Duncan School of Law's founding was contentious, and understanding that history helps explain both where the school stands now and why its recent numbers matter. Lincoln Memorial University announced in spring 2008 that it intended to seek approval to offer a JD program, and the school — named for longtime Tennessee Congressman John James Duncan, Jr. — opened in downtown Knoxville inside the building known locally as Old City Hall. In February 2009, the Tennessee Board of Law Examiners approved the school, meaning graduates could apply to sit for the Tennessee Bar Exam even before the school held any ABA status.
The first entering classes were academically weaker than today's. The Fall 2011 class had average LSAT scores of 147 for full-time students and 145 for part-time students, with average GPAs of 3.01 and 2.99 respectively. That December, the ABA denied the school's application for provisional accreditation. Duncan's response was aggressive: it sued the ABA, alleging antitrust violations in how the accreditation decision was made. A judge denied the school's request for an injunction in January 2012, and Duncan then appealed to the ABA. The fallout was real — many students withdrew or transferred once the accreditation denial became public, and in February 2012 a former student separately sued the school for "negligent enrollment." That negligent-enrollment claim was dismissed in 2013.
The school's accreditation path then turned around. Duncan received ABA provisional accreditation in 2014, and on March 1, 2019, it received full ABA accreditation — the same status held by every other ABA-approved law school in the country. That is the single most important historical fact for a prospective applicant to internalize: whatever happened between 2008 and 2014 is not the school's current legal status. A JD from Duncan today carries full ABA accreditation, which affects bar admission eligibility nationwide and federal loan eligibility.
The bar-passage trajectory tells the same turnaround story in numbers. The school's own reporting notes a 2021 first-time Tennessee bar passage rate of 50.67% — a figure consistent with a young, still-stabilizing program. In the most recent ABA compilation available, Duncan's first-time bar passage rate was 78.7%, just behind the state average of 79.92%, with an ultimate two-year passage rate of 83.54%. Read together, these numbers suggest a school that struggled academically in its early years and has since closed most of the gap with other Tennessee-licensed law schools, though a prospective student should verify the most current cycle's numbers directly with the school, since bar statistics shift year to year.
Admissions credentials tell a similar story of improvement from the founding cohort. Where the Fall 2011 entering class averaged a 147 LSAT (full-time), the school's more recent entering classes show a 25th/50th/75th LSAT split of 150/153/156 and a GPA split of 3.08/3.44/3.68 — a stronger academic profile than that founding cohort. That does not erase the early record, but it does mean an applicant evaluating Duncan today is looking at a different institution than the one the ABA initially rejected.
What this means if you're deciding whether to apply:
The practical takeaway is that Duncan's accreditation drama is a founding-era story, not a present-day risk factor for prospective students — but it is also not ancient history so distant that it is irrelevant. Because the school is young (founded 2009) and its improvement in both admissions credentials and bar outcomes has been recent and real, it is reasonable for an applicant to weight the school's current, most-recent-cycle numbers heavily rather than anchoring on either the 2011 low point or on generic assumptions about how young law schools perform.
Duncan's most recent entering class reports a 25th/50th/75th LSAT split of 150/153/156 and a GPA split of 3.08/3.44/3.68, and the school accepted 432 of 828 applicants, an acceptance rate of about 52.17%. Those numbers describe where an applicant's file lands relative to recent admitted classes — they are not a probability of admission, and Duncan's own acceptance rate is a description of last cycle's applicant pool, not a forecast for any individual.
A useful way to use the LSAT band is as a planning anchor rather than a prediction. A 153 LSAT sits at Duncan's reported median; a 156 is at the school's 75th percentile, and a 150 is at its 25th percentile. If your own score falls below 150, your file sits below the bulk of Duncan's recently admitted range; if it sits at or above 156, you are above the point where three-quarters of the recent class scored. The same logic applies to GPA: a 3.44 is the reported median, with 3.08 and 3.68 marking the 25th and 75th percentiles. Where your numbers land relative to these bands is useful information for calibrating expectations and for scholarship conversations — see the general playbook on negotiating scholarship offers — but it says nothing about your odds of admission at Duncan specifically.
Class composition. Duncan enrolled a total incoming class of 163 students in the reported cycle, split between 109 full-time and 54 part-time students, out of a total JD enrollment of 429 across all years. The part-time option is a real, substantial share of the class — roughly a third of the entering cohort — which matters for applicants weighing work or family obligations against a full-time timeline.
Scholarships are near-universal, but vary widely in size. Duncan reports that 100% of students receiving grants — every grant recipient in the reported cohort got some level of scholarship support, with a reported 50th-percentile full-time grant of $28,000. But "100% receive grants" does not mean everyone receives the same award: the school's own award-band reporting shows 54% of grant recipients received between half tuition and full tuition, 39% received less than half tuition, and only 1% received a full-tuition award. In practical terms, the most common outcome at Duncan is a partial scholarship in the half-to-full-tuition range, not a token award and not a full ride — full rides are rare, going to roughly 1 in 100 recipients.
Because LSAT and GPA numbers are the primary lever schools use to set scholarship amounts, an applicant whose numbers sit above Duncan's 75th percentile (above a 156 LSAT and/or above a 3.68 GPA) is in a stronger position to negotiate toward the upper end of that half-to-full-tuition band than an applicant landing near the 25th percentile. If your numbers sit below Duncan's 25th percentile markers, it is worth treating any scholarship offer as the starting point for a conversation rather than the final word — a topic covered in more general terms in the scholarship-negotiation guide.
What the acceptance rate does and doesn't tell you. A roughly 52% acceptance rate means Duncan denied just under half of its 828 applicants in the reported cycle — a relatively accessible rate compared to schools with rates in the teens or single digits, but still one where a meaningful share of applicants were not offered admission. That rate reflects the composition of who applied in that cycle, including how many applicants' numbers clustered near or below Duncan's own median band; it is not a stand-alone predictor for any individual applicant's file, and Duncan does not publicly report how acceptance rates vary by LSAT/GPA band. The most defensible use of this data is to compare your own numbers to the school's 25th/50th/75th markers, treat the acceptance rate as background context rather than a personal forecast, and pair that comparison with a realistic look at cost — since grants at Duncan are common but rarely full, most admitted students should expect to finance a meaningful share of tuition regardless of where their numbers land.
Every single student who enrolls at Duncan School of Law receives some form of scholarship — the school's own reporting puts the figure at 100% of the student body receiving grant aid, with no exceptions. That's an unusually universal number, and it changes how you should think about the sticker price versus what you'll actually pay.
The pack does not include a reliable, current published annual tuition figure for Duncan Law, so this guide will not manufacture one — treat any tuition number you see elsewhere as something to verify directly with the school's financial aid office before you rely on it. What the data does show clearly is the shape of the aid: the median full-time grant is $28,000 a year. Layered on top of that is a distribution of how deep those awards run. Thirty-nine percent of students land in the band receiving less than half of tuition covered by their grant, 54% — a clear majority — fall into the band covering somewhere between half and the full cost of tuition, and just 1% receive a full-ride scholarship covering tuition in full. In other words, if you enroll at Duncan Law, the realistic expectation is a partial-to-substantial discount off list price, not a token award, but a full ride is genuinely rare.
What that means practically is that your LSAT and GPA numbers relative to the school's medians — 156/153/150 at the 75th/50th/25th percentile for LSAT, and 3.68/3.44/3.08 for GPA — are worth discussing directly with the admissions office as leverage points before you commit, since scholarship size at most schools tracks where an applicant sits against those medians. (For the general mechanics of how to negotiate a law school scholarship offer, see the shared guide at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation — the tactics are general, but Duncan's own median-grant and banding numbers above are what you'd plug into that conversation here.)
Beyond tuition, the pack does report a living-expense estimate for students living off campus: $28,325 per year. That figure is separate from tuition and covers the ordinary costs of housing, food, and other living expenses while enrolled — useful for sketching your own budget even without a finalized cost-of-attendance figure from the school, which this pack does not provide.
Put together, the honest read is this: Duncan Law's aid model is broad rather than deep for most students — nearly everyone gets something, the median award is a meaningful $28,000, and a majority receive at least half of tuition covered, but stacking a full ride on top of that median is uncommon. Before enrolling, get a written, multi-year aid letter and ask directly whether your scholarship carries any GPA-based renewal condition, since that detail is not disclosed in the available data and matters enormously to your real four-year cost.
Duncan Law's most recent first-time Tennessee bar passage rate is 78.7%, just under the statewide first-time average of 79.92% for the same testing period — meaning graduates are passing at very close to the rate of every other Tennessee-licensed law grad taking the same exam, not far behind it. That single sentence is the headline, but the more useful story here is the trajectory, because Duncan Law's bar numbers have moved dramatically over the school's short history.
Where the school started. Duncan School of Law is young: it was announced in 2008, opened as part of Lincoln Memorial University, and named for Tennessee Congressman John James Duncan, Jr. Its first years were genuinely rocky. The school's inaugural full accreditation push hit a wall in December 2011, when the ABA denied provisional accreditation — a decision Duncan Law contested by suing the ABA over alleged antitrust violations. A judge declined to grant an injunction in January 2012, many students withdrew or transferred in the fallout, and the school also faced a 'negligent enrollment' lawsuit from a former student, which was dismissed in 2013. The entering class that fall 2011 cohort had come in with average LSATs of 147 (full-time) and 145 (part-time) and GPAs near 3.0 — numbers that reflect how thin the applicant pool was during that turbulent stretch. The school didn't secure provisional accreditation until 2014, and full ABA accreditation came only on March 1, 2019.
The recovery, in the numbers. The pack's own historical note states that Duncan Law's 2021 first-time bar passage rate was 50.67% — roughly half of test-takers passing on the first attempt, a genuinely difficult starting point for any accredited school. From that low point, the current reported first-time rate of 78.7% represents a substantial, multi-year climb — nearly 28 percentage points — that has brought the school to within about 1.2 points of the Tennessee statewide average. That is a meaningfully different bar outcome than the school produced just a few cycles earlier, and it lines up with the broader accreditation and institutional maturation timeline above: full ABA accreditation didn't arrive until 2019, and bar outcomes at young schools often improve as curriculum, bar-prep support, and admissions standards stabilize post-accreditation.
What happens to the students who don't pass on the first try. Duncan Law's ultimate two-year bar passage rate is 83.54% — meaning that among the relevant cohort, an additional several percentage points of graduates who didn't clear the exam on their first sitting go on to pass within two years. That gap between the 78.7% first-time rate and the 83.54% ultimate rate is worth sitting with: it tells you that a meaningful share of Duncan Law graduates need more than one attempt, which has real costs in delayed licensure, delayed employment, and additional prep expense — even though the eventual outcome for most is a passing score.
How this connects to employment. The pack reports that 79.1% of Duncan Law's most recent graduating class secured full-time, long-term jobs that were bar-passage-required or JD-advantage within the standard post-graduation window. For comparison, the school's own historical data shows that the class of 2020 — closer to the accreditation transition — had only 62.7% in that same employment category. Read together with the bar-passage climb, this points to the same underlying pattern: outcomes at Duncan Law have been trending upward as the school has moved further from its accreditation-era instability, though 79.1% still means roughly one in five graduates from the most recent class is not in a job in that category ten months out.
What this means if you're evaluating Duncan Law today. A 78.7% first-time pass rate essentially at the state average is a legitimate, current data point — not a historical artifact — and it should be weighed against the school's median LSAT of 153 (25th/75th of 150/156), which sits well below many accredited law schools nationally. Tennessee's bar exam is part of the broader UBE landscape described in the shared bar-exam mechanics (a portable score, MPRE required separately, and a shift toward the NextGen bar in coming years for many jurisdictions) — none of which is unique to Duncan Law, but all of which will apply to anyone sitting for the Tennessee exam as a Duncan graduate. The honest takeaway: Duncan Law's bar outcomes have improved substantially and now track close to the state average, but the two-year climb to an 83.54% ultimate pass rate, and the fact that roughly one-fifth of recent graduates are not landing bar-required or JD-advantage jobs, are both real parts of the picture prospective students should weigh alongside the positive first-time-passage trend.
A Duncan JD is built for practicing law in Tennessee, mostly at small firms and in government offices — not for a Big Law offer. Of the 110 graduates in the reporting class, 79.1% landed work that was full-time, long-term, and either bar-passage-required or JD-advantage within ten months of graduation. That's the headline outcomes number, and it sits below the ABA's outer bound of 100% by a meaningful margin, meaning roughly one in five graduates did not land that category of job in the reporting window.
Look at the firm-size breakdown and a clear pattern emerges: Duncan is a small-firm and solo-practice pipeline. Of the 110 graduates, 39 (about 35%) went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, another 7 (about 6%) went solo, and only a handful climbed into mid-size firms — 5 to firms of 11-25 attorneys, 3 to firms of 26-50, and 1 to a firm of 51-100. At the very top of the market, only 2 graduates (1.8%) landed at firms of 501 or more attorneys — the Big Law tier. Two more (1.8%) landed at firms of 251-500 attorneys. In plain terms: for every graduate who reaches a firm with over 500 lawyers, roughly twenty go to firms with ten or fewer.
Government work is a real and sizable track here, not an afterthought: 22 graduates (20% of the class) went into government positions, making it one of the largest single outcomes categories after small-firm practice. Business and industry roles picked up 8 graduates (about 7%), while public interest work accounted for just 2 graduates (1.8%). The disclosure reports zero graduates entering federal clerkships and zero entering state or local clerkships in this cohort — worth weighing directly if a judicial clerkship is part of your post-graduation plan, since the data gives no evidence that Duncan is currently placing graduates into that track.
Adding up the named categories — small and mid-size firm work, Big Law, government, public interest, and business/industry — accounts for roughly 85% of the graduating class. The pack doesn't break out the remaining share by category, so it isn't clear what those graduates were doing (further study, still searching, or another status), and we won't guess.
Duncan's own disclosure flags Tennessee as the largest single employment destination for its graduates. Combined with a curriculum and bar-passage history built around Tennessee licensure, this is a law school whose value proposition is regional: if your career plan centers on practicing law in or near Knoxville and greater Tennessee, that's where Duncan's placement outcomes are concentrated. If your plan requires a national firm market or a coastal legal market, the data here doesn't show that pipeline.
Duncan's first-time bar passage rate was 78.7%, compared to a Tennessee state average of 79.92% for the same testing period — Duncan sits close to, but slightly under, the statewide average on the first attempt. The ultimate two-year passage rate — capturing graduates who pass on a later attempt — rises to 83.54%. That gap between first-time and ultimate passage matters practically: a meaningful share of graduates who don't clear the bar on the first sitting do clear it within two years, which delays but doesn't necessarily end a bar-required legal career.
If you're evaluating Duncan against a Big Law ambition, the numbers say plainly that this is not that pipeline — 1.8% of the class reached the 501+ firm tier. If your goal is a Tennessee-based legal career in a small firm, solo practice, or government office, the outcomes data shows that's exactly where the large majority of Duncan graduates land, with government work in particular representing a meaningful one-fifth of the class.
Duncan runs an unusually dense experiential curriculum relative to its size: 42 clinics offered (39 filled), 99 filled field placements, and 261 filled seats in simulation courses, all serving a total JD enrollment of 429 students and a graduating class of 110. In raw terms, that's roughly one clinic offering for every ten students enrolled, and a combined total of clinic, field placement, and simulation-course seats that is several times larger than the size of a single graduating class — meaning many students are stacking more than one experiential credit across their three years rather than taking just one.
It means hands-on legal work — supervised client representation in a clinic, a placement inside a government office or organization, or a simulated litigation or transactional exercise — is structurally built into a Duncan JD rather than being a scarce, competitive add-on. With 39 of 42 offered clinic slots filled and 99 field placements filled in the reporting year, the school is running most of its experiential capacity at or near full use, which suggests real student demand for these offerings rather than clinics that exist on paper but sit empty.
Duncan also lists 14 co-curricular offerings, which sit alongside the clinics, field placements, and simulation courses as additional ways students build practical skills and professional networks outside the standard classroom. The pack does not name the specific clinics, so applicants who want to know whether Duncan offers a clinic in a particular practice area (immigration, elder law, criminal defense, and so on) should confirm directly with the school rather than assume from these totals.
That's the honest, harder question, and the data pack doesn't answer it directly — there is no reported link in this pack between experiential-course participation and employment outcomes for Duncan graduates specifically. What the numbers do show is a school that has clearly chosen to invest its instructional capacity in supervised, practice-based learning rather than in a purely doctrinal, large-lecture model. For a student who learns best by doing — representing an actual client, working inside a real placement, or practicing skills in simulation — that structural emphasis is a genuine and verifiable feature of a Duncan JD, distinct from and not a substitute for the employment and bar-passage numbers discussed elsewhere in this guide. Applicants should weigh the two sets of facts side by side rather than assume one explains the other.
Yes, you can apply — but understand where that score puts you in Duncan's file before you do. Duncan's reported LSAT range is a 25th percentile of 150, a median of 153, and a 75th percentile of 156, so a sub-150 score sits below the bottom quarter of the class Duncan currently enrolls, which typically means the rest of your file (GPA, addenda, work history) is doing more of the persuasive work in a holistic review.
As of the 2025-26 cycle, the LSAT is scored 120-180 using two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, with Logic Games removed from the current format; schools consider your highest reported score, so a retake after focused, official-material prep is a standard and often effective strategy if your diagnostic suggests real room to move — see the LSAT prep spoke for a full study plan.
Score also has real financial weight here. Duncan reports that 100% of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant near $28,000 and most awards falling in the "less than half tuition" (39% of students) or "half to full tuition" (54% of students) bands. Because LSAT and GPA are the primary levers scholarship committees use to place applicants into those bands, a few points of LSAT improvement before you apply — or a stronger addendum explaining a lower score — can matter more for your award letter than for admission itself. If you do apply with a sub-150 score and receive an offer, it's worth reading the award terms and any GPA-retention conditions closely and, if useful, revisiting the negotiation playbook before accepting.
A competitive Duncan application starts with knowing where you'd land against the school's own numbers, not guessing at odds. Duncan's most recently reported cycle shows 828 applications against 432 offers — a 52.17% acceptance rate — with an entering-class LSAT split of 150 (25th), 153 (median), and 156 (75th percentile), and GPAs of 3.08, 3.44, and 3.68 at the same three points. A 153 LSAT or 3.44 GPA puts you at Duncan's midpoint; a 156/3.68 places you at its upper quartile. Use those numbers as planning anchors for how you frame your file, not as a prediction of your outcome.
Because the LSAT (in its current Logical Reasoning/Reading Comprehension format, with Logic Games retired) rewards sustained, official-material practice, most applicants who move their score meaningfully do so over several months rather than weeks — see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat for the general mechanics of building a study plan. If your GPA sits below Duncan's 25th percentile, a strong addendum explaining an upward trend or extenuating circumstances, plus a personal statement that reads as ready for a rigorous first year, does more work than another retake with a marginal score change.
Because Duncan runs both full-time and part-time JD tracks, be explicit in your application about which track you're targeting and why — it affects how your file is read and how any scholarship offer is structured. For the mechanics of building out a timeline (LSAT sitting, recommendation requests, deadlines), see /law-school-application-timeline; Duncan-specific deadlines and fees were not available in this data pack, so confirm those directly with the admissions office before you build your calendar around assumptions.
Nearly every admitted student at Duncan gets some form of grant aid — the school reports 100% of students receiving grants, with a median full-time grant of $28,000 — but the size of that award varies widely, and knowing which band you're likely to land in matters more than the fact that a grant exists at all. Of the reported distribution, 39% of grant recipients receive less than half-tuition, 54% receive between half and full tuition, and just 1% receive a full-tuition award. That means the large majority of funded students at Duncan are landing in the half-to-full-tuition middle band rather than at either extreme — worth knowing before you compare a Duncan offer against another school's headline number.
This data pack does not include a usable annual tuition figure for Duncan's full-time or part-time programs, so any specific cost-of-attendance comparison should be confirmed directly with the school's financial aid office rather than assumed. What the pack does report is an estimated off-campus living cost of $28,325 — a number worth stacking against whatever tuition figure the school gives you directly, since living expenses in Knoxville will make up a real share of your total borrowing regardless of your scholarship band.
The pack's conditional-scholarship retention data — the share of students who saw their scholarship reduced after 1L year — is reported as zero or not meaningfully disclosed for the 2022-23 through 2024-25 entering cohorts. That is not the same as confirming Duncan has no GPA-based renewal conditions on its scholarships; it means the data needed to verify retention risk one way or the other isn't present in this pack. Before you deposit, ask the admissions or financial aid office directly: (1) what GPA or class-rank threshold, if any, is attached to your specific award, (2) what percentage of your particular scholarship cohort historically kept their award through graduation, and (3) whether the answer is written into your offer letter, not just described verbally. For the general mechanics of how conditional scholarships work and how to negotiate an offer once you have it in hand, see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
On the borrowing side, remember that federal loan rules changed materially for new borrowers starting July 2026: Grad PLUS loans are gone, and Direct Unsubsidized loans for law students are capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 aggregate, inside a $257,500 lifetime federal limit. If Duncan's total cost of attendance — tuition plus the $28,325 living estimate — exceeds what federal loans will cover for you, the gap has to be filled by scholarship dollars, savings, or private loans, so the size and durability of your grant band becomes a bigger part of the affordability equation than it would have been under the old Grad PLUS system. See /law-school-loans-and-pslf for how the current federal loan and repayment rules fit together, and for how Public Service Loan Forgiveness factors in if you're aiming at a government or nonprofit career path.
Whether Duncan is worth it depends heavily on what kind of legal career you're aiming for and where you want to practice, because its own outcomes data points toward a specific, regional profile rather than a national one. Of Duncan's 110 graduates in the reported cohort, 79.1% landed in full-time, long-term jobs that were either bar-passage-required or JD-advantage — a reasonable outcome floor, but one worth reading alongside the employment mix underneath it. The largest employment category reported is Tennessee itself, and the firm-size breakdown skews small: 39 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, versus just 2 graduates (1.8%) placed at the largest firms of 501-plus attorneys typically associated with 'Big Law' starting salaries. Twenty percent of graduates (22 people) went into government roles, and a further 8 went into business and industry.
That distribution matters for the worth-it calculation in a concrete way: the generic labor-market picture for new lawyers is bimodal, with a smaller peak around very high Big Law salaries and a much larger, lower-paying cluster everywhere else. Duncan's own numbers place the overwhelming majority of its graduates in that second, larger cluster — small firms, government, and business roles concentrated in Tennessee — rather than in the Big Law peak. If your goal is a large-firm associate track with a six-figure starting salary right out of school, Duncan's placement data does not support planning around that outcome. If your goal is practicing law in Tennessee, particularly in smaller-firm or government settings, the school's outcomes look considerably more aligned with that ambition.
Bar passage is the other half of the equation, and here Duncan's most recent reported first-time pass rate was 78.7%, slightly below the state average of 79.92% for that cycle; the ultimate pass rate within two years climbs to 83.54%. That gap between first-time and ultimate passage suggests that a meaningful share of graduates need a second attempt to clear the bar, which has real cost and timeline implications — every additional month before licensure is a month of deferred earning and additional bar-prep expense layered on top of law school debt.
For students weighing government or public-interest work specifically, note that only 1.8% of the reported cohort landed in public-interest roles specifically (distinct from the broader 20% in government), and no federal or state/local clerkships were reported in this data pack for the cohort shown. If your plan depends on Public Service Loan Forgiveness, remember that under current federal rules PSLF still requires 120 qualifying monthly payments — about ten years — of full-time work at a government or 501(c)(3) employer, and that as of the 2025-26 cycle a new federal borrower must actively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) to get PSLF credit, since the default Standard Plan earns none. See /law-school-loans-and-pslf for the mechanics, and /is-law-school-worth-it for the general framework of weighing sticker cost, likely debt, and realistic first-job earnings before you commit. The short version for Duncan specifically: this is a school whose value case rests on regional Tennessee practice and smaller-firm or government outcomes, not on national Big Law placement, and your own affordability math — grant band, living costs, and expected first-job salary — should be built around that reality rather than around the top of the outcomes distribution.