FAMU Law School Still Facing Growing Pains
Suffering from poor bar passage rates, interim dean
restructures curriculum to better prepare students for exam
By Marlon A. Walker

ORLANDO, Fla.
Since becoming interim dean of Florida A&M University College of Law, James M. Douglas has overseen the school’s relocation into a new $30 million building, revamped the curriculum for first-year students and presided over the graduation of the school’s second class since its reincarnation.

Even those positive steps weren’t enough to keep the law program out of the news, as word spread that its bar passage rate was falling well below the rest of the public schools in the state university system. Last July, only 27 of FAMU’s 51 law graduates passed the exam. Of those, only 13 were Black as the school has had difficulty recruiting Black students.

But Douglas says it’s still a bit too early to analyze or criticize the school’s record. The law school has graduated 138 students since re-opening its doors to the first group of students in 2002.

“It’s crazy to talk about what type of legal program we have when we only graduated [two] classes. It’s a waste of time,” he says. “This is still in its infancy stage. We haven’t started to grow.”

FAMU officials point to results from the latest bar exam for reason to be optimistic. Fifty-seven percent of FAMU students passed the bar exam, up from the 53 percent in July.

“The rate itself is an improvement,” says Mildred Graham, the school’s director of development and alumni affairs. “Certainly the more times we take it, we expect we’ll have improvement with every opportunity we have to take the test.”

Bar passage is crucial to the accreditation of any law school by the American Bar Association, which also looks at the school’s facility, curriculum and job placement record after graduation. Douglas says reorganizing the law school’s curriculum was one of his first objectives after coming to the school as interim dean. He says he felt the move was necessary to better prepare students for the bar exam and life after graduation.