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 State Bar of California
Grant Title: Investigating the Benefits of Live Remote Proctor of Bar Exam
The State Bar seeks to evaluate the benefits of live remote proctoring (LRP) for the First-Year Law Students’ Examination (FYLSX). Previous remote FYLSX’s have been proctored relying on software recording and AI-based monitoring. This project will evaluate if LRP, 1) reduces false positive violations; 2) lessens login and other technology issues examinees encounter; 3) improves overall test experience for examinees.
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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.
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Legal Education Access Pipeline (LEAP)
Legal Education Access Pipeline (LEAP), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization now in its third year of operations. LEAP was established to diversify the legal sector and serves college juniors, seniors, and recent graduates from racial and socioeconomic backgrounds that are underrepresented in the legal profession. Leaning on research about successful diversity pipelines and education access initiatives, LEAP’s programs address the primary barriers to law school for the participants they serve.
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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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Dillard University
The LEAD Program has identified key components to student success based upon the experiences of the 2018 and 2019 LEAD cohorts. By 2022, LEAD will have data on almost 100 predominately African American students to analyze and share with the pipeline community and the legal academy. By engaging in robust data collection, analysis, and assessment, LEAD can help to develop scalable, data driven best practices for pipeline programs around the United States.
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)
The Law School and Bar Exam Study Skills Fellowship consists of five law school professionals (Fellows) who write 3-5 self-paced instructional tutorials each (15-25 tutorials) covering the area of the Bar Exam Study Skills. The goal of the fellowship is to author lessons that help develop students’ critical-thinking skills.
Read more about the Law School and Bar Exam Study Skills Fellowship.
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New York Law School
This grant supports New York Law School's efforts to dramatically enhance bar performance in its longstanding Evening Division, which offers a J.D. degree in four years (eight semesters). The Evening Division provides access to legal education for generations of underrepresented or economically disadvantaged groups working professionals, a significant number of whom have been members of historically underrepresented or economically disadvantaged groups.
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UC Hastings College of the Law
This project would test the validity of the Nevada bar exam and, by extension, state bar exams generally. The objective is to determine whether and to what extent state bar exams are predictive of practice capacities.
To read more, please visit A better bar exam? Law profs weigh in on whether test accurately measures skills required for law practice.
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University of Pennsylvania
The Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education received a grant to analyze the law school admissions market. A set of regression models were estimated for predicting the prices charged by law schools reporting data to the American Bar Association. Similarly, institutional characteristics such as LSAT scores, bar passage rates and employment outcomes were mapped.