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1983 Newsl. 1 (1983)

handle is hein.aals/aalsnews1983 and id is 1 raw text is: NWET ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN LAW SCHOOLS * ONE DUPONT CIRCLE o WASHINGTON, D.C. 20036 NO. 83-1 FEB. 1983 PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE David H. Vernon L m E Over the past several years, the American Bar Association (A.B.A.) and the Association of American Law Schools (A.A.L.S.) have worked cooperatively in carrying out their accreditation (A.B.A.) and merbership (A.A.L.S.) functions. While initial inspections appropriately are carried out independently -- they take place at different times in a school's history -- all reinspections are joint ventures, with a single questionnaire being used and a single inspection team preparing one report for use by the two accreditation committees. The advantages of the joint effort are obvious, the cooperation between the A.B.A. and A.A.L.S. clearly should continue. While duplication is avoided by the use of joint inspection teams, consideration of the single report by two independent committees involves substantial duplication of effort, at least to the extent that the two committees focus on identical or very similar issues as they tend to do. While the goal of both organizations is to assure the quality of the educational process and the academic integrity of the inspected school's program, the focus of the two organizations may be sufficiently different to warrant evaluations of the schools that reflect the different focus. As the official national accrediting agency of legal education, the A.B.A. must focus on a variety of details, all of which collectively go to the quality of the educational program. Many of the details, however, when viewed separately, relate to the quality issue only indirectly. A.A.L.S. functions more as a learned membership society than it does as an accrediting agency. As such, it may be that the A.A.L.S. should concentrate almost exclusively on qualitative issues -- those that relate directly to the academic and scholarly aspects of the operations -- while leaving most of the quantitative issues to the A.B.A. process. The suggestion is not that A.A.L.S. ignore quantitative matters completely but that it take a substantially less active interest in them than it currently does. Thus, perhaps A.A.L.S. ought not to worry much about the number of seats in the library, or even the number of books, but should focus directly on whether the students in fact are being stimulated to work to their full capacity and whether the library collection is sufficient to support broadly-based scholarship by faculty and students. While it certainly is true that the quality of a school's educational program will suffer if the university with which it is affiliated is imposing an overhead tax on the law school to support other programs, it may be that A.A.L.S. should leave that and similar issues to the A.B.A. and concentrate on what it knows best, the overall quality of the academic (Continued on page 2) ADIIU: JANES M. LA BARBERA, AZ3U,1PA I r UIIA.t, I U EX1 (Li1~IVF DIRECTOR .JOHN A. HAIJMAN Printing and Distribution Courtesy of Foundation Press, Inc. 011t>

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