Golden Gate has announced a closure plan for its law school program. Karen Sloan at Reuters highlights some of the trends of recent closures, a trickle we’ve seen over the years. Golden Gate was long at risk.

But California is a stark trend. Just a decade ago, in 2013, the school had 21 ABA-accredited law schools. That number has now dropped to 17 in a decade. Whittier closed, and, at the time, I suggested due to problems unique to California. Thomas Jefferson and La Verne opted to give up their ABA accreditation and be accredited only by the state of California. California lowered the cut score for its bar exam in 2020, but that appears not to have been enough to save Golden Gate.

These four schools graduated 817 JD students in 2013. That was nearly 16% of the 5184 graduates of ABA-accredited law schools that year. The closure of these schools is a major change in the legal education landscape in California.

And while the other law schools graduated 4367 students in 2013, they graduated just 3765 last year, which means they’re not exactly capturing many of the students in California who’d have attended school elsewhere.

It’s been a big decade for the shape of the legal education market in California, and how it plays out in the decades to come remains to be seen.