Since launching our grantmaking activities in 2014, we have awarded over $21 million in support of our research priorities: access, affordability, and the value of legal education.
Awarded Grants
Grant Program
Grant Status
Dillard University
This grant supports the Foundation to Legal Education Advancing Diversity (LEAD) program. The program will provide rising college juniors with analytical and logical reasoning skills to ensure their success on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and in law school.
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS)
The Before the JD project will study (1) the opinions held by students at, and recent graduates from, four-year colleges and universities in the United States about legal education and the legal profession; (2) their sources of information about legal education; and (3) the factors that influence their postgraduate choices.
American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation received a grant for the Emerging and Visiting Scholars Fellowship Program in Legal and Higher Education project. Doctoral fellows and visiting scholars will have access to an interdisciplinary scholarly community and benefit from mentoring provided by the ABF’s research faculty. This professional network of scholars will produce innovative, objective, empirical, and interdisciplinary research in legal and higher education.
Elon University School of Law
This grant studies the impact and benefits of its innovative new curriculum. Major components include shortening the general course of study to two and a half years, reducing cost by nearly 25 percent and enhancing the educational experience by requiring that all students complete substantial experiential learning components.
To read more, please visit Study: Lower debt, stronger diversity & improved outcomes at Elon Law
University of Pennsylvania
The Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education received a grant to analyze the law school admissions market. A set of regression models were estimated for predicting the prices charged by law schools reporting data to the American Bar Association. Similarly, institutional characteristics such as LSAT scores, bar passage rates and employment outcomes were mapped.
American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation received a grant award to follow up on the work of the American Bar Association Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education. The data that was collected as part of the Task Force’s work, in combination with other data and materials, will be fully analyzed in order to address challenges facing legal education.
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS)
The AALS strove to communicate a more balanced and informed understanding of legal education to key groups outside the legal academy including policymakers, leaders of the bar and bench, the media, prospective law students, and the general public. This grant from AccessLex Institute supported the general operation and implementation of this project.
To read more, please visit AALS Receives Access Group Grant to Support Public Outreach Efforts
Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at University of Denver
Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, an initiative of IAALS, will collect data for its Foundations for Practice project. Foundations for Practice is a multi-year project designed to identify the foundations entry-level lawyers need to succeed in the practice of law; develop measurable models of legal education that support those foundations; and align market needs with hiring practices to incentivize positive improvements.
Download the full report at iaals.du.edu.
Texas A&M University School of Law
Through the Texas Lawyers Study, Texas A&M University School of Law will survey nearly 88,000 members of the State Bar of Texas to collect data regarding income levels, demographics and career satisfaction. The data will be used to better understand the varying effects of a law degree based on student characteristics as well to produce scholarly research on the economic value of a law degree.