Awarded Grants

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.

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This project will identify students’ knowledge gaps about the law school admissions process, negative views of Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), and financial barriers that lead to fewer application submissions, and fewer offers of acceptance.

The project aims to evaluate factors that will enhance the value and relevance of legal education, especially for historically underrepresented groups. The first objective is to create a nationwide archival dataset on lawyer rosters, lawyer disciplinary actions, and state occupational licensing requirements for lawyers in the United States from 1900 to 2018. Second, the research will investigate the effects of a host of law school and licensing policies that are relevant to the value of legal education.

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The project consists of two interventions – a MBE Intensive Course by Kaplan and a new Advanced Legal Analysis Course – that are designed to improve the legal analytical skills and bar passage prospects of students at the University of Hawai’i, William S. Richardson School of Law. These two interventions are components of a schoolwide effort to raise awareness and address the challenge of bar passage rates.

This project aims to reduce the bar passage barrier by training law students to rate their ability to self-assess on certain critical study practices and test-taking skills. New England Law Boston will measure the relationship between students’ academic performance and students’ assessment of their own skill levels and the improvement in students’ ability to accurately self-assess.

JD-Next is an expanded program for the 2020 cohort and will serve two objectives: 1) to prepare diverse students for success in law school and 2) to provide a valid and reliable test for predicting law school performance. By linking these two goals together, JD-Next aims to achieve strong predictors of success without racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic biases that affect standardized tests.

The project is an updated version of the Survey of Law Student Well-Being that was conducted in 2014 [for a summary of the findings, read Suffering in Silence: The Survey of Law Student Well Being and the Reluctance of Law Students to Seek Help for Substance Use and Mental Health Concerns, 66 J. Leg. Educ. 116 (2016)]. The updated version of the survey would seek to learn how law student well-being has changed since 2014. The overall goal will be to determine whether there have been changes in the prevalence of substance use and mental health issues among law students and the extent to which increased attention to law student (and lawyer) well-being in the last few years has affected the willingness of law students to get help.

The Preliminary Bar (Prelim) Tool-Kit at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Franklin Pierce School of Law administers a miniature version of the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) to students while they are still in school. Student results on the Prelim can then be used to inform students' personal trajectories of study and make cohort-level programming decisions to promote bar readiness, as opposed to the conventional approach where students turn to bar exam prep in earnest only after they graduate-- at which point, it is too late for the law school to be the strongest possible resource for these students.

The primary goal of this project is to increase access to the practice of law in California by bridging the gap between admission to law school and passing the bar exam. Phase I of the project will identify potential interventions through a combination of statistical analysis and by gaining input from stakeholders. Phase II will involve the implementation of at least two interventions identified in Phase I.