Voting rights problems with the District of Columbia statehood bill

I’ve previously discussed the District of Columbia statehood bill, H.R. 51, and how, I think, D.C. statehood (or retrocession of D.C. to Maryland) should be contingent on a repeal of the Twenty-Third Amendment. The bill would carve out most of D.C. as a new state, but the remaining tiny enclave of federal buildings would remain, and that enclave would be entitled to three electoral votes.

One problem is a politically sticky first-mover question. If you condition statehood on repeal, a handful of states can effectively block statehood; if you grant statehood and hope for repeal, it may never happen.

I’ve tried to figure out what the remaining enclave looks like. The D.C. planning commission offers a sketch of that proposed residual district as of 2016. It mostly (but not entirely!) tracks with Census Tract 62.02, which, as of the 2010 census, had 33 inhabitants, and around 60 inhabitants as of 2018. This is imperfect, because it’s not entirely aligned with the census tract. And it doesn’t tell us how many are eligible voters. But it’s my start. And a 60-person jurisdiction receiving 3 electoral votes is, shall we say, suboptimal.

Under the Twenty-Third Amendment, Congress has power to choose how to award D.C.’s electors. So some have proposed interesting alternatives: give the votes to the winner of the Electoral College, or the winner of the national popular vote (if there’s such a thing). Another suggestion is that Congress doesn’t have to award them at all, which might lead to denominator problems in ascertaining a “majority” of the Electoral College. Now, the Twelfth Amendment says “majority of the whole number of electors appointed,” so perhaps those three aren’t counted as “appointed,” and we have (at least here) no problem.

But what Congress says it will do today isn’t necessarily what it’ll do tomorrow. There remains the possibility of Congress choosing three electors on its own, which seems to open up opportunities for mischief if we invite Congress to decide what to do with those electors. Since the Twenty-Third Amendment, Congress has assumed the people of D.C. vote for those electors. Shifting the power back to Congress invites a parliamentary-style choice. Only three electoral votes, but nevertheless congressional influence.

Section 206 of the bill anticipates this problem and provides for expedited repeal of the Amendment. But, there’s no guarantee that 2/3 of each house of Congress and 3/4 of the states would agree—or agree in time for a least one presidential election.

H.R. 51 also anticipates that there will be eligible voters remaining in the seat of government. Section 204 anticipates giving the remaining residents (33, 60, or some other tiny figure) the power to vote in federal elections. It says those residents are permitted to vote by absentee in the state where they last resided. (No word on what happens to those who never resided in another state.)

But this remedy in Section 204 is, in my view, constitutionally suspect. Congress has no power to establish voter qualifications—certainly not under the Elections Clause, as the Supreme Court said in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., and perhaps not elsewhere. Of course, other Supreme Court precedents, like Oregon v. Mitchell, have approved congressional rules on voter qualifications, like reducing the federal voting age to 18 and establishing minimum residency rules for presidential elections. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act does the same, but, as Professor Brian Kalt has, in my view, persuasively argued, is likely unconstitutional (even if exceedingly popular).

For Congress to extend this residual group of inhabitants voting rights—and by compelling states to accept them as voters—would raise, I think, a significant constitutional question. Granted, there’s case law on Congress’s side, as well as a similar (and exceedingly popular) statute for uniformed and overseas citizens—litigation challenging Section 204 might sweep away much more than Section 204. But it remains, I think, a challenge to consider.

Finally, Section 205 is misleadingly titled, “Repeal of law providing for participation of District of Columbia in election of President and Vice-President.” All this does is repeal a conforming amendment to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which sets the rules for Congress counting electoral votes from the states. It treats D.C. as a “state” for purposes of the rule. Repealing this statute doesn’t really do anything. Congress still has to count votes from D.C. under the Twenty-Third Amendment, if cast; if Congress casts those votes, then it has to count those votes, too, regardless of whether the Electoral Count Act gives express guidance of how to do so. Prior to the Electoral Count Act, Congress built up its own body of rules that, well, collapsed in the Election of 1876. The Electoral Count Act doesn’t “provid[e]” for D.C.’s participation in federal elections, and this section is only a technical provision that helps after the Twenty-Third Amendment is repealed.

In short, there are some election law problems with D.C. statehood absent a repeal of the Twenty-Third Amendment, and other problems that persist for the remaining few inhabitants in the residual district.

Should district court judges go "Reinhardt" on election laws during the coronavirus pandemic?

That’s the gist of Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos’s conclusion in a recent University of Chicago Law Review Online piece.

If there’s a saving grace here, it’s the ratio of lower court to Supreme Court activity: about twenty-to-one, so far, in the area of pandemic-related election litigation. The sheer volume of these suits guarantees that the vast majority of them will never be subjected to Supreme Court review. To be sure, the Court will probably decide additional pandemic-related cases—and decide them badly, misapplying sliding-scale scrutiny and furthering its ideological agenda. But as Judge Stephen Reinhardt once said of the Justices, their limited caseload means “[t]hey can’t catch ’em all.” What they don’t catch in the leadup to the November election is likely to be better, legally and democratically, than what they do.

Professor Stephanopoulos believes that the Supreme Court is wrong on law (and on the political consequences) on a variety of election law cases, including the Supreme Court’s recent decision in RNC v. DNC out of Wisconsin. But advocating for district courts to, for lack of a better phrase, “go Reinhardt” on the Supreme Court struck me as particularly notable.

The Washington State bar exam experiment of 2020 will be one to watch

The bar exam continues to confound licensing authorities in light of the coronavirus pandemic. There are many cohorts to consider, and there are many questions I still have.

Utah’s proposal is to offer diploma privilege to (1) first-time test-takers from (2) ABA-accredited schools whose overall first-time pass rate exceeded the Utah state average. I noted this was a fairly generous proposal considering how stingy “diploma privilege” has been, but that did cut some out. It certainly has not been without critique as too generous and too stingy. Nevada’s proposal updates the “performance test” for online administration. Time will tell what these or others may yield.

Washington, however, is doing something far more notable. To begin, it lowered its cut score from 135 to 133. This is a fairly modest change—most jurisdictions are in the 133 to 135 range, but it will certainly make the exam easier.

But Washington has gone a step farther. It announced the following change: all graduates of ABA law schools may have “diploma privilege” and earn admission. That includes, “The diploma privilege option will be available to applicants currently registered to take the examinations who are taking the tests for the first time and those who are repeating the tests.”

Now, this is remarkable in going beyond Utah for a couple of reasons. First, it applies to all ABA law grads, not simply those whose schools met the Utah threshold (although, as I noted, most Utah applicants would meet this test). Second, it includes repeaters, a cohort I’ve found mostly neglected in scrutinizing how to handle the bar exam.

I’m a little surprised on the repeater front, and it’s a reason to watch Washington in the decade (!) or so to come. Here’s why.

We know that lower bar exam scores are associated with higher ultimate attorney discipline rates, as Professor Rob Anderson and I have chronicled in California and studies elsewhere. Professor Kyle Rozema finds a similar effect.

It’s worth looking at the July 2019 bar exam cohort of ABA law school graduates to see what happened in Washington and what we can roughly expect from this July 2020 decision.

536 graduates took the July 2019 bar exam in Washington. 465 were first-time test-takers, and 71 were repeaters.

Among the 465 first-time test takers in July 2019, 366 passed, a 78.7% pass rate. Nearly 4 in 5 passed on the first attempt. 99 failed. One could imagine, then, a bar exam that exclusively looked to this cohort. Indeed, Washington has lowered its cut score. The pass rate would likely exceed 80% and perhaps even 85%. The vast majority of first-time test-takers pass.

Among those who fail the first time, a number likely would pass on the second attempt. From the February 2020 exam, we saw 96 repeat, 44 pass and 52 fail. We don’t know how many of those were on their second attempt or a subsequent attempt, but it’s likely a good number who passed on the second attempt. (It’s also worth noting that some number of the 99 who failed presumably didn’t try again in the February 2020 exam.)

Back to the July 2019 results. 71 repeated. Of those, 27 passed, and 44 failed for a 38% pass rate. Of note, 44 of test-takers (about 8%) failed the bar exam at least twice, and some of those more than that.

So that’s, I think, where the interesting part of this experiment lies. One can question the efficacy of the bar exam and the like, but it matches pretty closely with law school grades. Furthermore, we know lower scores or those who’ve failed at least once tend to face higher discipline rates. This could be a fairly notable shock to the system to admit so many at once who’ve failed multiple times and may never be admitted to the bar otherwise. Those whose entry would be delayed, those who’d drop out from taking the bar—they’re now all admitted, and all at once.

One could raise “access to justice” issues for underserved legal populations, which is a reason to admit more lawyers to the bar, but I wonder about this at a couple of levels. Are these exam test-takers who’d otherwise fail serving those “underserved” populations? And if so, will they do so well?

Another is that Professor Anderson and I, along with the study of Professor Rozema, noted that attorney discipline tends to manifest later in careers. Will we see more discipline earlier?

I don’t want to portend too much doom and gloom. Optimistically, perhaps the Washington State Bar has some relevant basis for helping supervise attorneys and identify those who are at-risk of discipline earlier in the career to prevent it from happening; indeed, Professor Anderson and I suggest that might be one such solution in the event state bars lower their cut scores. And, to be fair, character and fitness and other related scrutiny will still apply, which means that the bar exam is not the only thing standing between law school graduates and the practice of law.

Still, this is a fairly remarkable one-time event in Washington that should be worth watching. As states continue to grapple with the appropriate bar licensing regime, the results of this experiment will be helpful in assessing the costs and benefits of a bar exam.

Judges relying on Bostock v. Clayton County to interpret statutes

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, interpreting the language “because of . . . sex” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has already yielded extensive debate and discussion, but particularly within politically conservative legal communities, as Justice Neil Gorsuch drafted a majority opinion over the dissenting opinions of Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justice Clarence Thomas) and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In part, there is a debate about what “textualism” means and what tools of statutory interpretation are or are not appropriate. In another part, there is a debate over the result, concerning a federal anti-discrimination statute and its application to cases involving sexual orientation and gender identity.

The en banc Fifth Circuit recently issued a brief opinion in Thomas v. Reeves, concluding that a dispute over legislative district maps in 2019 was moot. But the case spawned 50 pages of essentially dicta concerning the proper scope and application of 28 U.S.C. § 2284(a), or the scope of authority for three-judge courts to hear election law cases.

Of note—to me, at least—was some language in Judge Don Willett’s opinion, joined by Judges Jerry Smith, Jennifer Elrod, Kyle Duncan, and Kurt Engelhardt, on statutory interpretation. In doing so, Judge Willett’s opinion pulls quotations from Justice Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock:

Just this week, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision, holding that the 56-year-old Civil Rights Act forbids workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Specifically, the Court declared that “because of sex” encompasses “because of sexual orientation or gender identity.” The latter is not distinct from sex discrimination, but a form of it. Hearteningly, all nine Justices applied textual analysis to Title VII, as we do today with § 2284(a), but, just like us, they reached polar-opposite conclusions. In dissent, Justices Alito and Thomas charged the majority with “disregarding over 50 years of uniform judicial interpretation” and protested that “there is not a shred of evidence that any Member of Congress interpreted the statutory text that way when Title VII was enacted.” The Bostock majority did not—indeed, could not—dispute those facts. It just deemed them immaterial, insisting that what matters (all that matters) is the literal text within a statute’s four corners—what it called “Title VII’s plain terms.”

A time traveler from 1964 would doubtless express astonishment that Congress had, unwittingly and unbeknownst to everyone, equated sex discrimination with sexual orientation discrimination (much less with gender identity discrimination)—and that it had done so by adopting a one-word amendment (inserting “sex”) from a representative who was cynically trying to scuttle the entire Civil Rights Act. But the Bostock majority focused on the “broad language” that Congress adopted, not on the ripple effects, however unforeseen, that flowed from it five decades later. The Court thus gave no interpretive weight to the fact that not a single drafter of Title VII in 1964 intended, noticed, or anticipated that “because of ... sex” would cover discrimination against homosexual or transgender persons. The Court remarked that resorting to “expected applications” or only those “foreseen at the time of enactment ... seeks to displace plain meaning of the law in favor of something lying beyond it.” Text is paramount—“only the words on the page constitute the law”—and if those words lead to “unexpected consequences,” so be it.

Settled practices matter not, nor does the “unanimous consensus” among the courts of appeals stretching across a half-century. As the Court put it: “Judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations.” In the Bostock majority’s view, language codified by lawmakers is like language coded by programmers. A computer programmer may write faulty code, but the code will perform precisely as written, regardless of what the programmer anticipated. Courts, no less than computers, are bound by what was typed, and also by what was mistyped. What this means for Title VII: “When a new application emerges that is both unexpected and important,” said the Court, it is no answer to “have us merely point out the question, refer the subject back to Congress, and decline to enforce the plain terms of the law in the meantime.” We are bound by Bostock, whose ascetic interpretive rules for Civil Rights Act cases apply with equal force to Voting Rights Act cases.

Judge Costa’s opinion asserts virtually the same arguments as the Bostock dissenters, appealing to “venerable” understandings, “widely accepted meaning,” and “uniform caselaw.” He labels the State’s § 2284(a) argument “unprecedented,” invoking Justice Scalia’s colorful elephants-hiding-in-mouseholes aphorism. . . .

(Emphasis added.) It’s interesting—to me, at least—that Judge Willett, who was one of the original eleven names on then-candidate Donald Trump’s “list” of Supreme Court nominees—has quickly and readily embraced Justice Gorsuch’s approach in Bostock, and critiqued Judge Gregg Costa for adopting the approach (as he saw it) of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh.

It’s also notable, I think, to see who signed onto this interpretation—Trump-nominated Judges Duncan and Engelhardt signed onto it, but Judges James Ho and Andy Oldham (who wrote separately on a different issue) did not. Judge Edith Jones also did not join Judge Willett’s opinion. (Others joined Judge Gregg’s opinion, didn’t participate, or didn’t weigh in.)

Was Justice Gorsuch’s approach in Bostock right? We already have several members of the Fifth Circuit who think so. We’ll see whether Bostock’s approach holds sway over other judges in the years ahead.

Federal Judicial Clerkship Report of Recent Law School Graduates, 2020 Edition

I’ve updated my Federal judicial Report of Recent Law School Graduates, which is now available via SSRN. It tracks recent federal judicial clerkship hiring tends by school and by region, “elite” legal employment placement rates, and trends within the federal judiciary in hiring recent law school graduates. Most data is a three-year average for the Classes of 2017, 2018, and 2019 to smooth out any one-year outliers. Here’s one chart, judicial clerkship placement rate of recent graduates for these three classes: 31 schools had at least 5% placed into federal judicial clerkships.

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For more charts, figures, and analysis, check out the entire report.

The "Contract with America" turns 25

In November 1994, Republicans swept elections across the country. It’s typical that the out-of-the-White-House party makes big gains in that cycle, but the size of those gains were atypically large and fueled by, among other things, the kinds of concerns that yielded a chaotic three-way race in the 1992 presidential election. Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1954.

One shorthand reference of this moment, led by would-be Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, was the “Contract with America.” It may be the case that the slogan has been oversold in terms of its electoral success. And it’s true that not everything promised came into fruition in Congress.

Still more, I’m hardly an expert in legislative history. But I wonder if it’s fair to say that the 104th Congress’s lawmaking in 1995 and 1996 represented the last high water mark of legislation, in an era today bogged down with divided government, heightened partisanship in each party and separating them from one another, inaction from the out-of-power party, increased use of the filibuster, and so on.

To name a few statutes enacted in this era, with Wikipedia links: the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, the Communications Decency Act, the Line Item Veto Act, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Defense of Marriage Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, “Welfare Reform,” the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and the Congressional Review Act.

Some (like the line item veto, a portion of DOMA, and the anti-decency provisions of the CDA) have been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Some have had sporadic use like the CRA; others, like Section 230 of the CDA, are under renewed attack. And still others like AEDPA and PSLRA have, I think, fairly dramatically transformed areas of the law.

I’m a little surprised I’ve seen no academic fanfare or discussion, no law review symposia planned or academic conferences (much less panels) dedicated to it. (Academics love looking at milestone anniversaries of major cases, constitutional amendments, or statutes.)

There were a scattered few op-eds on it last fall. But I’ve seen essentially no attention given to the Contract with America this year—supporting or opposing, critical or reflective, looking back or looking forward.

I don’t know that I’ll be the one to lead the charge about examining these statutes or this particular moment in federal lawmaking, but the anniversary struck me as one worth remembering, even if in a brief blog post.

Why I don't sign open letters or group amicus briefs

Over the course of my ten-year academic career, I’ve regularly been invited to sign an open letter in support or opposition to a particular cause, or to join a group amicus brief in a particular case. Sometimes these are generic groups (e.g., lawyers, law professors, etc.), and sometimes they purport to represent a collective interest at an institution or of an academic discipline.

It’s been my policy not to sign open letters or group amicus briefs, for any reason and under any circumstances. I thought I’d share why.

The first is a matter of control and ownership of the idea. Too often, the collective work has to be watered down and sufficiently generalized to attain broader support. Specific legal arguments become general platitudes. Interesting avenues of scholarly inquiry become rather bland, repetitive arguments found elsewhere. I’ve often found sole author amicus briefs particularly interesting, and I finally made a foray into this world this year. Controlling the work means offering particular insight. That’s not to say that co-authored amicus briefs or group letters might not be interesting, too. But it’s to say that a “please sign onto this” request generating sometimes thousands of signatories means that it’s not really about the specific contours of what’s being described or advanced.

The second is a matter of easing pressure. Open letters in particular seem (sadly) to signal to the world a false logical argument: those who signed this letter support X, therefore those who did not sign this letter do not support X. This is a particular concern for letters that purport to come from an institution or affinity group. My refusal to sign that letter inevitably can bring heat or criticism from those who observe my lack of signature. (My hope is individual discussion with them is more fruitful; more on that below.) If others truly oppose it on the merits, or simply prefer not to speak up (say, those in positions with less job security than I have), my refusal to sign can help ease pressure for them to know they are not alone.

The third is a matter of persuasiveness. Too often, these collective activities are not about persuasion. They are about signaling to the public one’s support or opposition to a particular cause, or signaling to one’s peers that one is an ally of said cause. Persuasion, I’ve found, is not best found in such demonstrative public acts, but in the careful and often difficult conversations that we may have one on one with each other, or in deliberate dialogue, or in the kind of focused scholarship (too often absent, as my first concern raises) that can help illuminate an issue. Open letters or group amicus briefs are addressing different audiences, and, I think, different modes of persuasion may be preferably for each.

All these reasons are not to cast aspersions on those who do sign such letters or briefs. Some may legitimately conclude that the ideas in many such open letters or group amicus briefs are sufficiently valuable; some may legitimately conclude that the cost of silence is greater than the cost of pressuring non-signatories or stirring divisions; some may legitimately believe that these tools can persuade. For me, however, I’ve found the evidence to come down against them in each case. And it’s simply become easier to have a straightforward rule that I can apply consistently and universally.

I have signed one kind of group letter, however. On three occasions (as of this writing, I think), I signed letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee advocating for a judicial nominee’s confirmation. These aren’t “open letters,” but I’m sure they are a matter of public record if one seeks them out. These were nominees I knew personally and could vouch for, and I treated them like a letter of recommendation. I could agree with everything in the letter about the person’s work, ethic, and character. One I helped draft, two I joined after they were drafted.

I’ve turned down many, many other opportunities, including for recent Supreme Court nominations, to sign onto letters, not the least of which was that I simply had never met the person, much less could vouch for the nominee’s character.

Again, I’m sure others have other views on this matter, and others may reach different conclusions. I hardly think my idiosyncrasies (like, say, having a non-revenue-generating blog) will be the norm. But I thought it would be useful to share my particular views.

Visualizing legal employment outcomes in California in 2019

This is the eighth and last in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2019. Following posts on outcomes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Florida, DC-Virginia-Maryland, and New York, here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of California law schools for the Class of 2019. (More about the methodology is available at the Pennsylvania post.) Last year's California post is here.

Please note, of course, that “J.D.-advantage” jobs may differ significantly from school to school, which may alter how one views the “overall” rate. (USNWR treats them as equivalent, but there are good reasons to think they may not be equivalent; and here, there are significant disparities among some schools and their J.D.-advantage placement.) And recall that I sort the table below to include school-funded positions, while the chart only includes unfunded positions. (It’s a reason I try to display the information in different ways!)

In some ways, California’s gains have come as three law schools have closed or been removed from ABA-accredited status. The removal of two schools from last year alone would have bumped the overall employment rate up in 2018 from 74.9% to 77.3%. But overall, bar passage-required jobs increased by about 100 among California’s 18 law schools reported below. J.D.-advantage jobs increased slightly, unlike most other regions of the country, and law school-funded positions fell overall. Total employment stood at 79.4%, another improvement.

I think this will be my last year doing these visualizations. They are a fair amount of work. And this year in particular there has been essentially no interest in the employment outcomes of these regions. If that’s the case, I’ll move on to other areas for blogging.

As always, please notify me of any corrections or errata.

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Peer Score	School	2019	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads	2018	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads
4.5	University of California-Berkeley	97.0%	1.2	296	6	16	328	95.8%	276	4	16	309
4.1	University of California-Los Angeles	95.6%	3.1	279	11	13	317	92.5%	257	19	20	320
4.8	Stanford University	95.1%	-1.8	156	9	8	182	96.9%	165	12	10	193
3.6	University of Southern California	90.6%	3.3	191	11	1	224	87.3%	162	11	6	205
3.4	University of California-Davis	88.3%	1.9	121	7	8	154	86.4%	135	8	10	177
3.5	University of California-Irvine	86.5%	-0.3	110	5	7	141	86.8%	85	3	11	114
2.7	Pepperdine University	83.7%	5.1	135	14	0	178	78.6%	114	18	0	168
2.7	Loyola Law School-Los Angeles	81.6%	-4.1	216	41	5	321	85.7%	213	24	3	280
3.1	University of California-Hastings	79.6%	0.9	209	25	12	309	78.7%	178	28	12	277
1.9	McGeorge School of Law	76.5%	12.6	94	23	0	153	63.9%	66	19	0	133
1.9	Chapman University	74.9%	1.0	92	36	0	171	73.9%	75	24	0	134
2.7	University of San Diego	74.3%	2.0	123	13	0	183	72.3%	172	19	0	264
2.5	Santa Clara University	67.8%	-0.9	128	15	0	211	68.7%	127	22	0	217
1.9	Southwestern Law School	64.5%	1.3	92	37	0	200	63.2%	128	39	1	266
1.5	California Western School of Law	61.8%	0.7	95	36	0	212	61.1%	86	32	0	193
1.1	Western State College of Law	57.5%	0.5	41	20	0	106	57.0%	49	8	0	100
1.5	Golden Gate University	50.5%	2.3	37	15	2	107	48.2%	27	11	2	83
1.9	University of San Francisco	49.6%	4.6	47	12	0	119	45.0%	49	26	1	169

Visualizing legal employment outcomes in New York in 2019

This is the seventh in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2019. Following posts on outcomes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Illinois, Florida, and DC-Virginia-Maryland, here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of New York law schools for the Class of 2019. (More about the methodology is available at the Pennsylvania post.) Last year's New York post is here.

Please note, of course, that “J.D.-advantage” jobs may differ significantly from school to school, which may alter how one views the “overall” rate. (USNWR treats them as equivalent, but there are good reasons to think they may not be equivalent; and here, there are significant disparities among some schools and their J.D.-advantage lacement.) And recall that I sort the table below to include school-funded positions, while the chart only includes unfunded positions. (It’s a reason I try to display the information in different ways!) The Class of 2019 saw continued upward trends. Bar passage-required jobs rose from 2882 to 3027; J.D.-advantage positions fell and school funded positions held steady. And while total graduates increased slightly to 3730, the improvement in bar passage-required positions helped increase placement from 86.1% to 87.6%.

As always, please notify me of any corrections or errata.

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Peer score	School	2019	YoY%	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads	2018	BPR	JDA	LSF	Grads
4.7	Columbia University	98.6%	2.2	416	3	6	431	96.4%	420	8	5	449
4.6	New York University	96.1%	-0.7	429	6	30	484	96.7%	411	3	29	458
2.3	St. John's University	91.0%	-0.6	192	10	0	222	91.6%	186	21	0	226
4.2	Cornell University	89.2%	-4.2	170	2	1	194	93.4%	178	4	1	196
3.3	Fordham University	88.0%	-0.5	310	25	1	382	88.4%	302	24	2	371
1.9	New York Law School	87.5%	6.5	200	38	0	272	81.0%	167	52	2	273
2.9	Cardozo School of Law	85.4%	0.5	228	11	1	281	84.9%	207	23	1	272
2	Pace University	85.4%	5.9	147	11	0	185	79.5%	118	14	0	166
2.3	Hofstra University	83.4%	1.0	162	13	1	211	82.4%	186	11	0	239
2.6	Brooklyn Law School	82.9%	2.4	240	31	0	327	80.5%	245	48	0	364
2.0	Albany Law School	82.4%	3.4	99	12	1	136	79.0%	86	8	0	119
2.3	City University of New York	80.4%	6.4	126	9	0	168	74.0%	64	7	0	96
2.3	University of Buffalo-SUNY	80.1%	2.1	96	17	0	141	78.1%	101	13	0	146
1.5	Touro College	77.9%	7.7	85	3	0	113	70.2%	95	4	0	141
2.4	Syracuse University	74.9%	-1.4	127	10	0	183	76.3%	116	16	0	173