UNH Law—A Bright Spot in Legal Education

We have posted many times about the problems in and facing legal education—e.g., here. But a bright spot in legal education is the University of New Hampshire School of Law (UNH Law). In an article in the New Hampshire Bar News, Kristen Senz explains:

In confronting the nationwide decline in law school applications and enrollments that many in legal education have called “a crisis,” while also navigating a merger with the University of New Hampshire, the UNH School of Law has taken a different approach than most other law schools in the country.

Instead of accepting less-qualified applicants or making more offers of acceptance to keep classrooms full, as other law schools have done, UNH Law (formerly Franklin Pierce Law Center) allowed its student body to shrink, made some strategic hires, expanded programming and overall adopted a strategy to “double-down on excellence,” as Interim Dean Jordan Budd recently put it.

“I think there was broad consensus that a volume strategy, for lack of a better phrase, simply would not work in New Hampshire,” says Budd. “There’s just not enough people here. For our law school to survive and thrive, we will always need to fill our classrooms with people from across the region and across the globe.”

In the past three years, the total number of students attending UNH Law has dropped nearly 30 percent, from 305 in 2013, to 217 this year. But the law school has consistently offered admission to roughly 54 percent of applicants, according to statistics the school provided, even though the number of applications decreased by nearly 22 percent between fall 2013 and fall 2015. The average LSAT score of the lowest-scoring 25 percent of incoming students has also remained consistent, at 153.

During that same three-year period, New Hampshire’s only law school has climbed a whopping 55 spots in the annual US News and World Report rankings, landing this year at 82, while securing the fifth-highest ranking in intellectual property, up from ninth last year. As its rankings increase and the law school attracts national publicity, as it did last year when a national study pointed to its Daniel Webster Scholars program as a model for practical legal education, Budd says the school is gaining a higher profile.

The full article is available here.
 
And information about UNH Law’s pioneering Daniel Webster Scholars program is available here.

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