The State Bar Association of North Dakota has proposed a novel way to fund the state’s financially struggling law school: Hike up the fee to file a civil lawsuit and funnel the additional money to the campus.

Bar association president Zachary Pelham said in an interview Wednesday that the proposal was not based on law school funding models elsewhere, though he later learned that Arkansas uses a portion of court filing fees for its public law schools.  (Barry Currier, the American Bar Association’s managing director for accreditation and legal education said he doesn’t know if any other states fund their law schools in this manner since the ABA does not track that.)