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Welcome Message from the President
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Rule IV Once Again
In 1976, Cooley Law School underwent what is known as a Rule Four hearing. It’s the proceeding used by the accreditation committee when they want to try to decertify an approved law school.
The 1976 hearing came only a year after we had been provisionally approved by the bar. We won that contest hands down, as the four commissioners unanimously found in our favor on every point at issue.
After that victory things seemed to improve. We achieved our full and final accreditation by the ABA in 1978.
Sadly, however, the attitude of the powers that be had not changed. In April of 1983 we received another one of Jim White’s action letters this time reporting on the decisions of the accreditation committee at their April 1983 meeting. They had heard from the Investigator they had sent in 1982 and they had heard from Dean LeDuc.
Still, they weren’t satisfied. Unless we reduced our student teacher ratio to 30:1, they threatened to convene another Rule Four hearing.
Don and I discussed their demands. He thought that hiring three more teachers would bring us down to the required ratio, and while we both agreed that there was no published standard requiring a 30:1 student teacher ratio, we also agreed that nothing was to be gained by further confrontation.
So we hired three more teachers and Dean LeDuc wrote to the chairman of the accreditation committee in June informing her of that fact.
Case closed? Not quite. On August 31, 1983 we received another ponderous epistle from Jim White, this one announcing that we would in fact, be subjected to a Rule Four hearing to take place either on October 21, 1983 or November 11, 1983 before Dean Peter Winograd of the University of New Mexico Law School.
Winograd was a certified elitist; Brown University A.B., Harvard University J.D., and an L.L.M. from New York University. He had been an Assistant Dean at both NYU and Georgetown Law Schools. He was also thoroughly credentialed as a member of the legal educational establishment, through his involvement in the Law School Admissions Council, The Association of American Law Schools, The American Law Institute and most extensively the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.
In short, Peter Winograd could not be expected to look very kindly on a non university law school, teaching practical legal scholarship to a student body made up of a cross section of average college graduates.
Dean LeDuc replied to Jim White promptly. He pointed out that we had employed three additional professors, bringing our student/teacher ratio down to 29.99:1. He reminded White that he had so informed Justice Wahl, chairman of the accreditation committee of that fact by a letter sent on June 24, 1983. Noting that his letter of June 24 had never been acknowledged either by White or by the committee, he went on to say that the three new faculty members were already teaching classes in the September term.
And why, LeDuc asked, wasn’t his letter of June 24 listed among the letters and documents to be considered by Peter Winograd, the Rule Four hearing officer? Did the committee think the size of our faculty was irrelevant to the student teacher issue? How indeed could a student/teacher ratio be calculated except by dividing the number of students by the number of teachers?
Our Dean was on a roll. He took White to task over his description of the Rule Four hearing.
"Your letter indicates that the proceedings are ‘relatively informal’ and conducted ‘in accordance with normal rules and practices for administrative hearings.’ I taught administrative law for seven years and in the past have conducted hundreds of administrative hearings, including license revocations. If your hearings are relatively informal, they cannot be conducted in accordance with normal rules and practices for administrative hearings. You state that ‘testimony is not under oath.’ Normal administrative practice, especially where license revocation or decertification is involved, requires sworn testimony…"
He concluded with a flat rejection of Jim White’s purported notice of a Rule Four hearing:
"Your letter is not in compliance with [the provisions of Rule Four] in at least two particulars: first, there is no notification of the school’s ‘apparent deficiencies;’ and, second, there is no notice of a hearing ‘on a certain date.’
Don sent me a copy of his drafted letter. That same day I sent him this memo:
"Thank you for an advanced copy of your letter. I would not change a single comma. I approve not only its content, but its sassy tone."
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This Page was last updated on:
09/08/2006