O.C. Law School to Keep Its Ranking

A federal judge temporarily stopped the American Bar Assn. from stripping an Orange County law school of its all-important national accreditation Friday.

U.S. District Judge Gary L. Taylor agreed with attorneys for Western State University College of Law that there was evidence the ABA had not followed its own rules in moving to rescind the school’s accreditation.

About 10 representatives from the school will attend the ABA House of Delegates meeting next week in San Antonio to make their case for ABA approval.

Taylor’s preliminary injunction would allow the ABA to vote to pull Western State’s provisional accreditation, but prevents the group from implementing the action.

ABA approval is the highest accreditation a law school can receive, allowing its graduates to take the bar examination anywhere in the country and signifying to employers the school’s quality.

Western State had earned the ABA’s provisional accreditation, a step toward full approval. Two ABA committees have recommended that the school’s accreditation be removed, which triggered Western State’s lawsuit.

The loss of the ABA designation would be a severe blow to Western State. The fallout already has hurt the for-profit school’s recruiting and encouraged some students to transfer, school officials said.

Western State says about a quarter of the judges and commissioners in Orange County received their law degrees from the school, the vast majority long before it had provisional ABA accreditation.

In his opinion, Taylor referred to the ABA’s “apparent inconsistencies and potentially unreasonable interpretations” involving the accreditation process and said it “may be failing to follow its own rules.”

“We essentially got what we wanted out of this,” said Don Daucher, Western State’s attorney. “Nothing the ABA does [next week] makes a difference.”

The ABA’s general counsel in a phone interview Friday held out the possibility of a settlement. “There’s always an opportunity to talk to the school to see if we can reach some sort of agreement short of going to trial,” said Darryl DePriest.

“I’m sure we’d be amenable to talking to them,” Daucher said. In his court filings, Daucher has indicated that Western State would agree to an extension of its provisional accreditation.

Western has argued that the ABA is hostile to for-profit law schools. The ABA signed a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice in 1996 agreeing not to prevent for-profit schools from receiving accreditation.

The ABA has given full accreditation to 181 schools and provisional accreditation to five. They ranges from the prestigious, such as Harvard, to the obscure, including William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota. Two of the schools are for-profit -- Florida Coastal, which is fully accredited, and Western State.

Nancy Slonim, a spokeswoman for the ABA, said no one at the ABA can recall any other school losing its provisional accreditation.

Western received provisional accreditation in 1998, which usually leads to full approval within five years.

The ABA committees that voted to pull the accreditation based their decisions on concerns about the number of students passing the bar exam, scores on the Law School Aptitude Test and the dropout rate.

The law school acknowledges the problems but says it has improved since Education Management Corp. bought it two years ago.

In July 2003, 46% of Western State’s graduates who took the bar exam for the first time passed, compared to 31% for Whittier and 57% at Chapman, the two other ABA-accredited schools in Orange County.

The highest pass rate for first-time test-takers from ABA-approved schools was achieved by Stanford at 92%, followed by UC Berkeley at 91% and UCLA at 89%.

The ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, which comprises 24 lawyers, judges, deans and professors, has recommended that Western State lose its accreditation.

The delegates in San Antonio have received a half-inch-thick volume making the case against the Fullerton law school, DePriest said.

But there is no guarantee they will take up the Western State case.

Because the legal education section missed a deadline, ABA groups must vote to place the matter on the delegates’ agenda, DePriest said.

Daucher said Western State representatives will try to persuade the Rules and Calendar Committee not to schedule the matter.

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Rankings

A federal judge has issued an order preventing the American Bar Assn. from rescinding its accreditation of Western State University College of Law in Fullerton. Shown are statistics from July 2003 for graduates of ABA-approved schools in California taking the bar examination for the first time.

*--* Law school # took # passed % passed Stanford Law School 97 89 92% University of California, Berkeley 213 193 91% University of California, Los Angeles 270 241 89% University of San Diego School of Law 225 186 83% University of California, Davis 145 118 81% USC Law School 177 143 81% Hastings College of The Law 359 280 78% Loyola Law School, Los Angeles 361 251 70% McGeorge School of Law 189 132 70% Pepperdine University School of Law 167 117 70% California Western School of Law 119 82 69% Santa Clara University School of Law 238 164 69% University of San Francisco School of Law 162 105 65% Southwestern University School of Law 161 93 58% Chapman University School of Law 74 42 57% Thomas Jefferson School of Law 71 33 46% Western State University College of Law 65 30 46% Golden Gate University School of Law 70 22 31% Whittier Law School 144 44 31% TOTAL 3,307 2,365 72%

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Source: State Bar of California