A review in Slate of the collapsing market in law degrees makes the opening of new law schools at UC Irvine and the University of Massachusetts (and they’re not the only ones) all the more disgusting. All of these schools come equipped with the standard current law school package of extremely highly paid professors and under-employed, debt-ridden students.
Law school professors are beginning to look très Marie Antoinette.
Some people have called for the ABA, which accredits anything with a pulse, to be replaced by an actual accrediting agency. That would certainly be a good start.
March 28th, 2011 at 10:26AM
It is not only the students who suffer. When the number of lawyers grows beyond a certain level, there are negative economic and social effects on the whole society. “Two lawyers can thrive in a town where one would starve.”
I don’t know how one would compute the optimal number of lawyers, but it’s probably a smaller one than the current one, and surely a parameter that there is no urgent national need to increase.
Related post: A plague of sticky governors?
March 28th, 2011 at 5:20PM
(1) The crushing debt that law students now incur can extinguish the idealism that still prompts many fine students to seek a career in law. The resident tuition at the University of Minnesota Law School (where one of my twin daughters is a second year student) is over $32,000 for this year alone. See the October 27, 2010 post on Above The Law at http://abovethelaw.com/2010/10/13-tuition-increase-1-faculty-salary-cuts-100-screwing-of-minnesota-law-students/.
(2) There is a large and growing number of our fellow citizens who do not have access to legal advice and the judicial system. This is true despite dedicated efforts of many attorneys to provide pro bono services. See the Report on Pro Bono Legal Services at http://www2.mnbar.org/committees/lad/2009ProBono.pdf. (Lawyers also carry on a tradition of serving as volunteers for numerous civic organizations, social service agencies, and educational organizations.)
The phrase “Equal Justice Under Law” is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court building. It becomes ever more difficult to approach this ideal as the gap widens between very wealthy individuals and corporations and the rest of society. The real problem is access to justice for all members of our community.
March 28th, 2011 at 7:29PM
Well, there are too many lawyers graduating. And there are some really crap law schools. But it’s not clear to me that there shouldn’t be a UC Irvine – they are aiming to graduate lefty-prog activist types, and that’s not so depressed a market as merger and acquisition types. My guess is the schools that ought to go are Suffolk and Golden Gate and McGeorge, University of Dayton, Valparaiso, etc. Those graduates are well and truly hosed. Irvine is, on the left, sort of what George Mason is on the right – a specialized school for whose graduates demand will be better than average.
March 29th, 2011 at 12:18AM
Dave,
UC Irvine is a state school. They shouldn’t be aiming to graduate lawyers with a particular political philosophy.
March 29th, 2011 at 6:24AM
@David Foster. See Stephen Magee, “The Optimum of Lawyers: Cross-National Estimates” (1992) and subsequent discussions in the WSJ and elsewhere. He estimated the US had 40% too many lawyers at that time.
March 29th, 2011 at 7:54AM
Don’t ignore Michael McNabb’s second point. There are simultaneously too many and too few attorneys in the U.S. There are too many in a number of different geographic and practice areas, and too few in many others. The same is true with health care providers.
I wholeheartedly agree that it is no answer to the problems of the inequitable distribution of the legal workforce to simply churn out more lawyers. However, it is equally untrue that the distributive problem will be solved simply by eliminating lawyers and law schools, even if the latter is independently justified.
March 29th, 2011 at 10:06AM
Daniel Goldberg is correct that the lack of access to service is a problem common to both law and medicine. My wife, a nurse and director of community health services, and our oldest daughter, a physician who is a third year medical resident at a large metropolitan hospital, see this on a daily basis. See also, T.R. Reid, The Healing of America (New York: Penguin Press 2009) and Maggie Mahar, Money Driven Medicine (New York: Collins 2006).
Mr. Goldberg is also correct that the solution in law is not to simply churn out more lawyers. There must be a fundamental change in the economics of law, just as there must be a fundamental change in the economics of medicine.
March 29th, 2011 at 6:20PM
I honestly have no idea what the tuition payoff rate is for law school (that is, what the expected lifetime yield is for per tuition dollar actually spent) — nor what the figures would be for an undergraduate or graduate degrees in English. Is there any data?
I do expect reasonable minds would differ about the social utility of those degrees, just as I expect reasonable minds would differ about whether law or business professors should be paid substantially more than their brethren in the humanities. But as much as I resist UD’s abiding animus toward many professional schools, I think there is broad agreement that opening more law schools is a serious mistake. Oddly, Irvine may have the best prospects of all the newbies.