As jobs for attorneys disappear, campuses like UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts establish new law schools. Debt-burdened unemployables are loosed upon the world.
A win-win situation, and since the American Bar Association accredits anything with a pulse, we can expect more of it.
An opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times gives some background and makes some suggestions:
… From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016. Taking into account retirements, deaths and that the bureau’s data is pre-recession, the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.
… A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt.
… Today there are 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S., with more on the way, as many have been awarded provisional accreditation. In California alone, there are 21 law schools that are either accredited or provisionally accredited, including the new one at UC Irvine…
[G]ive [accrediting] authority to an organization that is free of conflicts of interest, such as the Assn. of American Law Schools or a new group. Although the AALS is made up of law schools, it is an independent, nonprofit, academic — not professional — group, which could be expected to maintain the viability and status of the profession, properly regulate law schools, curtail the opening of new programs and perhaps even shut down unneeded schools. The AALS has cast a very skeptical eye [for instance] on for-profit schools, compared with the ABA’s weak hands-off accreditation policies…
January 9th, 2010 at 1:53PM
I’m pretty sure that much of the controversy around the law school UMass is absorbing (not starting) arises from its LACK of ABA accreditation.
January 9th, 2010 at 2:20PM
U Mass seems confident that once the school is absorbed into the U Mass system and gets lots of taxpayer money as a result it will quickly win accreditation.
January 9th, 2010 at 3:35PM
I’m posting this comment for Marilyn Mann, a UD reader:
January 9th, 2010 at 4:15PM
A thread on Volokh:
http://volokh.com/2010/01/09/do-we-need-government-intervention-to-reduce-the-number-of-lawyers/
January 9th, 2010 at 5:22PM
Many thanks, RJO.
January 9th, 2010 at 5:25PM
Drexel University in Phildadelphia recently started a new law school, in spite of being located in a city where there are many existing law schools that in terms of reputation run the continuum from stellar to garbage.
Unfortunately, many disciplines suffer from an abundance of unemployable graduates. The number of unemployed or underemployed doctoral degree holding humanities graduates (in almost all disciplines) is another example. Yet programs continue to accept class after class of new professor wannabees.
I’m not sure government intervention and regulation is what’s needed. Maybe just more careful consumers.
January 10th, 2010 at 2:14AM
I guess I don’t buy the premise. Why should we worry about oversupply of law school graduates? Are we concerned about their pore widdle salaries if law firms aren’t standing in line to recruit?
Why not extend this over-solicitous view of employment prospects to say, PhD’s in American Lit or European History? Just how many openings are popping up this year for new faculty in that field?
Maybe we should all take a page from the AMA’s strategy: Impose artificial enrollment limits on US medical schools, take midwives and nurse practitioners to court at every opportunity to protect their monopoly, and sponsor legislation obstructing the licensing of foreign-trained doctors.
It may not seem real positive for people trying to buy insurance or pay off medical bills, but it’s worked out great for doctors.
January 10th, 2010 at 11:35AM
So let me get this straight. The author believes that too many people are willing to pay to get a legal education. The cause, he seems to believe, is that there are too many law schools. Somehow those unneeded schools manage to fill their seats (If you build it, they will come?) with people who can’t make sensible decisions about investments and what they want to do with their lives. If only they were as smart as Greenbaum, they would know they shouldn’t go to law school.
But they’re not as smart as the author, obviously, so he needs to save those poor deluded souls from their errors. How? Not by warning them about the legal job market or by recommending other careers, but by taking the choice away from some of them. Simply eliminate the ABA’s accreditation power and give it instead to a cartel of existing law schools who naturally will stop Princeton or Brown or Dartmouth or any other university from competing with them. That’s apparently what Greenbaum means by saying the AALS is “free of conflicts of interest.”
This is what passes for reason? It’s so wrong on so many levels that it could be a parody of statist, anticompetitive thinking. Perhaps Greenbaum should do his own small part to eliminate the lawyer surplus by turning in his law license.
January 10th, 2010 at 12:34PM
If the accrediting bodies are to have any credibility as something other than a cartel, they need to restrict themselves to assessing whether the academic/professional content of the program is minimally appropriate and whether it is adequately staffed and funded to meet its stated standards.
January 10th, 2010 at 2:06PM
@theprofessor: that is just what the ABA is supposed to do and what purports to do. In practice, though, the ABA discriminated against religious schools (for ideological reasons) and against for-profit schools. Moreover, its interpretation of minimally appropriate standards, staffing, and funding reflects cartelistic behavior — e.g., forcing universities to provide law schools with bigger and better buildings and to pay faculty more money. There’s still a lot of ideological pressure, too. I dare say that any law school that tried to operate without giving racial preferences in admissions would immediately be threatened with loss of accreditation.
Cartels are cartels, and trying to limit them to non-cartelistic behavior is a constant battle. Just as the AMA restricted entry to medical practice by driving a lot of medical schools out of business, so the ABA restricted entry to legal practice by driving out many night law schools. A better and fairer approach would be to enact strict testing requirements for admission to practice and leave the students and law schools to figure out how to meet those requirements.
August 15th, 2010 at 12:12PM
[…] here […]
May 21st, 2012 at 2:41PM
[…] on and on the ABA goes, accrediting everything, making the world safe for tens of thousands of useless lawyers and […]