The American Bar Association’s adoption two years ago of an accreditation standard requiring law schools to provide students with six credit hours of experiential learning has put the ABA on a collision course with the tenure-track faculties of American law schools.
The new requirement will apply to students who begin law study this fall, and law school administrators are scrambling to find teachers for additional sections. Under Standard 303, an experiential course “must be a simulation course, a law clinic, or a field placement.” Standard 303 is currently the central element of broader, long-term effort by the ABA to require that the law schools better prepare students for legal practice.
