by Jeff Sovern
Five years ago, I posted a list of law schools teaching consumer law, as compiled by my then-research assistant Preston Postlethwaite. I've received requests to update the list, and so I asked another research assistant, Sara Krastins, to do so. Sara examined the web sites for the 204 ABA-approved law schools (she couldn't check the web sites for Inter-American, the Judge Advocate General's School, Lincoln Memorial, the Marquette clinics, Pontifical Catholic of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, Saint Louis, or Texas Southern). According to Sara, as to consumer law offerings, 78 schools had only a class (38.24%; percentages are of the full 204 schools, including the eight schools for which Sara couldn't find information); 13 schools had only a clinic (6.37%); 17 schools had both a class and a clinic (8.33%); and 108 schools had either a class or a clinic (52.94%). In all, 95 schools offered a class and 30 have a clinic. That is a dramatic improvement over what we found five years ago, when 53 schools offered a basic course, 21 had a consumer law clinic, and 12 had both a clinic and a basic course. There are, however, two caveats: first, so far the 2019 list is based solely on web sites, and web sites are sometimes inaccurate. Last time, as this time, we started with the web sites, and people wrote in with additional information which we then used to update the list. I'm pasting in the list after the jump; if you see anything that is incomplete or inaccurate, please let me know via the comments. Second, some schools have on their web sites information about the current school year while others have information about next year's classes. so the list may represent an amalgam of courses taught in both the 2018-2019 school year, and the 2019-2020 year. Though these numbers are a big jump over what we saw last time, I'm hoping that readers of the blog report still more schools teaching consumer law.