Law Commons^™

The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools That Overperform On The Bar Exam, Derek T. Muller, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Journal Articles

Since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success despite recent signs of improvement. At least partly as a result, rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates' chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. This Article examines which schools do so and why.

Research for this Article began by accounting for law schools' incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar …

A Search For Balance In The Whirlwind Of Law School: Spirituality From Law Teachers, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The first-year introductory course in property law is about all that is left of the traditional black-box curriculum. It is where beginning law students cope with and despair of the arcana of English common law; where, with more detachment than, say, in the torts course, analysis of appellate opinions is what "thinking like a lawyer" means, with no more than peripheral and begrudging attention to modem legislation and administrative law; where legal reasoning is a stretching exercise and initiatory discipline. And, incidentally, surviving bravely the rude invasion of teachers of public law, it is where a teaching lawyer can point …

Why Does The Church Have Law Schools?, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Why does the church have law schools?

The title I was given for this talk during the Marquette Conference of March, 1994, was "the mission of the religiously affiliated law school." The title raises the possibility that the church has a law school in order to carry out a mission. The church does not get its mission from the state or the civil community. The only workable meaning of the title I was given is that each of our law schools has a mission from God.

If the assignment of mission comes from the civil community or the state, the …

The Catholic Tradition, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

If you stand in the road near one of the on-campus Roman Catholic university law schools in the United States, you can probably see a church spire. You can squint past whatever fire wall or battlement or gothic tower there is on the law building and see the campus church. You can do this at Notre Dame, St. Louis, Creighton, San Francisco, Boston College, and San Diego. If you go inside one of these law buildings, you may find crucifixes, chapels, holy-water fonts, or a statute of Thomas More. But none of these things will tell you what those law …

Four Issues In The Accreditation Of Law Schools, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Four issues that have become prominent in law school accreditation as the profession adjusts to changes in itself, education, and the flow of consumers of legal education are discussed: the demand for new buildings, student faculty ratios, restricting law school admission to "A" and "B" level students, and faculty tenure.