[Note: This isn’t going to be a funny or salacious post. The first half is pretty boring, and I beg you to get through it. The subject is important, maybe even critical, to our profession. At least I think so. I don’t ask much of readers, but do me the courtesy of reading through to the end.]
The rumblings have been going on for a while, that Brian Tamanaha has a book coming out that will change everything about American legal education. The Washington University Lawprof has written Failing Law Schools, which I hear is both condemnation and solution to the crisis we’ve been watching over the past few years. In its pre-publication marketing, the book is described:
For those unaware, Tamanaha isn’t new to his view. Almost two years ago at Balkanization, he sought to shake some sense into his fellow academics as to the systemic problems in law school. He was one of the few lawprofs to take seriously the views of scambloggers, who were largely ignored.On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise, and their resources are often the envy of every other university department. Law professors are among the highest paid and play key roles as public intellectuals, advisers, and government officials. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession.Addressing all these problems and more in a ringing critique is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades, with the scarce jobs offering starting salaries well below what is needed to handle such a debt load. At the heart of the problem, Tamanaha argues, are the economic demands and competitive pressures on law schools—driven by competition over U.S. News and World Report ranking. When paired with a lack of regulatory oversight, the work environment of professors, the limited information available to prospective students, and loan-based tuition financing, the result is a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.
Look past the occasional vulgarity and disgusting pictures. Don’t dismiss the posters as whiners. To a person they accept responsibility for their poor decisions. But they make a strong case that something is deeply wrong with law schools.
Following David Segal’s series in the New York Times, and despite many lawprof’s dismissal of the problem and denial of responsibility, the message has begun to get through to the scholars that something is amiss. The reason it’s been so hard becomes readily apparent from Orin Kerr’s description of Tamanaha’s book:
In most states, you can’t be a lawyer unless you graduated from an ABA-accredited school. Law professors have run the ABA accreditation process, however, and have done so in ways that ensure that all ABA-accredited schools treat professors extremely well and that law schools are quite nice places to work. This has led to a surprisingly uniform educational system in which nearly every school adopts a high tuition model that gives professors low teaching loads, nice salaries, and lots of time for research. Some professors work extremely hard and produce important scholarship, which is the goal. But many other professors just coast and take advantage of their good fortune after making it past the (typically low) tenure hurdle. And Deans generally can’t treat the hard workers and productive scholars better than the dead wood because Deans generally require faculty support to stay in office: A Dean who favors the productive scholars and top teachers too much may not stay in office long. So salaries for all professors are high and course loads are low, whether the professors work 80 hours a week or 20.
It’s a sweet gig any way you cut it. With only the occasional interruption for the unpleasant work of teaching, a life of scholarly pursuits at an extremely comfortable salary, with the added benefits of being treated with respect if not adoration for being so intellectually superior.
The reason I’ve made you endure this post up to now (assuming you’re still reading as I’ve begged you to do) is that this book has the potential to cause a paradigm shift within the legal academy, and there is one monumentally huge, gaping hole: Practicing lawyers have no voice in the discussion.
For a bit, I’ve been talking to a lawprof who shall remain nameless for now (as he has yet to come out with his position or that he deigns to talk to the likes of me, so I leave it to him to admit to our discussions), about the broad array of problems we’re facing. We agree on much. We disagree on much as well.
One of the fundamental disagreements is that he’s of the view that the problems with legal education are internal, and therefore must be cured by the legal academy. In other words, I shouldn’t worry my pretty head about such things. He flatters my interest, but assures me that they need to clean up their own act.
The failures of law school (and I use the plural deliberately) do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of the failures that pervade the profession as a whole, from our inability to fulfill our obligation to society to our inability to produce new lawyers who care more about law than themselves. One of the gravest dilemmas is the overproduction of lawyers carrying enormous debt and the underproduction of professionals capable of helping the public at a cost they can afford.
Add to this the government’s never-ending use of law as a tool to control/regulate/manipulate/improve/fix society, and thus further increase the need for the public to either use lawyers or suffer the mishaps that come of ill-conceived self-help in their everyday lives, and we’re left with a toxic mix.
This goes way beyond law school. This can’t be cured by lawprofs alone, or changes in legal education. Tweak one side of the equation and it impacts on the others, with unintended consequences. And don’t think for a moment that lawprofs, who are living a grand life off the current system even if they realize they’ve gotten too fat and greedy enjoying the fruits of law school tuition, aren’t concerned that letting practicing lawyers stick their nose under the tent won’t ruin their good thing.
But this is our profession. We are stakeholders in the future of lawyers, and it is not only outrageous, but unacceptable, that this discussion occur without our knowledge or involvement. You need to know this is happening. They need to know you care and have something to say about it. And if you turn your back and leave it to the lawprofs to fix, you deserve whatever they come up with.
Once the “fix” is in, there won’t be a mulligan, where lawyers can then add their two cents and go for a second round of how to cure the problems of our profession. Now is the time to get involved in the discussion, whether the lawprofs want us to or not. I realize this isn’t fun and, for many, rather boring and disconnected from the daily grind. But this is our future. Don’t leave it to someone else to fix.
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I think this is similar to “You have to be a cop to understand what it is like to be a cop.”
What do you think should be on the curriculum?
In hindsight, I wish I’d taken Trial Advocacy and some Administrative Law. And it would have been nice for there to be a practical component to New York Civil Practice. But maybe you’ve got more far-reaching ideas.
Maybe. Or maybe just that we may not be nearly as sensitive to their salary and scholarship requirements, and best to keep us at arms length.
I have less issue with curriculum (aside from the “law and ___” interdisciplinary nonsense) than I do with how it’s taught, with one foot in theory and another in practical application. I adhere to the curriculum of the old required courses (such as nobody should graduate law school without having taken evidence!), but think that the profs need to intersperse real world practice with ivory tower philosophy.
Steven Stark’s Writing to Win needs to become required reading for every 1L. And probably again for every 3L.
Funny you should say that. I just received a review copy of Stark’s new revised edition.
It’s not a coincidence.
One can understand why the author didn’t want to hear from practicing lawyers — like any licensed profession, those already licensed are bound to believe that the system’s job is to protect them from competition, not to protect the public or even give a break either to prospective clients or to would-be lawyers.
Except lawprofs aren’t a different licensed profession than lawyers, to the extent they bother to be licensed at all.
Are you stating that in the USA lawyers don’t have to take Evidence? WTF! I mean I know law schools are different over there but evidence is the foundation of anything lawyers do that even remotely means you might have to at one stage, shudder the thought, attend court.
Personally I think ADR should be a compulsory subject here in Aust, evidence most certainly is, as is tax law *blerk* as well. ADR is actually becoming a required elective in a lot of business (and even some IT) degrees as it should too.
Yes, evidence is no longer required at some law schools.
There’s a lot of courses we can add to the list of things nobody should graduate law school without having taken. Evidence is certainly one. Some schools are making administrative law part of the require curriculum. As G. Thompson says, ADR should probably be required, and I think you can make a strong case for a tax law course. I would also add a business organizations class to the list.
We now have 7 required upper-level courses (adding in Professional Responsibility and Constitutional Law). That doesn’t leave a lot of room for electives, and makes taking a clinic extremely difficult.
I’m curious as to whether you think there are any required courses that could be made optional in light of new additions.
It’s worth pointing out that practicing lawyers already have an important voice in the process of law school reform in their capacities as alumni and prospective employers of law school graduates.
That’s a rather small universe. Few of us make significant donations or do much hiring. Most of us are too busy working for a living, if you catch my drift.
You don’t need to a lot of hiring or make big donations to count, though. Write a letter to the Dean of your school, or to any profs you know there, or to both. Better yet, find other alumni who share your views and make it a group letter.
Nah, I don’t think this is the best way to address massive systemic problems. But thanks for the thought.
Gee I guess shunning might not be such a bad option.
You and Orin should also write a nice letter to oil companies politely asking them to stop polluting and lying about global warming. Maybe you can follow up with a nice letter to big I-banks politely asking them from refraining from practices that endanger the global economy.
What is billions of dollars next to the power of a nice letter?
Actually, practicing lawyers benefit from professors teaching nothing but “theory”. Young lawyers do not have the knowledge to compete and drive down prices. Young lawyers will either be too intimidated to handle anything larger than a speeding ticket; or they will recklessly plunge into things that they cannot handle, Rakofsky style.
shg’s comments were driven by concern for the profession not economic interest. Even if law schools actually taught law, it would take a very long time for a young lawyer to match shg’s level of skill.
But certainly law schools, unlike oil companies and banks, care deeply about the welfare of their students and the legal profession, to the exclusion of their own fiscal concerns and those of their faculty.
I imagine writing a letter to your school is a bit like writing a letter to your grandkids. If there’s not a check inside, it doesn’t get read.
A recent alumna and I both wrote a letter to the Dean of NYU asking for the school to publish complete employment statistics. A third alum (acting independently of us) had a letter published in the school paper to the same effect.
The response from the Dean was basically “Derp derp, numbers are hard, derp derp.”
And speaking of employment data, Orin, would you please ask the relevant parties at GW to publish the school’s full NALP report, or, in the alternative explain why the withheld information is irrelevant to prospective students? Thanks.
I have posted an article on the Legal Skills Prof Blog: What Law Firms and Attorneys can do to Help Further Legal Education Reform at [Ed. Note: Link deleted as per rules, but included as a link to the name above.]
I appreciate your interest and support in this, though my ideas of discussion and participation may be a wee bit broader and deeper than yours.
Just to show what is taught in Australia. Though this is from one University it is very standardised across the country.
Also this is for a Bachelor of Law (LLB) for either graduate entry (3yrs) or non-graduate entry (4yrs) that can ONLY be attempted as a mature age student. To attempt Law straight from school you need to do a double degree (6yrs) of Arts, Social Science, Business, Economics, Science, Computing, or Communications.
1st Year
Intro to Law, Law Foundation, Torts, Contracts, Professional Responsibility & Legal Ethics, Criminal Law, Property Law, Constitutional Law
2nd year
Law of Associations, Equity & Trusts, Commercial Law, Remedies
+ 4 Law Specific Electives
3rd Year
Administrative Law, Criminal Procedure and Evidence, Revenue Law, Dispute Resolution and Civil Procedure [ADR]
+ 4 Law Specific Electives
4th Year (if needed)
8 Non Law Specific Electives
[via course 2502.3 at University of Western Sydney ]