage problem.  Previously, less than 30% of the bottom quartile passed the bar exam the first time, and only 10% of the bottom decile did.  As the authors noted, ?sending students forth with so little chance of passing the bar seemed cruel, perhaps even immoral.?  (My view: not ?perhaps? immoral; just plain immoral.)  The faculty argued about how transparent to be with students as the new curriculum was introduced and eventually candor won out.  Read the article for details, but the school saw soaring rates of bar passage after adopting policies of ?early intervention, rigorous training in analysis and reasoning skills, a guided curriculum, reinforcement of legal analysis and, for some, an extra semester of study.?  Congrats to New York Law School for aggressively addressing the problem and for publishing its methodology.  It would be great to see that attitude catch on.  The editors of the Journal, who are not from New York Law School, comment on the article, ?We are no longer content to dismiss law school attention to bar passage as a sign of an insufficient commitment to scholarly inquiry and legal theory.?  I hope that comment was simply for rhetorical effect and does not accurately reflect the real attitudes, past or present, of anyone in legal academia.