The American Bar Association is considering deep-sixing a rule requiring full-time faculty to teach at least half of every law school’s upper-level courses—a proposal likely to ruffle the feathers of professors who fear it would allow schools to essentially outsource the second and third year to adjuncts.
Eliminating the requirement would provide law schools more room to experiment with how they deliver classroom instruction and would also allow them to cut costs, according to the ABA committee that proposed the change. “This is another way in which the standards are moving toward looking at outcomes rather than inputs,” said Barry Currier, who oversees the ABA’s section of legal education. “What if a school graduates 100 percent of its students and 100 percent of them pass the bar? Should the accreditation standards say, ‘Sorry, still no good because you don’t have a majority of your upper years taught by full-time faculty?’”
