UMass Law School Gets Provisional Accreditation

I won’t bury the lede: The UMass law school has been recommended for provisional accreditation by the ABA’s Accreditation Committee. The next step will be a consideration of that recommendation by the ABA’s Council on Legal Education. A commenter on a related post claims that the Council has always accepted the recommendation of the Committee.

After receiving provisional accreditation, the school undergoes at least three years of review to move from provisional to full accreditation. That will be an ongoing challenge for the school, but from the perspective of students, provisional accreditation gets them the right to take the bar in any state they want, so provisional is good enough right now.

As a longtime critic of the law school, I put aside my reservations for now and offer a tip of the hat to UMass for coming this far — they’ve hit at least one (and the most important) milestone they laid out in their application. I still have serious reservations about the time and effort being expended by UMass to address an area of the state workforce where we don’t lack for skilled employees or academic opportunities, but in a discussion strictly based on achieving stated milestones, the school deserves credit.

Crossposted at Pioneer Institute’s blog.