Five years ago, an alarm went off over the high number of law school graduates in Mississippi who were failing the state bar exam required to get their license to practice.
The University of Mississippi School of Law has been able to turn its numbers around, going from a percentage passing rate in the mid-60s on the first attempt to one in the mid-80s in just the past two years.
“We’re very close to reaching our goal, which is at least 90% pass on the first time out,” Susan Duncan, the dean of the law school, told the Greenwood Rotary Club Tuesday. “So that’s been just so fantastic, because the worst thing in the world is if you have to talk to a student who didn’t pass the bar. It’s horrible.”
Duncan said the secret to the improvement has been an intentional effort to provide additional academic support to students who appear to be struggling with their law school classes.
Those who complete their first year with a grade point average of 2.8 or below (less than a B average) are required to take an additional legal analysis course. Then in their third and final year, they are required to take a course on preparing for the bar exam.
The latter course, she said, is so effective that students who aren’t required to take it still sign up for it. “That class is packed because they realize that course is really good,” said Duncan.
The law school also recommends that its graduates take a privately offered bar review course the summer after they graduate, but for some students, the cost is prohibitive, Duncan said.
For that reason, she is looking at ways to raise money to help defray the cost for students with economic hardships.
Duncan has been the dean of the University of Mississippi Law School since 2017, after serving as interim dean at the University of Louisville’s law school. Her arrival in Mississippi coincided with the tail end of a five-year drop in law school enrollments nationwide. Since then, the opposite has been happening. Over the past five years, the number of first-year law students at the University of Mississippi has jumped from 115 to 182, an increase of almost 60%.
“It has been just shocking,” Duncan said of the enrollment rise.
The increase, according to Duncan, is attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted undergraduates to continue their education and workers to return to school, and to the higher profile the legal profession received during the presidential administration of Donald Trump. “They call that the ‘Trump bump,’ and a lot of law students were coming because they saw things going on in the world that they wanted to be part of and they saw lawyers had a real role in that,” she said.
Duncan said she is proud that the increased enrollment has been accompanied by increased diversity. Of the current first-year law students at the university in Oxford, 26% are non-white, including 13% African American and 8% Hispanic. More than half are female.
“Diversity was really, really important to me, especially when you think of the history of Ole Miss,” she said.
The law school, which opened in 1854, did not admit its first Black student until 1963, the year after James Meredith integrated the university under federal court order.
Duncan said even before moving to Mississippi she knew of the state’s reputation for talented litigators.
“Now that I live here, I can tell you you are the best storytellers I’ve ever heard,” she said. “So no wonder you’re great trial attorneys. You just know how to talk to a jury.”
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
