Washburn Law Journal

Recent Blog Post

ChatGPT-4 Understands Academic Attrition’s Impact on Bar Passage, but Does Anyone Else?

Rory Bahadur and Kevin Ruth | September 13, 2023 | Read this blog post

Summary: Access Lex recently published an article titled, and purportedly answering the question, “Are Law Schools Cream-Skimming to Bolster Their Bar Exam Pass Rates?” The article, however, does not answer the question asked, but rather answers another question, “Whether the impact of attrition and transfer on bar passage can be accurately detected using broad national level regression analysis?” The answer to the first question is yes, some schools’ bar passage rates are impacted by transfer and/or academic attrition. And the answer to the latter question is no, regression cannot accurately detect the impact of academic attrition and transfer on bar passage. In asking one question but instead answering the other, the article conflates and obfuscates the important difference between causation and correlation. In this short essay, we use artificial intelligence to demonstrate why, even though academic attrition and transfer can impact an individual institution’s bar passage rates, these impacts are not fully discernable using broad, national level, regression analysis. Additionally, conclusions based on regression analysis distract us from addressing the systemic inequities perpetuated by the bar examination.

Recent Comments

Oklahoma’s ‘Painful’ Opioid Litigation Reversal May Spell Trouble for Big Pharma Settlements

Yvonne Theresa SparrowSmith | October 4, 2023 | PDF Version (253 KB)

Preferred Citation: Yvonne Theresa SparrowSmith, Oklahoma’s ‘Painful’ Opioid Litigation Reversal May Spell Trouble for Big Pharma Settlements, 62 Washburn L.J. Online 4 (2022), https://washburnlaw.edu/wljonline/sparrowsmith-opioid.

Becerra v. Empire Health Found., 142 S. Ct. 2354 (2022) or: How I Learned to Stop Deferring and Forget Chevron

Nathan T. Seltzer | October 4, 2023 | PDF Version (205 KB)

Summary: On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court decided a relatively obscure case over a Medicare provision.  The case marks another step in the trend of the Supreme Court ignoring Chevron deference. The Supreme Court had granted certiorari to resolve a circuit split in which the Ninth Circuit diverged from other circuits over the application of Chevron deference.  The Ninth Circuit applied Chevron analysis to overrule changes promulgated by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), while the Sixth and D.C. Circuits came to the opposite conclusion. But—in a surprising twist—the Supreme Court issued a decision without so much as a whisper of Chevron deference.  Instead, the Court applied general rules of statutory interpretation.

Preferred Citation: Nathan T. Seltzer, Becerra v. Empire Health Found., 142 S. Ct. 2354 (2022) or: How I Learned to Stop Deferring and Forget Chevron, 62 Washburn L.J. Online 3 (2023), https://washburnlaw.edu/wljonline/seltzer-chevron.

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