John Donahue’s blog post on the Yale Effect paper has a lot of interesting claims, some of which seem sound and some of which I’m less sure of, but I was struck in particular by this claim:
My colleague Roberta Romano notes that Barondes speculates that Yale law clerks may know less legal doctrine because of the school’s famous emphasis on theory. But Romano points out that bar review passage rates would at least give a sense of whether Yale Law students are deficient in acquiring knowledge of legal doctrine. To test this I thought one might look at July 2007 bar passage rates by school for the single largest state. As it turns out, across all non-California law schools with at least 15 applicants, Yale had the highest bar passage rate (94.1 percent). California bar exam takers from the University of Chicago and Harvard did quite well, but their passage rates of 86 and 87 percent were clearly lower than that of Yale students. Yale law graduates are looking better all the time!
Interesting point, although I doubt bar passage rates for Yale, Harvard, and Stanford have much to do with what law students actually learn at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. In my experience, passing the bar is mostly a matter of how seriously students take their BarBri lectures [UPDATE: Or whatever lectures or books students use] to learn the fantasy world of law that exists only on the bar exam. For better or worse, the overlap between what students learn in school and what is on the bar exam is relatively narrow. As a result, bar exam passage rates don’t shed much light on how much law students learn in school.
UPDATE: I should take this opportunity to link to the world’s greatest BarBri parody video. Hilarious.