Practice Management

Usually it is the other way around. It is the undergraduate school that starts a law school.

Massachusetts School of Lawl has always been perplexing to me. One, I am not sure I would recommend someone to apply to a non-ABA law school, just because of the restrictions it causes with licensing upon graduation. There is also something to be said for supervision. On the other hand, at least one of the missions of MSL is to provide an affordable law school education. There is no doubt that many of the ABA rules on accreditation are simply antiquated and are extreme costly. This, along with ranking concerns, drastically increases tuition much further than it needs to be. Should MSL obtain ABA approval, it is pretty certain it will not be educating lawyers for $15,000.00 a year.

And, you cannot argue with MSL's' results. It has a good name, it accepts 70% of those apply, and yet 79% of their first-time takers passed the Massachusetts bar in 2009.

Unconventional is MSL's trademark. In that regard, in a kind of reverse engineering, the law school has started the American College of History and Legal Studies in Salem, New Hampshire as a feeder school.

ACHLS is as unconventional as is MSL. The law school provided the funding for ACHLS for the purpose of funneling students to it. It is essentially a senior college campus. Students who do well in their first year at ACHLS can combine their last year of undergraduate work with their first year of law school.

The college grew out of Dean Lawrence Velvel's concerns about students entering law school with weak writing skills and a near-total lack of American history knowledge.

The college is no-frills and consist currently of a half dozen offices and classrooms in an office building. Classes are held from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. three nights a week. The students merely sit at folding tables, there are no lectures, only Q&A, and lots of assigned reading.

The entering class consisted of only 5 students and ACHLS is not yet approved by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/nation/in-unique-step-massachusetts-law-school-starts-its-own-undergrad-feeder-college-in-nh-104664984.html#ixzz125WjNeeC