Colleagues,

I am taking up Ginny Maurer's invitation to weigh in on the revisions to the standards. I concur with Ginny. We are no worse off than we were under the standards voted on in April. The interpretive material still considers the JD to be the degree that confers academic qualification on legal studies faculty teaching business law and legal environment. That's what we had before. I'm not sure I go along with Francis Achampong's view that the new paragraph (paragraph 5, p. 44) refers to graduate law degrees like the LLM or the SJD, although it certainly is a fair reading of the paragraph. Even if we were considered academically qualified under paragraph 6 (no research doctoral degree), I don't think as an organization we should ever yield to the notion that the JD is not a research degree. It is only a short step from that proposition to the thought that legal research is not really scholarship. 

To sum up, I think we are still OK under Standard 10 as interpreted in the interpretive section. I wish AACSB hadn't tinkered with the language. Our position was much clearer in the April 2003 document. However, as Ginny said, I don't think we are any worse off.

It's cold, it's snowy, it's late. I'm headed home. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Fran Zollers