Raising accreditation standards closed part-time and minority-serving law schools

Evidence

Between 1889 and 1909, the number of law schools doubled, and the number of law students quadrupled.’ This expansion occurred primarily in urban areas, where part-time schools—often with lax admissions standards— flourished by providing opportunities for recent immigrants and other working people to pursue a professional career. During the first third of the twentieth century, however, bar associations and the Association of American Law Schools campaigned to raise admissions standards for law school in order to upgrade the quality of the legal profession and reduce competition within it. States began to require that candidates for the bar be graduates of an accredited law school. During the Great Depression, many part-time law schools, already struggling to survive, were forced to close because they could not meet ABA accreditation standards. Among the casualties were three of the nation’s four black law schools. Portia Law School, founded in 1908 to serve an all-female student body, abandoned its special mission and became the New England School of Law. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 976

Categorization

• QUESTION: The professional self-interest framing raises a question worth chasing: how far were ‘quality’ claims a cover for restricting immigrant and minority entry into the bar?
• XREF: connects to: Law-school training and strict bar admission are recent American developments — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 972; Bar accreditation pushed out part-time law schools and black law schools. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 653