ABA plan to boost law students' hands-on experience spurs criticism about accreditor overreach

Reuters

20-05-2025

May 20 (Reuters) - The American Bar Association's proposal to double the number of hands-on learning credits that law students must complete to graduate has sparked criticism that the accrediting organization is going too far in controlling the curriculum for legal education.
Under the proposed change to the ABA's law school accreditation standards, the number of credits for hands-on learning, known as experiential learning, which students must take would go to 12 from the current six. Students would need to earn at least three of those credits in a clinic or a field placement. And none of the experiential credits — which include clinics, externships, or simulation courses that aim to recreate real legal work — could be taken in a law student's first year.
The ABA, which says that the change is necessary to produce practice-ready graduates, adopted the six-credit experiential learning requirement in 2014, but surveys of recent graduates and legal employers continue to find that young lawyers are unprepared, according to the proposal, opens new tab.
The ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar is gathering public comments on the proposal through June 30 with final adoption possible in August. If approved, the changes would go into effect in 2030.
Supporters and opponents are making their cases now, before the comment period closes.
'The ABA ought not to be in the business — for the most part — of increasing programmatic requirements that are expensive,' Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor Daniel Rodriguez told Reuters. He also said doubling the experiential credit requirement leaves less room in law students' schedules to take upper-level seminars or subjects tested on the bar exam.
The ABA proposal acknowledged that clinics are more expensive for schools to deliver than other types of classes due to their low student-to-faculty ratios but said their costs are in line with other low-enrollment courses. The ABA did not provide an estimated cost to schools for meeting the proposed new requirement but said schools would have several years to reallocate resources.
The ABA has not produced any empirical studies that show law graduates who took 12 or more experiential credits are better lawyers than those who took fewer, Rodriguez said.
University of Miami law dean David Yellen said in a post on the law school-focused PrawfsBlawg, opens new tab that the ABA proposal goes beyond what other professional school accreditors require. Doctors, dentists and veterinarians complete more hands-on training than lawyers, but those rules are imposed by schools or licensing requirements, not by their accreditors.
The claims of ABA overreach come as the organization faces threats from the Trump administration to strip it of its status as the federally recognized accreditor of U.S. law schools.
Supporters of the change, including the Clinical Legal Education Association, say critics are overstating the cost of experiential courses and underestimating how flexible and innovative they can be.
Live client clinics cost more than large lectures, said University of Washington in St. Louis clinical professor Robert Kuehn, but so do many other types of law courses. His research shows that law schools that offer more experiential learning opportunities don't charge higher tuition than those with less.
'It's really a choice about how schools spend their money,' Kuehn said. 'It's not that schools don't have the money to do it.'
Other ABA curricular requirements for professional responsibility and upper-level writing coursework haven't generated the same level of scrutiny or claims of regulatory overreach as experiential education, said Gautam Hans, a clinical professor at Cornell Law School.
The debate over the experiential credit requirement also reflects the longstanding tension between clinical and doctrinal teaching, said University of Florida Levin College of Law clinical professor Sarah Wolking.
'The critics are doctrinal or podium professors,' she said. 'These are people who feel threatened by the idea that nobody is going to fill their niche seminars.'
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