Congressional candidate and University of Arizona law school professor Kirsten Engel has refused to stand by Israel as her alma maters, Northwestern University and Brown University, blow up with antisemitic protests, a new report shows.
“Kirsten Engel is not a fighter for Arizona, she is a scared politician who is too afraid of the extreme left to speak up against antisemitism,” National Republican Congressional Committee Spokesperson Ben Petersen said in a statement.
Engel has “been silent in the face of protests taking place at their alma mater.”
Engel is running to represent Arizona’s sixth district. She is a former legislator, Charles E. Ares Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law, and an environmental lawyer.
She received her undergraduate degree from Brown and her J.D. from Northwestern.
Students at Northwestern set up an encampment on school grounds to demand the administration divest from Israel. Terrorist sympathizers even became violent with police officers.
At Brown, students also set up a pro-Palestine encampment, which they agreed to clear April 30.
Students across the country are skipping classes and final exams to protest on behalf of Hamas-controlled Palestine.
At Columbia University, students took over Hamilton Hall overnight, barricading themselves inside. At the University of Texas, more than 80 arrests have occurred.
Elizabeth Troutman is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send her news tips using this link.
Applicants to Arizona State University’s (ASU) law school may have to take their admissions test on their own, but they won’t have to do their own applications.
ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law will now allow applicants to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to complete their applications. In a press release at the end of last month, the law school stated that generative AI will be a necessary tool for upcoming lawyers.
“In our mission to educate and prepare the next generation of lawyers and leaders, law schools also need to embrace the use of technology such as AI with a comprehensive approach,” stated the school.
Stacy Leeds, Willard H. Pedrick Dean and Regents Professor of Law, added that generative AI also allowed for more equitable admissions.
“Our law school is driven by an innovative mindset. By embracing emerging technologies, and teaching students the ethical responsibilities associated with technology, we will enhance legal education and break down barriers that may exist for prospective students,” said Leeds. “By incorporating generative AI into our curriculum, we prepare students for their future careers across all disciplines.”
Generative AI consists of large language model (LLM) tools: one of the most popular models is ChatGPT.
Last month, two New York lawyers were sanctioned for relying on a ChatGPT-generated brief that cited fake cases. The judge punished the pair for not conducting a proper review of the AI brief and for insisting that the fake cases cited were real, not for relying on generative AI in the first place.
The pair paid $5,000 for their oversight. The lawyers stated that they didn’t know that ChatGPT could create fake cases. However, the lawyers’ firm issued a statement disagreeing that the use of generative AI constituted bad faith.
“We made a good faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” stated the firm.
The New York lawyers may well become a case study at ASU. ASU’s law school also offers courses through its Center for Law, Science, and Innovation (LSI) on the legal questions of AI use, especially within the legal field.
One of LSI’s AI-centered projects, the Soft Law Governance of Artificial Intelligence, proposes using “soft law” governance for AI rather than existing legal frameworks. Soft law is a blanket term for recommendations or guidelines, rather than law. The project is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.
ASU’s law school began allowing AI-generated applications this month.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
The University of Arizona (UArizona) doesn’t believe that traditional law school entry tests are equitable enough, bolstering their push for an LSAT alternative.
UArizona James E. Rogers College of Law wants law school applicants to take JD-Next, an online prep course that concludes with an exam. UArizona issued a study in defense of their proposed LSAT replacement, claiming that it wouldn’t be “picking winners and losers through testing” but rather providing a way to “recognize and produce capability” — namely, for racial minorities.
“Especially for underrepresented students, the goal is to measure not just the accumulated knowledge and skills that they would bring to a new academic program, but also their ability to grow and learn through the program,” read the study. “[T]he JD-Next exam holds promise as a new law school admissions pathway, both to better predict success in law school and to help diversify the populations of students in law school.
The @NationalJurist article in support of increasing diversity in the legal profession suggests aspiring law students enroll in Arizona Law's online JD-Next Program to develop skills and experience.
The study tracked incoming students across dozens of law schools to determine whether the JD-Next exam was predictive of student performance. The study included data from two separate cohorts in 2019 and 2020.
The 2019 cohort tweaked its representation of students by oversampling minorities: 60 percent of nearly 11,600 invited participants were a minority. 24 percent were Black or African American, 21 percent were Hispanic, 14 percent were Asian, and one percent were Native American or Native Hawaiian. As a result of the oversampling, only 43.5 percent of participants were white.
The study also disclosed that students who identified as both White and Asian were coded as multi-race, but not classified as “underrepresented groups,” or “URG.”
However, the 2020 cohort more similarly reflected the makeup of law schools across the country: 61 percent white.
Regents Professor of Law Rebecca Tsosie discusses the legal profession’s diversity challenges with @Reuters.
The study noted that it focused on race as a factor in testing in order to determine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education. It claimed that the JD-Next exams resulted in smaller disparities in test results between different races than the LSAT.
“These questions about score disparities are important because admissions tests can impact efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in law schools,” stated the study. “If admissions officers rely on these tests to decide which applicants to reject, and lower test scores are associated with some races or ethnicities, then students with those identities are more likely to be rejected, and overall representation in law school and the legal profession is thereby reduced.”
"Unfortunately, the legal profession is one that hasn't been as diverse as we would like it to become, so increasing diversity is an important initiative for the University of Arizona law school," said @jessfin79.
This wouldn’t be UArizona’s first foray into modifying admissions test standards. The university successfully pushed for the acceptance of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test for law school admissions in 2021. Prior to that, the GRE General Test was used for admission to graduate schools.
The American Bar Association (ABA) mandates that law schools require an admission test in order to be accredited. However, the ABA Council voted last November to abolish this requirement beginning in the fall semester of 2025.
Authors of the UArizona study included Jessica Findley, a research scholar with UArizona Office of Diversity & Inclusion and an assistant clinical professor at the law school; Adriana Cimetta, associate educational psychology research professor in UArizona College of Education; Heidi Legg Burross, interim department head, educational psychology professor, and research assistant professor in the College of Education; Katherine C. Cheng, assistant educational psychology research professor in the College of Education; Matt Charles, designer of curriculum for the law school; Cayley Balser, Innovation for Justice post-graduate fellow; Ran Li, graduate student in educational psychology; Christopher Robertson, adjunct law professor.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
