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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People Who Have Shaped the Teaching Careers of Our Faculty—Part 5: Walter Weyrauch, Mentor and Friend

The editors of this blog have asked a number of faculty members to write about those who have been influential in their understanding of the law. In this, the fifth post in the series, Professor Alison Barnes writes about her mentor and friend, Walter O. Weyrauch (1919-2008), who was Professor of Law at the University of Florida and Honorary Professor of Law at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Walter Weyrauch remains a unique thinker in the law, known by many worldwide, and for more than two decades since I took his classes at University of Florida, my principal guide and inspiration in law and law teaching. Our dialogue, which included hundreds of snail mail letters on goofy art note cards, reflected Walter’s world view and legal philosophy, and confirmed and developed mine.

In demeanor, he had an impassive face and long pauses. What seems a dissonance in style became cause for student comment towards the very end of his teaching career. He said of his student evaluations: “They noticed I have a German accent” for the first time since he began to teach at University of Florida 50 years before. His chuckle over this was signature. Indeed, perception of him had evolved from the days when he was rumored to have been a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe. (Chuckle.) Well into his eighties, he negotiated his retirement three years away. He said, “I thought I would be ready; I am not ready.” In part, he feared he would have too much time to reflect on unresolved feelings about his own experience.

Walter provided to me two versions of his memoirs, one hard copy (typed on his manual typewriter) and a later electronic revision, scanned in by his assistant, for my editing. He had received annotations from several scholars, but these were the last so I have worked with them and hope they will be available for any who wish to read, search for their own names, comment.

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From Council to Counsel: Reflections of a Lawmaker Turned Law Student

At the time I applied for admission to law school, I had been serving on Racine, Wisconsin’s City Council for six years. Attorneys I knew told me that my experience as a legislator would help me with my legal studies. They were right, but I don’t think any of us considered that it would be a two-way street.

Before I go further, I should note that being an Alderman in Racine is a vastly different experience from serving on a council in a city like Chicago or Milwaukee. My job is most decidedly part time, as is the pay. The relative size of the jobs, however, isn’t the only thing that makes them different.

Chicago Alderman Proco Moreno recently illustrated this. Chick-fil-A’s CEO made public statements opposing gay marriage, which upset, among many others, Alderman Moreno. “Because of this man’s ignorance,” said Alderman Moreno, “I will now be denying Chick-fil-A’s permit to open a restaurant in the First Ward.” In Mr. Moreno’s world, this likely unconstitutional action will probably go unchallenged in any real way. In my world, I would get a rebuke from the City Attorney, a hammering in the local press, and probably a lawsuit.

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