Since launching our grantmaking activities in 2014, we have awarded over $21 million in support of our research priorities: access, affordability, and the value of legal education.
Awarded Grants
Grant Program
Grant Status
The NALP Foundation for Law Career Research and Education
The project proposes AccessLex fund 10 law schools' participation in The NALP Foundation and NALP’s U.S. Law School Alumni Employment and Satisfaction Study, for a three-year period: 6 HBCU law schools and 4 other new law schools with significant populations of under-represented groups. The additional data from these schools’ alumni will enhance the study’s inclusivity, providing important new insights for the profession, and the new participating schools with actionable data and benchmarking.
Behavioral Insights Institute
Demographic matching between law students from underrepresented groups and law school faculty increases these students’ access to research opportunities and quality employment and impacts their sense of belonging. The sense of belonging influences students’ academic performance, course selections, J.D. degree completion, and bar exam success.
View grant outcomes.
The Pennsylvania State University
Led by Dickinson Law, and in collaboration with other law schools that are leading this Antiracist Reformation, the ADI will offer a three-week online, hybrid, or resident program that invites fellows to participate in programs designed to facilitate Antiracist institution-building.
Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Enhance and evaluate the Productive Mindset Intervention for the California, Colorado, and Utah bar exams in July 2022 and 2023. Examine the predictors of bar performance in a dataset comprising over 15,000 test-takers across 7 administrations of the bar exams in California, Colorado, and Utah.
CALI - The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction
The purpose of this grant is to extend the reach of Academic Success Professionals and help law students become better learners in the unique law school environment. This is especially useful for first-generation and underrepresented law students.
The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois on behalf of The John Marshall Law School
This project will study the efficacy of an intervention to enhance law student writing skills and create a scalable, replicable model to improve student writing for use in other law schools.
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University of Hawai'I William S. Richardson School of Law
The project consists of two interventions – a MBE Intensive Course by Kaplan and a new Advanced Legal Analysis Course – that are designed to improve the legal analytical skills and bar passage prospects of students at the University of Hawai’i, William S. Richardson School of Law. These two interventions are components of a schoolwide effort to raise awareness and address the challenge of bar passage rates.
New England Law Boston
This project aims to reduce the bar passage barrier by training law students to rate their ability to self-assess on certain critical study practices and test-taking skills. New England Law Boston will measure the relationship between students’ academic performance and students’ assessment of their own skill levels and the improvement in students’ ability to accurately self-assess.
The Law College Association of the University of Arizona - James E. Rogers College of Law
JD-Next is an expanded program for the 2020 cohort and will serve two objectives: 1) to prepare diverse students for success in law school and 2) to provide a valid and reliable test for predicting law school performance. By linking these two goals together, JD-Next aims to achieve strong predictors of success without racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic biases that affect standardized tests.