The verdict is unanimous: CUNY School of Law keeps outdoing itself. Two recent achievements brought accolades to the 25-year-old school, whose clinical programs are routinely cited in the country's top 10. CUNY Law – led by Dean Michelle J. Anderson – has posted the highest New York State Bar Exam pass rate in its history (82.75 percent) and has been selected to join an elite group of law schools nationwide to analyze and shape future legal education.
The panel of representatives from 10 law schools – including prestigious Georgetown, Harvard and NYU – is being organized by the Carnegie Foun-dation for the Advancement of Teaching and Stanford Law School. The invitation to participate in the three-year study follows the release of several glowing public reports from the Carnegie Foundation as well as U.S. News & World Report's annual law school rankings.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has called CUNY School of Law "an institution of incomparable value" and has praised the school's leadership for "innovations and tireless advancement of public interest law."
The request to join the current small working group came from Larry Kramer, dean of the Stanford Law School, and Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Their creation of the group flows out of an earlier report issued by the Carnegie Foundation that cited CUNY School of Law for its ground-breaking approach to merging instruction in the clinical practice of law with the traditional law school curricula covering such subjects as torts, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. Students in all three years of study at CUNY School of Law study practical lawyering skills; by the third year, they are required to represent clients in court in real cases under the supervision of faculty members.
"Each of the schools we are inviting to participate have been in the vanguard of assessing their own curricula in recent years," Shulman and Kramer wrote in their letter to CUNY School of Law Dean Michelle J. Anderson inviting her participation in the evaluative project.
Dean Anderson said CUNY Law is delighted to join the working group. "It's a nice coup for the school," she said. "The Carnegie Foundation recognized the innovative pedagogy that melds theory and practice instituted at CUNY School of Law's founding, and now the school is being called upon for its expertise in that area."
