1. Ratner, Morris A. and Goggin, Stephen and Moscato, Stefano and Greer, Margaret and McGriff, Elizabeth, Determinants of Success on the Bar Exam: One Law School's Experience 2010-2023, __ J. of Legal Educ. __ (forthcoming, 2024).
In this study, UC Law SF faculty and outside researchers collected and analyzed data to assess the impact of multiple factors on bar passage. It is not a stretch to infer from the article that robust, well-supported, and strategic academic support initiatives can foster students' bar success.
From the Introduction:
The most effective pre-graduation interventions we studied resulted from a paradigm shift: UC Law SF improved bar outcomes after it moved from an academic skills development model focused on the most at-risk students based on entering metrics or law school GPA (LGPA) to a model of pervasive, integrated, and iterative skills instruction aimed at all students. Examples include: (1) requiring and encouraging students to take upper-division bar subject classes, with each additional bar subject class taken associated with a 3% increase in the probability of first-time bar passage in the post-2016 period; and (2) offering for-credit bar skills classes in the 3L year focused on improving MBE performance (Critical Studies 2) and on overall bar test taking (Critical Studies 3). The impact of these interventions varied by law school GPA band.
UC Law SF’s post-graduation bar success interventions proved to be particularly positively impactful given the strong connection between the percentage of commercial bar preparation courses that graduates complete and first-time pass rates. The most effective of these interventions included the following: (1) tracking individual student performance in post-graduation commercial bar preparation courses and advising and coaching individual students to complete a greater percentage of the classes; (2) offering supplemental law school-administered practice bar essay feedback during bar study; and (3) advising students to effectively practice MBE test taking. Combined with LGPA, the percentage of completion of post-graduation commercial bar course and regular postgraduation practice on bar essays and MBE questions turned out to be powerful predictors of first-time bar passage.
2. Baldwin, Chelsea (Washburn), Bad Therapy: Conceptualizing the Teaching of "Thinking Like A Lawyer" as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, 55 St. Mary' L. J. __ (forthcoming, 2024).
From the abstract:
Law students and lawyers experience mental illness and substance abuse at higher rates than the general population and other learned professions. This is bad for an individual’s wellbeing as well as their clients and society because mental illness and substance abuse increases stress which in turn decreases effective decision-making and judgment, and in worst case scenarios leads to attrition as individuals choose death by suicide which has cascading social and economic impacts. This Article identifies practices in legal education that likely combine in a causal mechanism, although not a sole cause, to the higher rates of mental illness and substance abuse experienced by students and lawyers and proposes a series of alternatives and mitigations to lessen impact. This work builds upon that done by Lawrence Krieger and Kennon Sheldon, as well as Jeremy Organ, David Jaffe, and Janet Stearns et al. on the subject of law student well-being. This is a multi-factor and multi-causal problem, and where prior work focused on students’ self-determination and subjective well-being, this Article looks at the educational practices that results in administering cognitive behavioral therapy en masse to law students without the protective mechanisms that surround intended therapy with a professional.
After providing a brief primer on the regulatory system that applies to counselors and therapists, the A-B-C model underlying human psyche and the various orientations that help individual’s change their psyche, this Article examines how legal education administers a course of cognitive behavioral therapy to law students without the surrounding protections that exist when a trained therapist administers CBT. The Article concludes with a number of ways to introduce protective mechanisms to legal education, reduce the harmful applications of cognitive behavioral techniques in the course of education, and suggestions for future research.
[Posted by Louis Schulze, FIU Law]
