Is This Christian Law School Lying About Its Success?

Liberty is unranked because USNWR only ranks accredited law schools.
That said, the rankings are a poor guide to quality, though they are a guide.
But bar pass rate is a low factor in ranking.

Your friend is right about the different states having different difficulty of passing. There’s another reason California has a low pass rate – you don’t have to go to law school to take the exam. Most states require you be a law school graduate to sit for the bar exam, but California lets anyone who pays the fee take the test. They have an incredibly low pass rate because of all the people just taking the exam to take it (often people in prison or just out of prison).

On Liberty’s favor though: VA is known as one of the hardest bars in the state so a high pass rate is pretty good. You should look at the pass rates of just VA schools to see how they stand.

I suspect that 18 of their students took the bar exam and 17 passed (that fits the statistics given as would some multiple of 18 [up to 54 with 3 failing, I doubt 72 or higher as the entering class size is only 70 and they claim to be expanding]).

University of Virginia, which Liberty admits had a higher pass rate, has a class size of about 360 (though some may not have taken the Virginia bar exam). It also doesn’t boast about the pass rate instead emphasizing the jobs gotten.

ABA accreditation is kind of a big deal. But it shouldn’t be that hard to get if you’re serious about providing a good legal education. The ABA looks for schools that 1) maintain an ethical code substantially similar to their model; 2) possesses faculty who have reached a certain level of academic achievement by way of peer-reviewed academic articles and significant accomplishments in the law; 3) has a substantial law library; 4) has a substantial campus; and 5) uses a rigorous and competitive student-selection process. A “provisional” accreditation means that the school falls short in one or more of these areas but has presented the ABA accreditation committee with a plan to remedy those shortcomings.

The ABA website does not indicate why Liberty has been given a provisional accreditation. My guess would be that it falls a little short of ABA standards in either student selection and ethics (Liberty may give a preference to Christians and particularly to evangelicals) and maybe in the academic credentials of its faculty. And it would be B.S. for the faculty to complain about an “anti-Christian bias” in the legal academy; there is no “Christian” interpretation of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code or the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Those subjects may not be as sexy as church-state relations, but in real life, there is very little demand for that sort of thing. So if their scholars want to write about the kinds of things legal scholars all over the country write about, they’ll get their publications in somewhere — maybe not in Harvard or Yale or Stanford but there will be prestigious enough academic journals to publish serious legal scholarship, assuming that’s what Liberty’s faculty is turning out.

Let me preface this by saying I’m a student at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Here in North Carolina, there are two schools with provisional ABA accreditation: Elon and Charlotte Law. They’re provisionally accredited because the ABA only gives full accreditation after a few years of provisional accreditation (5 years?). Perhaps Liberty Law is just too new to be fully accredited. A provisional accreditation under this rule basically puts the school under closer and more frequent scrutiny from the ABA, but any student graduating from the school while it has provisional accreditation is deemed to have graduated from an ABA-accredited school, whether that school is given permanent accreditation or not.

Bar passage rates mean nothing. Campbell University has the highest NC bar passage rate, but nobody calls them the best law school in the state. In fact, most would say that Duke is unquestionably the best followed by UNC and Wake. Recently ABA rules have been revised to allow schools to give credit for bar review courses. Most of the top schools don’t do it, but many of the lower schools do. Liberty has a very strict curriculum. Most schools allow you to pick classes after your first year; it appears Liberty does not. Courses like Evidence and Business Associations appear on the bar exam but are not mandatory at most schools; they are mandatory at Liberty. See Curricular Offerings, Liberty University School of Law, http://www.liberty.edu/academics/law/index.cfm?PID=8966. This may explain the high bar passage rates.

A quick check on the Law School Admission Council’s Official Guide gives the following stats on bar passage rates:
Liberty University – No information provided to ABA/LSAC
Stanford University – 97 takers in CA, 89% pass rate (compared to 65% overall in CA)
University of North Carolina – 156 takers in NC, 87% pass rate (compared to 74% overall)
Campbell University – 86 takers in NC, 97% pass rate (compared to 74% overall)

And the same guide on libraries says:
Liberty University – 228,387 volumes, 206,022 titles
Stanford University – 480,130 volumes, 280,302 titles
University of North Carolina – 527,954 volumes, 137,536 titles
Campbell University – 191,519 volumes, 47,652 titles

So clearly Liberty’s library isn’t inferior in its size.

I have no idea if Liberty has a good program or not, but I went to a Christian undergraduate institution that’s one of the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country. Just because they’re Christian doesn’t mean they’re all bad.

All new law schools must go through a period of mandatory accreditation. Liberty law is provisionally accredited simply because it hasn’t been around long enough to apply for full accreditation. The comments about the statistical significance of a high passage rate for a small class are perhaps valid, but the current 1L class has well over a hundred students, and the school is growing steadily. I suspect that any statistical concerns should be readily confirmed or denied within a very few years. What this blog has proven is that people are afraid to admit that those who band together in Christ might actually do something better than everyone else. What even atheists should be able to appreciate is that those who are especially purposeful in their endeavors have stand a greater chance of success.

Mr. Noodleguy, my name is Harrell Canning and I am a 3L at Liberty law. I’m set to finish in December (I was the first transfer law student, and my credits dictate that I finish in the middle of the year). I’m sure my identity could be verified in a number of ways–perhaps on the Liberty law “Facebook” page. In any event, I’m not sure about the comments made at the ceremony, but in an e-mail sent to the student body on October 16th at 4:02 p.m. Dean Staver indicated that he believed the passage rate would place our students in the “top five percent“. Either someone has reported this wrong, or he misspoke at the ceremony. Of course, because Dean Staver represents a Christian body, he is expected by everyone else to be perfect. When he is not, people seem to relish pointing out his misstatements. Perhaps someone will hold you to these standards someday, too.

Is the “Friendly Atheist” lying about what Staver actually said?

“That’s going to put us in the top 5 percent of all law schools in the country,” said Mat Staver, Dean of Liberty University School of Law.

And here:

Most new law schools take years to break through the 70% bar passage rate, and the majority of established law schools never exceed 80%.

Is the friendly atheist honest enough to print a retraction?

Exactly. Wrong again in his facts. Of course I don’t expect a retraction anytime soon.