FIXING LAW SCHOOLS has been excerpted in the Chronicle of Higher Education. They even included a few of my graphs!

FIXING LAW SCHOOLS – Inside Higher Ed has a nice interview with me where I discuss my new book Fixing Law Schools.

MAKING LAW SCHOOL CHEAPER IS SUGGESTION NUMBER ONE – Fixing Law Schools spends a lot of time detailing the unconscionable run up in law school tuition and student debt over the last few decades and some ideas for how to reverse the trend. Paul Caron reports that Memphis Law School has cut its out-of-state tuition by 25% to $24,000, which is a nice step in the right direction by Glenn and my sister public law school across the state.

KITTEN’S GOT CLAWS: TaxProf Paul Caron reports that the ABA has found Louisville Law School out of compliance with its accreditation standards. The ABA has been a lot busier enforcing its standards in the last few years, but this latest move is especially notable. First, Louisville is not one of the usual suspects. Founded in 1846, Louisville is the oldest law school in Kentucky and one of the oldest in the country. It’s named after the great Justice Louis Brandeis and is a top-100 law school. Worse yet, Louisville has been dinged under ABA Standard 202, because “its current financial condition” may have “a negative and material effect” on the school’s ability to operate. YIKES! If the flood waters have reached Louisville, there’s likely an awful lot of law schools in financial trouble. On a related topic, Fixing Law Schools explains how this has happened and what law schools should do about it. Hint: the answer ISN’T higher tuition or more debt.

EXERCISE AND BEER CLOSELY LINKED – Researchers at Penn state have published a study that finds “an unequivocal correlation between exercising on any given day and subsequently drinking.”  The relationship “held true throughout all seasons of the year and whether someone was a man or a woman, a collegian or a retiree. Age and gender did not affect the results.”  Glenn and I regularly meet for a drink (usually whiskey or wine rather than beer, but still) after a Rippetoe style lifting session.  It helps with recovery and makes us more likely to do both activities again.  I’m guessing there me be some similar activities at Bullets & Bourbon this weekend.

THANKS SO MUCH TO GLENN, my co-guestbloggers, and to all of you for a great week.  I learned A LOT from the posts, your comments, and the experience.

Most notably I learned that this is even harder than it looks from the outside!  One possible explanation for the Blogfather’s excellence: Glenn is, in fact, a blogging cyborg.  He doesn’t eat.  He doesn’t sleep.  All he does is post awesome links with interesting commentary.  When he returns and finds that I have mocked his robot brethren I may be in some trouble. . . .

LEGALZOOM SUES NORTH CAROLINA BAR FOR ANTITRUST VIOLATIONS – In case you missed it, LegalZoom has sued the North Carolina Bar for antitrust violations.  Here’s the WSJ lawblog post and a copy of the complaint.  This is on top of LegalZoom’s ongoing North Carolina fight over whether online legal services are the unauthorized practice of law.  LegalZoom has had some success in South Carolina on this front and with more of a mixed result in Missouri.  The bottom line is that LegalZoom is still operating in all fifty states, which is how I count wins and losses in this sort of game.

An antitrust suit is a horse of a different color, however, since it challenges the very structure of American lawyer regulation.  S**t just got real.  In my book I talk a bunch about what a tight spot the ABA and state bars find themselves in.  They could try to shut down LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer through new regulations or even prosecution for the unauthorized practice of law, but the public outcry would be LOUD and the downside risk – an antitrust suit or other attempts to strip lawyers of self-regulation – is very real.  Bar associations have been cursed to live in interesting times indeed.

AVOID DECISION FATIGUE – EAT THE SAME BREAKFAST EVERY DAY – I’ve had the same, relatively strange, breakfast (canned alaskan salmon on a rice cake, with a banana, and an apple on the side) every day for years.  One decision eliminated at the start of the day.

SLOWER PLEASE: Study Shows that 1 in 4 cancer research papers contain faked data.

CHINESE TOURISM AND LUXURY SPENDING SOARS – I’ve been a Fulbright Scholar in lovely Ljubljana, Slovenia this year and I’ve been visiting Europe since the 1980s and this trend is super noticeable on the ground here.  My last long trip to Europe was summer of 2011, and I don’t remember seeing swarms of Chinese tourists carrying Prada bags, and using selfie-sticks with iPhones that year or earlier.  I grew up in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s and there were lots of Chinese immigrants and virtually no Chinese tourists, because if you got out of China in those years you stayed out of China.

I actually take the tourism as a pretty good sign.  Better that the Chinese spend their money in freer and more democratic markets.  It is also good that they get a view of how the rest of the wealthy world lives, with cleaner air, louder political debates, free access to Google and Facebook, etc.  When growth runs at 10% or higher and lots of folks are making money, people are willing to put up with a lot of BS from their government.  Once people have some money and growth slows it’s a lot harder to keep that balance, especially if the middle and upper middle class is traveling elsewhere and taking notes (and pictures, lots and lots of pictures).

LIBERTARIAN TRIUMPH?  Since the beginning of Instapundit Glenn has called for married gay couples with closets of assault weapons and we’re basically there!  Now we just need to keep hustling for marijuana and prostitution and we’re getting somewhere.  In 2010 Glenn and I made the following wager: Will marijuana be legal in all fifty states before or after January 1, 2020?  Glenn took before (optimist!) and I took after.  A Chipotle burrito bowl (or steak tacos in Glenn’s case) awaits the winner, so the stakes are high.

HIGHER ED BUBBLE LAW SCHOOL EDITION – Taxprof reports that Cardozo Law School in New York has created a one year jobs program offering their unemployed graduates to small firms at the low, low, price of just $38,000 a year.  In an unrelated story, full tuition is $53,570, not including living expenses for New York City.

GLASS HALF FULL FINALE – So that’s the book in a nutshell.  I lay out a pretty comprehensive overview of the American market for legal services and law schools, and at the end it seems like times are grim indeed.  And yet, every time the American legal profession has appeared down for the count, it has come roaring back.  During the 19^th Century era of Jacksonian democracy every effort was made to break the hold of courts and lawyers.  The practice was virtually unregulated in a majority of states, state judicial elections became the norm, and legislatures passed new codes of civil procedure to further erode lawyer hegemony.   Times looked grim for the profession.

But lawyers responded by becoming irreplaceable partners with all levels of businesses, working hand in hand with the makers of the industrial revolution.  The great legal historian Lawrence Friedman describes the rebirth in the post-Civil War era thusly:

Nevertheless, the lawyers prospered.  The truth was that the profession was exceedingly nimble at finding new kinds of work and new ways to do it.  Its nimbleness was no doubt due to the character of the bar: open-ended, unrestricted, uninhibited, attractive to sharp, ambitious men.”

Lawyers again faced an existential threat during the Depression, when the economy crumbled and earnings collapsed.  Lawyers did even worse in the 1930s than the economy as a whole.  When World War II ended, however, lawyers started on a historic run that lasted until the 1980s, partially assisted depression-era restrictions on entry like the bar examination and the law school requirement.

Don’t forget that – for better or worse (and from the comments I know many of y’all think that it is worse) – America’s legal profession is utterly unique in the world.  It is bigger, richer, and more intertwined in civic life than anywhere else.  Lawyers founded this country.  Thirty-two of the fifty-five framers of the constitution and twenty-five of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were trained or practicing lawyers.  Twenty-five out of forty-four American Presidents have been lawyers, including three of the first four, six of the first eight, ten of the first thirteen.  Lawyers have always been a dominant force in Congress and state legislatures.

America and its legal profession have been intertwined from the beginning, and lawyers – sharp-elbowed and ambitious – will find a new purchase in these changed times.  They have before and they will again.  Whether that is good news or bad news I will leave to you.

WHAT DOES JURASSIC WORLD’S BOX OFFICE DOMINATION MEAN?  Lots and lots more sequels and event blockbusters, that’s what.  That’s not necessarily bad news though.  I loved Fast and Furious 7. I saw the movie on opening night at a multiplex in Ljubljana, Slovenia.  One of my proudest moments as an American was when they dropped multiple cars out of a plane and then opened their parachutes.  The entire crowd gasped and then applauded and laughed.  Same deal when they jumped a sports car through  three different skyscrapers.  America baby!  This is what we do.

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.

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS: Glenn loves to welcome them.  I prefer to mock them: here is a minute and thirteen second video compilation of robots falling over from the 2015 DARPA Robotics Competition.

GLASS HALF FULL PART 2 – Yesterday I made the easy case for optimism: Americans of all income levels will have more access to law and legal services in the twenty-first century.  Today I tackle the harder case: after a wrenching period of change the legal profession and law schools will be improved.

The profession will benefit greatly from smaller law classes filled with students with a realistic idea of what lawyers actually do and earn.  Current law students come in spite of a headwind, rather than because they are history majors with no other plans, and as such are much likelier to enjoy law school and law practice.  One of the hidden causes of rampant lawyer unhappiness is that too many lawyers were not thoughtful about coming to law school and are later disappointed with their choice.  The college graduates who do not go to law school will also be better off, pursuing careers for which they are better suited.  Fewer law graduates means less competition for the remaining jobs.

The actual job of being a lawyer will also improve.  The best of times for Big Law profits has been the worst of times for the lawyers themselves.  Big Law has led a boom in both remuneration and misery.  The changes ahead will force “alternative billing” for many projects, encouraging creativity and efficiency rather than the grind of maximizing hourly billing.  Much of the less interesting work will be computerized or outsourced, leaving only the most challenging and interesting work.

Competition from Axiom and other virtual law firms will allow creative lawyers flexibility in the terms and conditions of their employment, allowing some lawyers to do Big Law type work on their own schedules.  Surveys have regularly shown that Big Law lawyers would take less money in return for more free time and autonomy.

The same trends will make the small firm and solo practitioners who survive better off.  First, some portion of Big Law will separate from the most profitable firms and fall back to the pack, possibly rejoining what now resembles two separate professions (Big Law and everyone else).

Second, while much legal work will be lost, the work that remains will be more challenging and interesting.  At every level of the profession, entrepreneurialism and creativity will be required.  Lawyers will not be able to count on h