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Welcome Message from the President
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Night School Students
The American Bar Association has had a long and sordid history of elitism. Persons of African ancestry were excluded from membership until the middle of the 20th century. Equally exclusionary, though more subtle, was the bar’s bias against part time legal education.
In the early 1900’s, night school was seen as the place where the uncultured masses could gain undeserved entry to the ancient and learned profession of the law. Part time legal education, the leaders of the bar felt, invited the working classes, the foreign born, the ghetto bound, to become lawyers. The conventional wisdom of that time was that economic need fostered unethical conduct. Night school lawyers were often perceived as money grubbing, ambulance chasing, unscrupulous shysters. Even today, law schools which operate evening divisions are sometimes branded as mere trade schools.
One way to discourage part time legal education was to require a longer period in residence. Presumably night school students were slow learners. The bias took some curious forms. The State of New York, for example, required four years of study rather than three if classes were scheduled after four o’clock in the afternoon.
The ABA’s Council on Legal Education took a different tack. It required four years of study unless the student devoted substantially all of his time to the study of law. That definition was more of a goal than a standard. It was nearly impossible to apply to a given student. Clearly a law student had to eat and sleep and needed some time for recreation and the ordinary activities of social living. So the Council adopted a black letter rule: anyone who was gainfully employed for more than twenty hours a week was considered a part time student, and had to study law for four years rather than three.
The rule limiting gainful employment echoed the bar’s bias against the working class. One could be occupied more than twenty hours a week in many other ways. Only gainful employment was banned. You couldn’t have a job. You couldn’t earn money as an employee. You could work any number of hours as a volunteer. You could own your own business or spend eight hours a day managing your investment portfolio. You could mother a brood of six children, or run for public office in a round the clock political campaign. But you couldn’t work twenty-one hours a week for a paycheck.
Cooley Law School posed new challenges for the ABA. We operated not two divisions, day school and night school; we offered three divisions, morning afternoon and evening. Our students were studying twelve months of the year and graduating in less than four years. By our count, only a small handful of Cooley students were full time. These we required to certify that they were not employed more than twenty hours a week. All the rest of our people we counted as part time.
This dichotomy took on significance as the accreditation committee focused on student teacher ratios. On that issue, the accreditors were playing hide the ball. First they wanted us to have a ratio of 30 to 1. Then 29 to 1 wasn’t good enough. What exactly was enough, they wouldn’t say.
The push for lower and lower student teacher ratios was driven by the bar’s perception that our student body needed help. In the 1980’s the Law School Admissions Test was scored on a scale of 200 to 800. The median was 500. Cooley had many students with LSAT scores in the four hundreds.
At one point Don LeDuc and I went to an accreditation meeting in Sacramento. I gave the committee my ‘four hundred club’ speech. In it, I detailed the successful professional lives of dozens of our graduates whose LSAT scores were below the median.
And so the battle raged. For purposes of student teacher ratios, a part time student was counted as equal to two-thirds of a full time student. Could we count students as part time even though they took as many as fourteen credit hours in a term? They had no rule against it. Still some committee members wanted to impose a fourteen hour definition of full time study. When they tried to do so, other schools balked. They backed down.
But the committee still wanted to apply the rule to Cooley. They argued that our student body was too much at risk; our LSAT scores were too low; we needed more teachers than other law schools because our students needed more help.
It was a phony argument. Student teacher ratios never had anything to do with class size. A large research faculty with light teaching loads was fine with them. Sheer numbers of warm bodies on the faculty payroll; that was the goal.
In the end, the economy solved our debate. Baby boomers buying cars and houses, aided by the policies of Reaganomics created a plethora of good paying jobs for college graduates. No need to go to grad school. No need to get a law degree if you can start next week at Proctor and Gamble for forty-thousand dollars a year.
Law school applications nationally went into the dumper. Cooley took more than its share of the hit, as out of state students found schools closer to home eager to accept them.
Our enrollment shrunk by 25% from over 1,200 to less than 900. The Thomas M. Cooley Law School was in for some very tough years. It would be a time of testing for all of us.
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This Page was last updated on:
08/19/2004