AccessLex
Since launching our grantmaking activities in 2014, we have awarded over $19 million in support of our research priorities: access, affordability, and the value of legal education.
Awarded Grants
Grant Program
Grant Status
Behavioral Insights Institute
Demographic matching between law students from underrepresented groups and law school faculty increases these students’ access to research opportunities and quality employment and impacts their sense of belonging. The sense of belonging influences students’ academic performance, course selections, J.D. degree completion, and bar exam success.
View grant outcomes.
American University
The project will estimate the causal effect of participating in legal-career-related extracurricular activities while in law school on the chances of passing the Bar exam on the first attempt together with how racial, ethnic, or gender differences in extracurricular participation contribute to corresponding gaps in Bar success rates. View grant outcomes.
UC Hastings College of the Law
This grant will support the study of teaching reforms and academic and bar success interventions implemented at UC Hastings College of the Law.
View grant outcomes.
UC Berkeley School of Law
This grant will support the development of the Pre-Law Online Curriculum, a web-based, mobile-friendly pre-law advising center that is free and available to all. This system will provide instructional modules, community discussions, and online resources to students preparing for law school.
View grant outcomes.
The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois on behalf of The John Marshall Law School
This project will study the efficacy of an intervention to enhance law student writing skills and create a scalable, replicable model to improve student writing for use in other law schools.
View grant outcomes.
University of St. Thomas School of Law
Over the last few years, a growing number of law schools have implemented a required first-year course/program focused on professional development or professional identity formation. To date, there has been no assessment of which of the courses/programs are most successful in advancing students with respect to learning outcomes associated with professional development. This project would be designed to assess these courses/ programs and to identify the most successful pedagogies.
View grant outcomes.
Dillard University
The LEAD Program has identified key components to student success based upon the experiences of the 2018 and 2019 LEAD cohorts. By 2022, LEAD will have data on almost 100 predominately African American students to analyze and share with the pipeline community and the legal academy. By engaging in robust data collection, analysis, and assessment, LEAD can help to develop scalable, data driven best practices for pipeline programs around the United States.
Indiana University Maurer School of Law
The project seeks to...
- Evaluate a replication on the State Bar of California’s July 2019 Bar exam of a Productive Mindset intervention that improved passage rates on its July 2018 exam.
- Examine predictors of bar passage in a data set compiled with over 7,000 takers across three years of California’s exams.
- Scale the Productive Mindset program to three new jurisdictions and examine predictors of passage in a multi-jurisdictional data set of over 10,000 takers of the July 2021 bar exam.
Wayne State University
The Damon J. Keith Pre-Law Summer Institute program targets undergraduate students who are graduates of the Detroit Public School Community District (DPSCD) and interested in attending law school. It will provide participants with LSAT preparation, academic skills-building, law school application and admissions support, and mentors.