Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage? asks the question, and says the answer is “no”. That is certainly what our study here, several years ago, showed.
Recent Bluessky Posts- Jotwell Int'l: Kathleen Claussen, International Regulatory Geopolitics, JOTWELL (9/9/26) (reviewing Lucian Cernat & Hannah Preuss, Soft Power, Hard Standards: How Strong Is the 'Brussels Effect' in International Standards?, __ J. World Trade __ (forthcoming 2026)), intl.jotwell.com/internationa.... September 9, 2026 Jotwell
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- Private right of action (in court) vs government-must-initiate enforcement (before court or via agency). So the difference from the econ or polisci dichotomy is less than it may seem? September 8, 2026 Michael Froomkin
Is the Miami study publicly available?
I doubt it. It must have been a decade or so ago, at a time when the bar pass rate had dipped and we were looking for possible causes. Neither course selection nor core course professor seemed to matter in a statistically significant way. Bad grades overall were a strong predictor of failure: if you did very badly in law school, you were much more likely to fail the bar. Other than that, as far as I recall, we didn’t come up with anything much.
We eventually came to the conclusion, based on anecdotal evidence only, that too many people were skipping the bar review lectures and going to the beach. We started giving scary lectures about the dangers of this practice and also taking attendance more often in our own classes in order to emphasize the virtues of turning up. Scores went back up.