California School of Law

The California School of Law was founded in 2007 as an online law school that awards a Juris Doctor degree, making students eligible to sit for the California State Bar examination . Students and instructors meet in a virtual classroom and are able to speak to one another using Ventrilo, a free VOiP software program. The California School of Law utilizes the Socratic Method of teaching. Under this system of legal instruction, students are assigned cases and statutes to read and brief before each class. This is followed by in-class presentations by the students and questions by the professors regarding the facts, rule of law or the court’s reasoning.
The California School of Law is registered with the California State Bar Committee of Bar Examiners as a “Distance Learning” law school. The Institution is not accredited by the American Bar Association. Students must pass the First Year Law Students’ Exam in order to receive a Juris Doctor and to become eligible for the California State Bar Exam.
At the California School of Law, the Socratic Method is the basic pedagogy for all courses. Use of the Socratic Method at the California School of Law is possible because at this online school students can speak with and hear the professors and their classmates by logging into a Virtual Classroom from a computer at their home or work, thus enabling the professors and students to orally discuss cases and debate the law, live and in “real-time, as is done at all prestigious residential law schools.
Data for the June,2009 administration of the “baby bar” is available for the California School of Law, a school listed as a "distance Learning" law school by the California State Bar. Dean William Hunt reports that all students passed who had taken the School's Legal Methods course as well as its recommeded, but not mandated, review course designed to prepare students for the "baby bar," thus indicating a 100% passage rate for the June 2009 students who had fully and properly prepared. Overall, counting a transfer student who had been at the shool for a semester and a half, six students from the California School of Law took the June 2009 "baby bar" and four, or 66.7% passed. Three of these students were taking the exam for the first time and all three, or 100%, passed

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