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Taft Law School

online/distance education law school based in Santa Ana, California

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ7675042 ↗
Source-derived summary

Taft Law School is a private for-profit online law school in Santa Ana, California. It was founded in 1976 and operates through the Taft University System (William Howard Taft University). The school offers a Juris Doctor (J.D.) program.

Although the school is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, it is not accredited by the American Bar Association or by the State Bar of California. The Law School Admission Council explains that most states do not "permit graduates of these schools to take the bar examination" nor "admit to their bars a graduate of a non-ABA-approved law school." The California State Bar Committee of Bar Examiners categorizes Taft Law School as a "registered unaccredited correspondence law school." As such, its graduates must pass the First-Year Law Students' Examination, also known as the 'baby bar', in order to be eligible to take the California General Bar Examination.

The Committee of Bar Examiners classifies distance education law schools into two categories: "registered unaccredited distance learning law schools" and "registered unaccredited correspondence law schools". By rule, a "registered unaccredited distance-learning law school" must require that students participate in not less than 135 hours of synchronous (live) interactive classes per year.

Bar pass rates

Since 2021, Taft Law School has had 10 or fewer students sit for the California Bar, except for the July 2023 exam, when 11 students took the bar and 1 passed, for a pass rate of 9 percent.

Editorial summary

“Taft Law School” enters the record as online/distance education law school based in Santa Ana, California. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Taft, School and online can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1976, 2021, 2023—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Taft, School and online.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Taft Law School” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Taft, School and online provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7675042. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1976, 2021 and 2023.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

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  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Taft Law School”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Taft Law School primary sources, Taft Law School archive and Taft research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Taft Law School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.