Next month the American Bar Association (ABA) will likely vote on a proposal to offer accreditation to online law schools. This would permit students who earn their law degrees online to sit for the bar exam in any state. Currently, only traditional “brick and mortar” law schools are eligible for accreditation.
The ABA accepted feedback on the proposed change from January 23 to March 25. Nearly 80 pages of responses were received. Among them was a letter from 26 law school deans. The deans opposed the change and urged the ABA to collect more data before reaching a decision.
The two-page letter concludes:
In sum, we are still at the very beginning of learning about the possibilities and limits of online legal education. At present, students who enroll in these programs have the assurance that they are being developed by experts in legal education, our traditional ABA-accredited law schools, whose innovations are being individually reviewed and assessed by the Council on Legal Education. This provides a measure of protection and security for students taking on the substantial obligation of time and money that law school requires. We hope that the Council will pause implementation of the revisions to Standards 102 and 306 to allow for additional discussion and study before allowing new and qualitatively different entrants into online legal education.
To read the full text of the letter, click the document below.
In addition to the dean’s letter, the ABA received several comments from Purdue Global Law School (America’s oldest online law school founded in 1998) favoring the change.
Purdue’s online law dean, Martin Pritikin, authored a letter summarizing the arguments in favor of the policy change:
The arguments in favor of online law school have been made a number of times, but several
key ones can be summarized here:
● Fully online law schools provide critical opportunities for non-traditional students who,
due to work or family commitments, geography, military service, physical limitations, or
other life circumstances, simply cannot attend an in-person program even part-time.● Campus-based law schools either cannot or will not offer their online programs for less
tuition than their in-person programs. Only a fully online law school can make a serious
dent in the high cost of legal education–and thus the law student debt crisis.
● The pandemic showed the legal profession that most of the functions of a lawyer–
including depositions and trials–can be conducted remotely if need be. It stands to
reason that if one can be a lawyer online, one should be able to study to become a
lawyer online.
● Fully online education has been embraced in a variety of other fields that arguably
benefit from face-to-face interaction at least as much as law does, including social work.
By allowing for approval of online law schools, the ABA would merely be catching up to
other professions, not moving beyond them.
The full text of Dean Pritikin’s letter is attached below.