GLASS HALF FULL PART 3 – I’ve previously covered how the revolution in American law will benefit consumers and the legal profession. Today I argue it will even help law schools.
The challenges law schools face are very real, but when we reach the other side of the tunnel the law school experience itself will be cheaper and better. As fewer students apply to law school, there will be increased competition for students in terms of tuition and scholarships. Today’s more clear-eyed students haggle over tuition and try to borrow less.
As some law schools focus less on U.S. News rankings and more on the serious business of staying open, the student experience may also improve. There will be pressure to spend less on faculty scholarship and more on teaching practical skills. Competition has already created some small innovations, like Northwestern’s two year program or Washington and Lee’s experiential third year of law school. Any changes that break up the current, monolithic approach to law school will be a positive overall, even if some of the innovations are less successful or simply cost saving measures.
Happier law students should make for happier faculty. But even if it does not, a correction in the salaries and perks for law school professors has been a long time coming. Brian Tamanaha’s recent book Failing Law Schools is at its most powerful in its chapter on a law professor’s job (“Teaching Load Down, Salary Up”), precisely because legal academics have been so slow to recognize their own role in the trends of the last thirty years. Law professors work less and are paid more than they used to be, and law school administration has grown exponentially, and yet we seem mystified over why tuition and debt loads have risen so precipitously.
Some law professors have a “let them eat cake” response to the suffering of recent law grads, noting that law has always been a competitive market and these graduates are just poorly suited to it. Others think that the cost of law school is fair enough in a free market, conveniently forgetting that much of the “demand” for law school comes from the government requirement of graduation from an ABA accredited law school in order to take the bar.
These attitudes should fade somewhat as the pain in the legal market is shared by legal academia. If it is true that the worst part about living a lie is wondering when everyone will find out, the hardest part is over for legal academia. The law faculty that survives the retrenchment should, like the students who are happy to be employed, experience gratitude for what they have, rather than jealousy for what they do not.