A new, comprehensive analysis of bar passage rates by graduates of 192 U.S. law schools has found that LSU Law graduates rank among the nation’s very best.
The analysis, titled “The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools that Overperform on the Bar Exam,” was recently published by CJ Ryan, an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, and Derek Muller, a Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law.
LSU Law is No. 13 in the analysis’ ranking of law schools producing graduates with the best bar passage rates, and it is the highest-ranked SEC law school in the analysis. The only other SEC schools in the top 25 rankings are the University of Georgia School of Law (No. 14) and Vanderbilt Law School (No. 25).
Ryan and Muller began their research by accounting for law schools’ incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar exam passage rate for each school. They then examined each school’s aggregated performance on the bar exam tests for which its graduates sat, based on relative and absolute performance, weighing the difficulty of each state’s bar exam. The analysis evaluated six years of bar exam performance, 2014-2019, to exclude any impacts from the pandemic.
The analysis notes most top-performing law schools in the ranking “are not spending extravagantly more resources, and in many instances are spending less, than other schools to achieve bar success,” adding they also tend to overwhelmingly measure bar success “not by an ultimate bar passage rate within two years of graduation but by ensuring that every student who attempts the bar exam passes on the first attempt.”
You can access the full paper here.
