Parking Garage Quietly Marks the 225th Anniversary of the Northwest Ordinance

This post is authored by J. Gordon Hylton and Jane Casper.

July 13, 2012 marked the 225th anniversary of the signing of the Northwest Ordinance.

As some users of the Eckstein Hall Parking Garage know, excerpts from the text of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance are transposed on the walls of the Tory Hill/Clybourn Street floor of the garage and on the elevator doors on the same level. (The Magna Charta excerpts are on the walls of the underground garage’s other level.)

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the first landmarks of constitutional government in the United States. It “organized” the Northwest Territory, the first United States territory, and it set down a series of guidelines that would dramatically affect the development of the “western” United States.

The Northwest Territory included the present day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota, and its passage was made possible by the willingness of eastern states, particularly Virginia, to cede their western land claims to the national government.

The Ordinance dictated that new states would be created from the Territory when the population warranted; it abolished African-American slavery in the region during the territorial stage; it propagated the first bill of rights issued by the United States government; it committed the policy of the United States to the support of public schools (and religion generally); and it established the “gridded township” system of development advocated by Thomas Jefferson that defines to political organization of states like Wisconsin to this very day.

At the same time the Congress was enacting the Northwest Ordinance in New York City, our so-called “Founding Fathers” were meeting in Philadelphia and were in the process of drafting the Constitution that would replace the Articles of Confederation. That the Northwest Ordinance was unaffected by the ratification of the new Constitution was confirmed on August 7, 1789, when new President George Washington signed into law a re-enacted Northwest Ordinance (which contained only minor alterations).

Plans are in the works for a festive event in the summer of 2014 to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the signing of the re-enacted Ordinance.

 

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Should the American Bar Association Accredit Foreign Law Schools?

At this week’s annual meeting in Chicago, the American Bar Association’s Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar will debate the question of whether or not non-United States Law Schools should be able to apply for ABA accreditation.

In the early 1920’s, the ABA, on its own incentive, began to accredit American law schools. Although ABA certification initially gave accredited law schools nothing more than a reputational boost, in the post-World War II period, a growing number of states decided to limit their bar examinations to graduates of ABA-approved law schools. Moreover, in 1952, the United States Department of Education certified the ABA as the nationally recognized accreditation authority for law schools. Today most states require law school graduates to be graduates of ABA-accredited law schools before they can take the state’s bar examination.

The American model of legal education has been highly influential around the world. Canadian law schools now operate on what is essentially an American model, and Australian schools have made significant moves in that direction. Moreover, entrepreneurs have established U.S.-style law schools in other countries where the ordinary model of legal education differs from that in the United States.

One such school is the Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, China. The Peking law school was founded in 2007, with the intention of making it possible to obtain a U.S. style legal education in China. From the start, the school has been led by a former University of Michigan Law School dean, Jeffrey Lehman, who serves as dean and chancellor, and by Steven Yandle, formerly a long-time associate dean at the University of Virginia and Yale Law Schools.

The Peking School has adopted an American admissions model. Only students who possess a bachelor’s degree in a subject other than law are admitted to the law school, and all applicants must take the LSAT-STL, a variation of the LSAT. The law course does, however, last four years rather than three, and graduates receive both a J.M. degree (which qualifies them for practice in China) and a J.D. degree (authorized by the Chinese government, and designed to qualify them for practice in the United States). The school opened in the fall of 2008, with classes taught in both Chinese and English. All 53 of the school’s initial students were from mainland China. This first class graduated this past fall, and the fifth class will be admitted this fall.

The current ABA debate was prompted by the Peking University law school’s application for ABA accreditation in 2010. It is the first, and so far only, non-U.S. school to make such an application.

In 2010, an ABA Committee, appointed to consider the question, recommended that the ABA’s Council on Legal Education seriously consider extending its accreditation function to foreign law schools, so long as they were constructed on the U.S. model. However, in 2011, a second committee, which solicited public comments on the proposal, reached a contrary conclusion.

Persistent efforts on the part of the Peking law school have brought the issue back before the ABA for a third time in three years.

Advocates of expanded accreditation cite to the increased globalization of law practice and the value of such a system in determining which foreign lawyers are eligible for admission to the bar in the United States. Opponents emphasize the difficulty in administering such a system, the danger that it would stretch ABA financial resources too thin, and that it would lead to increased competition for American law students seeking jobs in a lawyer-saturated marketplace.

 

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Looking at the Increase in the Number of Law Schools and Law Students, 1950-2010

There seems to be a consensus today that the United States has too many law schools and too many law students.

The table below looks at how we reached the current situation. It compares the increase in the number of law students and ABA accredited law schools to the general growth of the U.S. population on a decade by decade basis for the past 60 years.

Decade GeneralPopulation Increase Increase in Law School Combined Annual Enrollment Increase in Number of ABA Accredited Law Schools
1950-60 18.5% -16.9% 12.3% (114 to 130)
1960-70 13.3% 80.1% 10.8%  (130 to 144)
1970-80 11.5% 85.5% 17.4%  (144 to 169)
1980-90   9.8%   4.1%   3.6%  (169 to 175)
1990-00 13.2%   0.6%   4.0%  (175 to 182)
2000-10   9.7%  17.8%   5.4%  (182 to 200)

As the table indicates, there has never been a correlation between general population growth and increases in law schools and law students.

Although the decline in the number of law students in the 1950’s may be somewhat exaggerated by the fact that law school enrollment boomed in the late 1940’s because of the disruptive effects of the Second World War and the benefits provided by the GI Bill, the period was a remarkably stable era for legal education. Although the number of ABA-accredited law schools increased by 16 in the decade, there was no growth in the number of law students. Law schools remained essentially the same size across the decade or else reduced their enrollments.

In contrast, the decade of the 1960’s and 1970’s saw an enormous increase in the number of law students: a 234% increase over the 20 year period. (This figure compares the enrollment in the 1959-60 academic year with the enrollment in 1979-80.) This enormous growth occurred even though the number of law schools increased only by 30%, from 130 to 169. Obviously, lots of law schools got much larger in these two decades. Presumably, this increase was justified by an increase in the demand for legal services.

In contrast, the period between 1980 and 2000, was a period of remarkable stability for legal education. Total law school enrollment increased by less than 5% over the twenty year period, while the number of law schools increased by less than 8%.

Obviously, the stability of the final two decades of the 20th century ended in the first decade of the 21st. The current economic climate suggests that the nearly 18% increase in the number of law students was not economically warranted.

Why did this happen? What caused the controls exercised in the 1980’s and 1990’s to break down?

Knowledgeable observers are likely to cite the 1995 consent decree between the American Bar Association and the Clinton Justice Department in which the ABA agreed to relax the accreditation standards for new law schools. Moreover, in 2006, the Justice Department levied a fine on the ABA for violating the decree. Regardless of the degree to which the ABA lived up to its part of the agreement, it was clearly easier to establish a new ABA-accredited law school after 1995 than it was before.

However, the number of new ABA-accredited law schools in the first decade of the 21st century is not that out of line with the historical pattern. Between 1950 and 2000, the ABA accredited, on average, 13 or 14 new law schools per decade; between 2000 and 2010, the number was only 18.

While new law schools are responsible for part of the increase in the number of law students between 2000 and 2010, they do not explain the entire increase. Existing law schools also increased their size during the decade.

What the pattern will be in the 2010’s is not at all clear.

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