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71 J. Legal Educ. 673 (2021-2022)
JD-next: A Randomized Experiment of an Online Scalable Program to Prepare Diverse Students for Law School

handle is hein.journals/jled71 and id is 681 raw text is: 673 JD-Next: A Randomized Experiment of an Online Scalable Program to Prepare Diverse Students for Law School Katherine C. Cheng, Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Legg Burross, Matt Charles, Cayley Balser, Ran Li and Christopher Robertson I. Introduction Imagine starting a medical degree without having studied science as an undergraduate. Without having exposure to the basic content, how can potential students be confident that they are on the right academic path? Without training in the specific skills needed, how can they succeed on that path? In the health professions, graduate programs of education have solutions to these problems. Before matriculating as medical students, applicants are typically required to take a relevant curriculum, including courses like organic chemistry and biology, as undergraduates. If they graduate without doing so, and later choose to go to medical school, they can take a post-baccalaureate program to fill in the gaps and demonstrate their ability to learn such material. In contrast, for law, the juris doctorate (JD) has no particular curriculum as a prerequisite and lacks a systematic approach to exposing potential students to the skills and methods of legal education. Matriculants thus arrive to JD programs with widely varying preparations, some having studied chemistry as undergraduates, others having studied economics or literature. Few have learned the skills of case reading and analysis, which will be needed on the first day of law school. Of course, some students will have advantages-for example, if they have attorneys or other highly educated professionals in their families. Some may even spend money and time to take expensive preparation courses. But these advantages can just exacerbate disparities. The American JD also lacks a systematic approach to preparing diverse populations to succeed in the study of law. Moreover, the field lacks systematic and valid measures of prospective students' ability to learn legal skills from cases, as in law school classes. Katherine C. Cheng, Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Legg Burross, Matt Charles, Cayley Balser, Ran Li, and Christopher Robertson are all affiliated with the University of Arizona. Corresponding author Robertson is also Professor of Law at Boston University, ctroo@BU.edu. The research team thanks the AccessLex Institute for support of this project, and the collaborative support of Marc Miller, Keith Swisher, and Rob Williams. David Klieger of ETS Inc. provided helpful feedback on preliminary drafts. Journal of Legal Education, Volume 71, Number 4 (Summer 2022)

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