Law schools must reform
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As major news outlets have documented for some time, the job market for recent law school graduates may be charitably described as dismal.
The graduates, however, are not the only ones facing a crisis. As more and more law students graduate with a diploma in one hand, significant student loan debt in the other and no true "law job" in the offing, law schools are forced to confront a deeply moral dilemma.
As a law professor and former law student, I recognize that, beyond tuition, students invest a deep faith in us that the enormous sacrifices they make to earn their degree will allow them to do the work of justice that drew them to the law in the first place. Law schools are morally obliged to justify that investment of faith.
We cannot face this crisis simply by blaming a weak economy. I suspect that hard times have merely given major legal employers an excuse to act on an instinct they've had for many years.
Law firms have always chaffed at the notion of hiring graduates and paying them substantial salaries while simultaneously teaching them (at the firm's expense) what they need to know to practice law. Unlike medical school graduates, who have one foot in the hospital and one in the classroom during much of their schooling, many law graduates need directions to find the courthouse. In tough economic times, firms have simply decided to get out of the business of providing post-graduate training for lawyers.
You would think that law schools would make fundamental changes to their programs in the wake of the job crisis, fearing that law degrees might someday be assessed like a Ph.D. in poetry -- soul-satisfying but potentially impractical. A few have responded dramatically, but most have held fast to the traditional law school model or made superficial changes. Why the resistance?
For many law schools, their institutional identity dictates that they be largely disconnected from the practice of law. This is done (I suppose) in the belief that we "in the academy" will thereby establish ourselves as an intellectual elite worthy of praise for the intricacy of our philosophical analysis.
Many of us write scholarly articles unconcerned that practicing lawyers never read them but in hopes that other professors will. We do not rank ourselves based upon the skill level of our graduates but support a national publication's ranking system that gives the highest single value (25 percent) to what other law schools think of our program.
First Published January 4, 2011 12:00 am
