I just finished re-reading Debbie Hagan’s book Against the Tide, which I recommend to prospective law students, as well as to others who want to understand how economic class works in the context of the American Bar Association and the law school accreditation process.
On the surface, it is the story of Massachusetts School of Law, founded in the ’80’s in order to make a good legal education accessible to working class people in northeastern Massachusetts. That story is interesting in itself, but the real value of the book is that it explores the various institutional obstacles that were placed in MSL’s path, and in particular the hostility of the ABA’s Section on Legal Education to MSL’s attempts to become accredited.
Herre’s a precis: Michael A. Boland, a sleazy businessman, started Commonwealth School of Law in Lowell, MA in 1986. It was geared toward low-income students, and it was shady. Boland retained control of decision-making, cut corners, and was dishonest with students about the accreditation process. After the Massachusetts Board of Regents investigted the school and found it lacking even the foundation of a good law school, Boland gave in to student pressure and agreed to hire a dean.
The man he hired was Dean Lawrence Velvel, a dedicated advocate of expanding access to the legal profession. As a young law professor, he had sued the executive branch to enjoin the Vietnam War. An all around good guy, except when it comes to Israel. Velvel had a vision of a law school that would be run with low enough costs that it would be able to provide an inexpensive, but high quality, legal education. He tried to bring the law school up to the Board of Regents’ standards, and to run a school that was accountable to the students, but found himself blocked by Boland repeatedly. When he stood up to him, he was fired.
At that point Velvel and student leaders met and decided that the best thing to do would be to start a new law school in the area. The students who were being poorly served by CSL would be able to enroll in the new school, and they expected that it would achieve degree-granting authority before CSL would. They found a building in nearby Andover, and, with a community effort, started MSL in fall 1988. As expected, CSL collapsed and MSL was certified by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
But certification by the Commonwealth only meant that graduates were eligible to sit for the bar in Massachusetts. The school could, and did, petition for eligibility to take the bar exam on a state-by-state basis, but to be able for students to be able to sit for bar exams across the country, it would be necessary to secure accreditation from the American Bar Association’s Section on Legal Education. And the ABA was unwilling to permit it. MSL failed to meet its criteria, and though the ABA had the means to make exceptions for the sake of educational diversity, it would not do so for MSL, despite the fact that the school was just about an ideal candidate for exception.
(More to come)
