Archive for the ‘Law School’ Category

Higher Education Costs: What Could The Federal Government Do?

posted by Dave Hoffman

President Obama’s State of the Union glossed on a topic that’s quite relevant to the recent debates about legal education:

“Of course, it’s not enough for us to increase student aid. We can’t just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we’ll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who’ve done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury— it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”

As political pap goes, this is as good as any.  But I’d go a step further to ask how the government could help keep down costs, apart from threatening to take away subsidies.  Costs have many drivers, including rising student demand for particular kinds of campus amenities, legacy benefit costs that plague all large-scale employers, and rising health costs.  But the biggest factor is faculty salaries. Given tenure (which affects law schools disproportionately because of our accreditor’s monopoly) it might seem like this is a wicked problem.  Maybe it is, but the President could have called for the Congress to make a small change in law that might make a real difference: repeal that portion of the ADEA which prohibits mandatory retirement ages for university professors.

As is well-known, the federal government prohibits mandatory retirement policies except when age is a bona fide occapational requirement or when the person is a qualifying executive.  29 U.S.C. §§623(f), 631(c).  An exception for tenured employees, including professors, was phased out in 1993.  (The law phasing out the exception passed in 1986).  As this study predicted, the impact on research universities in particular is severe, as an increasingly high percentage of workers stay on the job after age 70. Why does this matter?   If teaching and/or scholarship decreases after many years on the job – and there is some evidence that they do – universities have few remedies given tenurial job protections for under performing employees.  In today’s economy, with an increasingly volatile stock market, and unpalatable health insurance choices, we’d probably also expect that fewer faculty will retire voluntarily in the future than they used to.  Thus, many institutions will find it hard to reduce costs by reducing faculty sizes (or paying less per person by replacing older, more expensive, employees with younger, cheaper, ones.)  We will deliver fewer educational goods, at higher costs.

Now there are good reasons for prohibiting mandatory retirement in general. But I’ve never understood why those reasons translate when you’ve got a tenured faculty who often exercise more self-government than law firm partners.  In any event, given the economic realities of the moment, lumping faculty in with other workers feels like a luxury students can no longer afford.

  January 25, 2012 at 2:01 pm   Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Education, Law School   Print This Post   3 Comments

Law School Debt

posted by Daniel Solove

This report by the Center for American Progress has some interesting statistics about law school debt:

The high demand for legal education is somewhat surprising given its hefty price tag. The average tuition and fees at private, nonprofit law schools in 2010 was $34,656 per year.  At public universities, in-state students paid $19,912 yearly on average in tuition and fees, and out-of-state students paid $32,247 per year. And unlike enrollments or degree completions, law school tuition is on a steady upward path. (see Figure 3)

It’s difficult to locate the cause of this steep rise in tuition. Though some have claimed that stringent accreditation requirements drive price, a 2009 GAO study showed that this assumption is incorrect. That report identified a few drivers of tuition based on interviews with law school officials, including a more hands-on approach to legal education that includes pricey clinical experiences and smaller class sizes.

Other changes to the legal education model may also drive tuition, including greater diversity of course offerings and increased academic support and career services for students, as well as higher faculty salaries, competition for higher rankings, and state disinvestment at public law schools. And of course, many of these changes are driven by increased competition among law schools, which in itself can be considered a driver of tuition.

Some other findings:

Law students have more debt on average than almost all other graduate students, excepting only medical students. And more law students borrow to pay for their education than all other graduate students. . . .

It’s difficult to get a complete picture of defaults at law schools, as the Department of Education collects and publishes default rates for institutions as a whole rather than by division or professional school. But since some law schools operate as standalone institutions, we can get some idea of how law grads fare. Of these standalone institutions, the average default rate is only 2.6 percent.

  December 29, 2011 at 3:16 am   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   2 Comments

AALS “Hot Topics” Program: Russia’s “Dictatorship of Law”

posted by Jeffrey Kahn

I am glad to announce that the AALS Committee on Special Programs selected my proposal as a “Hot Topics” panel for the 2012 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. next month.  The program is called: “The Dictatorship of Law: The Khodorkovsky Case, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law in Russia.”  William Pomeranz, Deputy Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, will chair a panel that includes Kim Lane Scheppele (the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton), Bruce Bean (Michigan State University), Christopher Bruner (Washington and Lee University), Alexei Trochev (Nazarbayev University) and me.  The program will begin at 10:30 on Friday morning, January 6. 

Below is a description of the panel, which will occur (as perhaps a “hot topic” should) between two central events on the Russian calendar: the surprising results of yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Russia and presidential elections scheduled for March 4 that (at least until yesterday) everyone was saying would be certain to return now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to the presidency currently held by his protégé, Dmitrii Medvedev.

During his first campaign for President of Russia in February 2000, Vladimir Putin defined democracy as a “dictatorship of law.”  This was meant to signal a shift away from the perceived lawlessness of his immediate predecessor’s governance, and to feed the nostalgia for Soviet-era stability.  As Putin starts his gambit to return to the Russian presidency, this panel examines which half of that slogan will dominate the other.  Recent developments in the most well-known case in the courts of both Russia and the Council of Europe present an opportunity to do so at a pivotal moment not only in that case but for the future of the rule of law in Russia.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the CEO of the Yukos Oil Company and the richest man in Russia when in 2003 he and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, were arrested and charged with crimes connected to Yukos, Russia’s most profitable and well-known private corporation.  They were convicted of fraud, causing property damage by deceit or breach of trust, and tax evasion and sentenced to eight years in prison.  Yukos was seized and sold to state-controlled companies.  In December 2010, as their sentences drew to a close, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were convicted by another court of embezzlement and money-laundering, charges arising out of the same time period and concerning the same corporate activities that were the basis for the first conviction.  On the eve of that verdict, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin informed a nationwide television audience that “a thief should sit in jail,” a reference to a well-known Soviet mini-series that would have been quite familiar to viewers (the quote continues: “… and people don’t care how I put him away.”).  In midsummer 2011, a Russian court upheld the verdict, extending the defendants’ sentences until 2016. 

A bit more on the tension this case embodies for Russian law and human rights after the break …

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  December 5, 2011 at 11:33 am   Posted in: Corporate Law, Corruption, Courts, Criminal Procedure, Current Events, Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Income-Level Value of Higher Education

posted by Daniel Solove

There have been many attacks on higher education lately, some justified but some unjustified.  Some  are questioning whether higher education — both undergraduate and graduate education — is worth it.  Much of these discussions speak about the value of education almost exclusively in terms of the money stream it will produce.  Of course, there are many other values of education beyond this instrumentalist reason.   Knowledge is a good in and of itself.

But if we measure education based on the income stream it will generate, the evidence is that it does correlate strongly with higher income.   A recent Gallup poll reveals statistics about the strong correlation between higher education and income:

More generally, college education is strongly correlated with household income. Nine percent of Americans earning less than $20,000 per year are college graduates; this rises to majorities of adults in all income groups above $100,000. Similarly, few adults in low-income households have postgraduate education, and this rises only into the teens among middle-income adults. But it sharply increases among those earning $100,000 or more, peaking at 49% among those earning between $250,000 and $499,000, and those earning at least half a million.

The educational differences between the nation’s “1%” and “99%” exceed all other demographic as well as political differences seen between these groups in the Gallup data.

This chart summarizes some of the data in the poll:

 

 

  December 5, 2011 at 9:58 am   Posted in: Current Events, Law School   Print This Post   2 Comments

Kahan on Science & Law School Education

posted by Dave Hoffman

At the Cultural Cognition Blog, Dan Kahan introduces a new project:

“I’ve been asked to be part of an NAS working group that will develop a proposal on how science should figure in the training of lawyers. I’m going to put together a memo that outlines my own initial views and distribute it shortly before the first meeting (in mid January). Below is a condensed account of the points and themes that my memo will stress. But my ideas are provisional & formative; indeed, I share them to invite your reactions, which I expect to stimulate and educate my own thinking.

I welcome feedback not only on the substance but also on what to include in an annotated bibliography, the germ of which appears after the narrative section. The bibliography is not meant as a syllabus for a course; some of the items would no doubt be assigned in the sort of “forensic science literacy” course I am describing, but mainly I am trying to compile sources that help make the spirit & philosophy of such an offering more vivid for memo readers.”

The remainder of the post, which talks about the components of science training for lawyers, is both provocative (in the best sense) and illuminating.  I figured it’d be of interest to our readers, especially in light of the recent discussion on this blog regarding the relationship between legal scholarship, legal education, and the practice of law. (And in light of the responses in the HLR Forum to Dan’s forward, one of which claimed to hear in Dan’s work “the sounds of an earlier era, the era when Progressives believed that scientific expertise could be called upon to resolve normative questions that divided the nation …”)  In the blog post, Dan argues that the key task of law schools in here is to teach students to “recognize what constitutes sound forensic science and what doesn’t. A model course should instruct students in the general concepts and procedures that one must understand in order to perform this recognition task reliably, including principles of validity; elements of probability; and methods of inquiry (more on these below).”  This conception of scientific legal education is, I think, linked with Dan’s famous speech on the core role that judgment and recognition generally plays in legal education.

In any event, check it out and contribute to the project!

  December 2, 2011 at 11:46 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   No Comments

What’s in a Name?

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Today my law school received a $31 million gift.  Henceforth we will be called the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Here is the announcement.

  December 1, 2011 at 1:55 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   3 Comments

“Mentoring” versus “Scamming”

posted by Dave Hoffman

Today in Contracts, I taught Vokes v. Arthur Murray, 212 So. 2d 906 (1968).  In Vokes, a “widow of 51 years”¹ sought to be relieved from her obligation to pay for dance lessons purchased from an Arthur Murray franchise.  She claimed that the defendant had lied to her about her abilities as a dancer – and, significantly, exaggerated her improvement.  She had an account with almost 2,000 hours of unused lessons outstanding, and she owed more than $200,000 (in 2010 dollars). Surprisingly, the court permitted that argument to go to a jury, reasoning that the studio’s superior knowledge, coupled with the defendant’s bad faith as illustrated by the facts, made this the kind of exceptional misleading “opinion” which might be actionable.

It’s a good teaching case.  But it got me to wondering about an issue tangentially raised by David Segal’s embarrassingly error-ridden and ideologically charged series in the Times about legal education, and more forcefully by the equally thoughtful Paul Campos. Both argue (ironically) that law schools are contributing to the problems of the legal profession by not raising higher barriers to entry.  Those barriers might be incidentally related to other worthy goals — experiential education, a single tenure system, and a more rigorous disclosure regime are all popular reforms that are very, very expensive.²  But sometimes reformers make a more direct claim: like the Texas lawyers of the 1930s, they claim that “Our bar, already overcrowded, is held out as an asylum for the lame, and the halt, and the blind from the law schools of this country.”  Law schools are failing students by encouraging them to apply (it’s a “scam”), taking their money (it’s really a “scam!”), not preparing them to practice (“scam! scam! scam!”), and then not supporting them in getting jobs (“SCAM!”)

But how far, I mused outloud in class, does this argument run?  Let’s say a student comes to your office hours early in the Fall semester.  They are lost.  Really, desperately, lost.  They are working all the time, but they can’t see the forest, the trees, the continent, the planet.  Law’s greek to them. What to do?  One view – let’s call this the Segal/Campos view – is that the morally right thing to do at that very moment is to 1) recognize that my livelihood depends on the students; 2) this puts me, like every provider of services, in a slightly compromised position when talking to a student about whether they ought to be in school; 3) realizing this, decide pretty quickly if I think that the student is a candidate for Bar passage and employment; 4) if not, tell the student that they’d be better off leaving school and pursuing other opportunities in today’s job market, or to take the Ayes-refund offer if it comes.

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  November 22, 2011 at 11:27 pm   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions   Print This Post   40 Comments

New York Times Financial Advice: Be an Unpaid Intern Through Your 20s (Then Work till You’re 100)

posted by Frank Pasquale

Jason Mazzone has already addressed the main shortcomings of the latest N.Y. Times article by David Segal on law schools. I’d like to situate it as part of a neo-liberal ideology developing at the Times and other scriveners for the powerful.

If you pair the basic message of Segal’s piece (“law students and professors aren’t doing enough to raise corporate profits”) with that of Ed Glaeser’s anti-retirement musings in the same pages (“work into your 90s”), the ideology starts to emerge. Labor economist Mark Price pithily suggested it:

Law schools couldn’t possibly teach the wide range of firm specific skills that law firms need . . . . And yet you have a writer [pushing] propaganda that the big law firms are tired of paying for on the job training.

On the other hand it is at least comforting to know that law firms are not that different from firms in Manufacturing or Health Care[;] that is[,] they would prefer that somebody else pay for the skills that make them profitable.

This is a classic problem of uneven bargaining power familiar since the 1920s.* Why are wages falling while productivity is rising? Because firms realize they can fire current workers, shift their duties (unpaid) to frightened current employees, and reap the profits of having one person do the work of many. It’s another form of “shadow work” that contributes to the time bind so many Americans find themselves in. When 65% of economic gains go to the top 1% of the population, it’s not too hard to discern this dynamic.
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  November 20, 2011 at 1:40 pm   Posted in: Law and Inequality, Law School, Teaching, Technology   Print This Post   21 Comments

The New York Times on Legal Education

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Congratulations to Tyler Doggett, whose article on “What is Wrong With Kamm’s and Scanlan’s Arguments Against Taurek” got a shout out in today’s front page story.  I’m not sure, though, that all publicity is good publicity.

  November 20, 2011 at 9:41 am   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

Call for Papers

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’m pleased to make the following announcement about what we hope will become an annual event.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Junior Faculty Interdisciplinary Scholarship Workshop at Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis

March 22-23, 2011

The workshop will explore “Objectivity in the Law” and is open to non-tenured academics whose research is interdisciplinary in nature.  The normative value of objectivity runs through the purpose for most law, though social practices influence how laws are implemented.  Submitted papers should focus on a chosen area of law and examine that law’s objective purpose and the relationship between its purpose and its actual implementation.

To ensure each presenter receives extensive feedback, only six papers will be selected for the workshop.  Senior scholars from Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis and other law schools will be paired with presenters and serve as primary or secondary commentators on the papers.  Presenters will receive a small honorarium and will be reimbursed for their travel and hotel expenses.  The Law School will provide lunch and dinner on Friday, as well as breakfast on Saturday.

Interested participants must submit a 500 word abstract to Professor Cynthia Adams at cmadams@iupui.edu before November 15. Presenters will be notified before December 15. If selected, a participant must submit a full copy of the paper before February 17, 2011.

The program is also open to other scholars wanting to attend, read, and comment on the papers but not present. There is no registration fee.

  October 4, 2011 at 7:06 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   No Comments

The Price of Law School Cost Transparency, Part II: An Interview with Law School Transparency

posted by Dave Hoffman

A little while back, I argued that recent efforts to encourage law school “transparency” to benefit prospective students must fairly account for the costs that disclosure imposes on current students.  In light of the recent traction that disclosure regulation has gotten, I’m pleased that Kyle McEntee and Patrick J. Lynch, of Law School Transparency, agreed to respond to some questions about their project.

As an introduction, I think about transparency (and consumer decisions) as a problem of optimal and efficient disclosure.  Obviously, what schools disclose must be, at least, true.  But with notable exceptions, commentators don’t allege that law schools are literally lying about their statistics.  But they do point out – with some force – that omissions may make what’s disclosed literally accurate but misleading.  This is a very common problem in various areas of legal study — securities law, food and drug law, products liability, common law fraud, etc.  In some regimes, regulators have ordered particular items of disclosure; others are governed by ex post tort remedies; and still others are governed by the market alone.  Ordinarily, the choice between these disclosure regimes is guided by empirical data about what consumers want and how they behave.   Not so here.

Paul Campos says that law faculty should sign a petition that calls upon our regulator to “require all schools it has accredited to release clear, accurate, and reasonably comprehensive information regarding graduate employment.”  That is, he wants a highly specified, regulator-driven, disclosure policy.  What could possibly be wrong with that?  Well, for one, we know that Guilds generally act in the interests of incumbents – and the Bar is no exception – making it unlikely that any Bar-led regulatory solution will ultimately accrue to the benefit of students. As I’ve previously expressed, I believe in less, not more, ABA regulation. I think that asking the Bar to impose regulations – even “benign” ones on disclosure – is a dangerous game.

I am concerned as well that the petition makes no mention of cost to current students – opportunity and otherwise.  It should be obvious that disclosure will cost current students something — if only the time of the person collecting the statistics, which could have been spent in career services, or on the lights, or in buying pizza for student groups.  Now, the petition alludes to an LST white paper, which does talk about costs – but in a relatively cursory way at 30-31 -where it suggests, for instance, that disclosure’s costs could be funded out the ABA’s budget.

Because I don’t fully appreciate how well LST’s proposal will be implemented by schools, how much it will cost and who would bear those costs, and because I would like to have a better understanding of the problem before endorsing one solution, I won’t sign LST’s petition. But I’m sympathetic to the project.  I’d like law schools to provide more information about their graduates’ employment, in a way that could be easily compared across schools. I’ve talked with Temple’s office of career services about these kinds of concerns – and I think they’ve been tremendously receptive.

The interview reflecting on these topics follows, after the jump.  I thank Kyle and Patrick for their cooperation.  My questions and subsequent comments are in bold.  Everything else is their text: I didn’t edit their responses at all.

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  September 20, 2011 at 12:56 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   One Comment

LL.M. Roadmap: An International Student’s Guide to U.S. Law School Programs

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’m pleased to announce that my colleague George Edwards has a new book coming out that will be really useful for foreign students who are thinking about or are in an LL.M program.  The release date is next week, and George will be having an event at Harvard Law School on September 16th to mark the book’s publication. We focus on J.D. students when we think about the costs and benefits of legal education, but LL.M students are a significant part of many law schools and they need the kind of guidance that this book provides.

  September 7, 2011 at 8:48 am   Posted in: Law School, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

No More Fire, the Water Next Time

posted by Dave Hoffman

Among its many other vices, does legal education teach you to argue less persuasively and in a way that unsettles civil society?  That accusation is implicit in Dan Kahan’s new magisterial HLR Forward, Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law.  In Some Problems, Kahan considers the Supreme Court’s perceived legitimacy deficit when it resolves high-stakes cases.  Rejecting the common criticism that focuses on the ideal of neutrality, Kahan argues than the Court’s failure is one of communication.  The issues that the Court considers are hard, the they often turn on disputed policy judgments. But the Justices  resort to language which is untempered by doubt, and which advances empirical support that is said to be conclusive. Like scientists, judges’ empirical messages are read by elites, and thus understood through polarizing filters.  As a result, Justices on the other sides of these fights quickly seek to undermine these purported empirical foundations – - as Justice Scalia argued last term in Plata:

“[It] is impossible for judges to make “factual findings” without inserting their own policy judgments, when the factual findings are policy judgments. What occurred here is no more judicial factfinding in the ordinary sense than would be the factual findings that deficit spending will not lower the unemployment rate, or that the continued occupation of Iraq will decrease the risk of terrorism.”

Kahan resists Scalia’s cynicism — and says that in fact Scalia is making the problem worse.  Overconfident display encourages people to take polarized views of law, to distrust the good faith of the Court and of legal institutions, and to experience the malady of cognitive illiberalism.  Kahan concludes that Courts ought to show doubt & humility – aporia – when deciding cases, so as to signal to the other justices & the public that the losing side has been heard.  Such a commitment to humble rhetoric would strengthen the idea of neutrality, which currently is attacked by all comers.  Moreover, there is evidence that these sorts of on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand arguments do work.  As Dan Simon and co-authors have found, people are basically likely to consider as legitimate arguments whose outcomes they find congenial.  But when they dislike outcomes, people are better persuaded by arguments that are explicitly two-sided: that is, the form of very muscular rhetoric typical in SCOTUS decisions is likely to be seen, by those who disagree with the Court’s outcomes, are particularly unpersuasive, illegitimate, and biased.

I love this paper — it’s an outgrowth of the cultural cognition project, and it lays the groundwork for some really neat experiments. So the point of the post is partly to encourage you to go read it.  But I wanted to try as well to connect this line of research to the recent “debate” about Law Schools.

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  August 29, 2011 at 3:52 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School, Law School (Teaching), Philosophy of Social Science, Sociology of Law, Supreme Court   Print This Post   11 Comments

On Villanova’s “Censure” By the ABA

posted by Dave Hoffman

As has been widely reported, the ABA censured Villanova for its intentional misreporting of data, requiring it to post this document on its webpage.  This censure is symbolic — it’s about a weak a punishment for wrongdoing as one could imagine.  It’s also badly misguided in its substantive particulars.  Though there’s an admirable demand that the school now internally audit its data, the Bar also has created a byzantine data collection review process.  Villanova’s Dean now will – on top of raising money, dealing with tenured professors, and worrying about the horrendous job market – “survey the data for completeness”, “review the list of individuals [doing data collection]“, and “review for completeness and appropriateness the control confirmation report [which shall be signed by each "Data Owner"].” Talk about evidence-free bureaucratic mission creep!  Perhaps the ABA should have mandated that Villanova hire someone to watch the Dean while s/he watches the people who are watching someone input data.  And stream the data collection process to ABA mission control.

What a uniquely lawyerly and psychologically naive way to think about fraud.  I’m tempted to say that the tagline for this censure could have been “From the people who brought you the job killing and time wasting CEO certifications in Sarbanes-Oxley comes a new way to increase the costs of Law School…”  It is as if a bad process was at fault in the original reporting scandal, as opposed to perverse incentives and terrible ethical judgment.  Additionally, the Law School is mandated to employ a law firm (Freeh Sporkin) to serve as an additional watchdog — one can see how the ABA might have liked that solution!

So to get this straight.  Villanova Law did a really bad thing.  To punish the Law School, the ABA has required it to spend a ton of money on process (taking money from the pockets of current and future law students, in the form of higher tuition and lost scholarships).  There is zero evidence that this process will deter, specifically or generally.  Other schools will look at this case and see that ABA is more interested in the atmospherics of disclosure than in actually engaging in thoughtful and principled regulation. All in a good day’s work!

  August 17, 2011 at 3:22 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   3 Comments

Our Bar . . . is . . . an asylum for the lame, and the halt, and the blind from the law schools of this country. And they are still coming.

posted by Dave Hoffman

Sorry for the blogging hiatus.  I’ve been writing.  I’m sorry also to have missed the latest NYT attack on legal education — in the form of a misleading hatchet job on NYLS.  The article – one of a shoddy series by David Segal – struck an academic nerve already made sensitive by Justice Roberts’ dismissal of legal scholarship.

Of course, arguments about law school’s worth and scholarship’s consequence are evergreen – they drive blogging traffic and comments & promise to motivate engagement between blogs by practicing lawyers and the academy.  But quite often, unfortunately, these discussions go nowhere.

On law professor blogs, there’s a tone of tetchy defensiveness: “the market tells us that we’re worthwhile – just look at the continuing number of lemmings pounding at the gate!”, or “of course our scholarship is consequential, let’s count the citations”; or, “no one ever promised that a JD was a job guarantee!”; or, “what’s their BATLS?” [The last is a truly obscure negotiation joke if there ever was one.]

For reporters, it feels like the scene in the Wire when they are talking about what to cover in the coming year. Sure, you could talk about complexity and globalization and economic markets and the changing nature of legal practice.  Or you might talk about the relationship between ABA regulation, thoughtless paternalism, and resulting distributional inequalities in education.  But that’s a set of sprawling stories – lacking an obvious villain to muckrake.  Rather, then, the news blames the dickensian aspect of law schools.  Reporters write articles that stir the pot, but aren’t recognizable to insiders, making them less likely to actually motivate change.

Last, not least, the practicing lawyers often articulate resentment toward ivory tower academics who ignore the realities of “trench lawyering”. (This happens even when the “academics” in question are actually practicing lawyers.)  Basically: impractical law professors versus practical lawyers.

Why does this “debate” feel so tired?  I have a partial hypothesis: because we ignore history. I had a great research assistant, Alex Radus, collect quotes about the ferment about legal education in the 1930s-1940s.  (Which is highlighted in Prosser’s famous 1948 speech to Temple’s law faculty, Lighthouse No Good.“)  After the jump, you’ll see some fantastic quotes from that era and before, which remind us that “what has been will be again / what has been done will be done again /there is nothing new under the sun.”

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  August 4, 2011 at 12:01 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   7 Comments

The Summer Before Law School

posted by Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder

Concurring Opinions is pleased to welcome this guest post by University of Missouri – Kansas City Profs. Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder, co-authors of the recent book “The Happy Lawyer.”

So you’re going to law school this fall.  Congratulations!  Getting in wasn’t easy. Last year 155,000 people took the LSAT. The 201 ABA accredited law schools across the country received about 88,000 applications.  Only 49,700 students matriculated.

Obviously you’re a hard worker (or you wouldn’t be coming to law school and you wouldn’t have read past the first paragraph), so you may be wondering what you can do the summer before to prepare yourself for law school.

First, let’s get the legal disclaimers out of the way.  There are no guarantees, warranties, or promises of any kind; there is no magic bullet for preparation.  There are, however, a few tips toward a happier and more productive beginning that we will offer you.

1. Get Situated

More than one-third of you will be going to law school in some place other than your home or college town. It is important to have housing set up so you can move in at least several weeks in advance.  Find the stores you’ll need, arrange your banking, stock up on supplies and grocery staples. Students struggle when they land suddenly in a new town and promptly start law school. Law school requires more focus than other forms of education. It starts immediately, and is difficult at first because students may be called on to speak in class or have writing assignments due.  If you get behind in the first few foundational weeks, it will take a lot of work to catch up later.  In undergraduate lectures, you were free to fall asleep perusing Facebook.  Not anymore.

A colleague of ours, Dean Barbara Glesner Fines, has posted her wonderful Orientation speech online, emphasizing that there are better and worse times to begin law school, and the worst time to start law school is at the same time that you start (or end) a marriage, or have a new baby, or are newly diagnosed with a chronic illness. In other words, any time you’re facing significant personal challenges.  Arrange for your law school computer or any upgrade at the beginning of the summer, so you have plenty of time to become familiar with it. In short, get the distractions out of the way.

Related to the issue of getting situated is the idea of establishing residency for both bar and tuition purposes, depending on your state’s and your school’s rules. Top-Law-Schools.com has posted a guide to “Law School Residency Issues by State,” covering 23 states.

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  July 8, 2011 at 12:19 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   3 Comments

Age Is More Than a Number: Viewing Our Students Through Generational Research — Book Reviews of Twenge’s Generation Me and Twenge and Campbell’s The Narcissism Epidemic

posted by Heather Garretson

Jean M. Twenge & W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic (Free Press 2010).

Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before (Free Press 2006).

As any good lawyer knows, successful communication depends on knowing your audience.  Are today’s law students really more demanding than ever, or are professors becoming part of the old get-off-my-lawn mind set?  Are we sending law firms self-absorbed graduates who refuse to sacrifice a social life for a career, or are law firms hiring graduates who are simply more confident in vocalizing the need for a work-life balance?  Many of the answers to these types of questions may be found by understanding the character of our students. Jean Twenge’s book, Generation Me (Free Press 2006) and the follow-up book with co-author W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic (Free Press 2010) examine the dominate age group of our students – twentysomethings.  While the books are not about the character of law students per se, Generation Me is specifically about the character of those who make up a majority of our classrooms.  As a disclaimer, I note that I too am(barely) a member of the group Twenge researches and names “GenMe.”  As a member, reading Generation Me did more than educate me on my students’ influences and attitudes.  It also revealed much about the forces that were likely influences on my personal and professional decisions.

Generation Me is a thoroughly researched book, full of statistical information that tells us what we already know about our students and so much more.  It gives insight into the beliefs, biases, and behavior of its subjects and is therefore worth reading for anyone who deals with members of GenMe.  One of the observations Twenge highlights is that informality in school and the workplace is the new norm.  This finding is backed by studies and illustrated through anecdotes – like the Northwestern University women’s lacrosse team wearing flip-flops to the White House (p. 17-18).  This is not to say that you have to allow baseball caps in your classroom, but it does give a reference point to professors who encounter students who are surprised when baseball caps are not allowed.  Many more findings provide relevant context for our student population.  Cheating in school is on the rise (p. 27), as is the use of shocking language (p. 40), and grade inflation (p. 62).  In decline is the use of titles, calling a boss “Linda,” for instance, rather than “Mrs. Smith” (p. 29) and the belief that there is one right way to do things (p. 26).  This last finding may explain why there is resistance when teaching students to “think like a lawyer.”

Generation Me makes wide brush strokes about its members but backs its findings with research.  Much of the book’s allure comes from these detailed statistical findings.  It does not provide a light cultural observation – there is no “kids these days” aspect to it.  Rather, Generation Me outlines specific data that walks the reader through thirty years of cultural changes and how those changes affected people who grew up in this timeframe.  Particularly enlightening to educators is Twenge’s demonstration of the affect of the self-esteem curriculum (p. 53).  Self-esteem, once an “obscure academic term,” has not produced its desired outcome.  Teaching self-esteem, the theory went, would increase student performance.  Actually teaching self-esteem, however, has not produced increased ability, only increased self-esteem.  Data collected from students born in the 1980s shows a sharp uptick in self-esteem.  The average kid in the 90s, smack in the middle of GenMe, had higher self esteem than 73% of kids in 1979 (p. 53).  This increase in self-esteem is attributed to self-esteem curriculum and cultural messages that tell students they are, regardless of their actions, lovable, great, and important (pp.53-60).  The message was inundated into the culture in the 90s and as a result, we have young adults who were raised to find value in themselves rather than in what they provide.  The statistics show that these students tend to find value in their performance simply because they provided it and not because the performance itself has intrinsic worth (pp. 62-65).  GenMe received a message that feeling good about yourself is more important than good performance (pp. 56-57).

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  June 7, 2011 at 1:48 am   Posted in: Book Reviews, Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Price of Law School Cost Transparency

posted by Dave Hoffman

Higher-education cost transparency is all the rage.  In a recent article in Slate, Annie Lowery argued that:

“It is true that we have tremendous amounts of data about higher education. But it is also true that too often students end up misled, overwhelmed, or confused attempting to gauge the different options. Big, expensive purchases require smart, educated customers. That is why the government created the new fuel-efficiency labels. It is also why the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is rolling out simplified, standardized home-mortgage forms. It should not, after all, take a Ph.D. in statistics to get through the college application process.”

This intuition drives politicians like Sen. Boxer to attack the ABA for failing to push law schools to disclose more data, and to crowd-sourced work like Law School Transparency.

In general, I absolutely think that law schools ought to compete on the transparency of their disclosures about student job outcomes, and that the ABA’s highest and best accreditation purpose would be to audit such data for its accuracy.  However, I thought I’d caution proponents of cost transparency of two specific & unanticipated costs of their proposals.

First, think about what cost transparency entails.  To my mind, real law school cost transparency doesn’t mean that we on a clear form provide prospective students a series of blanks: ”tuition + anticipated tuition growth” plus “living costs +  anticipated cost increases” minus “expected three-year scholarship”.  We’d also need to disclose our predictions of the student’s chances on the summer job market – law school cost is for some students significantly defrayed by summer employment.  If you look nationally, graduating law student debt has spiked in the last two years.  That rise doesn’t follow largely from tuition increases, though that’s part of the story.  Rather, it’s the collapse of the firm job market in 2008 -2010 that did the trick: students lost $10-$30,000 of expected income that would have offset or repaid borrowing.

The problem is that although law schools could get a handle on some of these numbers, disclosing them in a way that’s going to meet students’ ever-rising expectations isn’t exactly an easy task.  Think about the average administrator in charge of this disclosure — how likely is it that they will be able to do so in a way that meets Lowery’s standard of clarity, accuracy, and replication? Even when they are excellent at their job today, this kind of data-organization and display task would demand a fundamentally new set of skills.   Bringing in a new body is a fine idea, although many law schools are operating under hiring freezes to control tuition growth. Moreover, as Gordon Smith observed some years ago with reference to curricular change, legal education reformers often discount opportunity costs severely.  So if law schools spend more time on figuring out the expected costs of law school education, they are going to spend less time on something else.  (And, likely, less money.)  What’s that to be?  My guess is: library resources, clinics, and research support.  Maybe that’s a worthwhile trade-off, but it strikes me that discussions of cost transparency are really just proxies for complaints about cost, period.  Real law school cost will fall if and when the legal job market recovers.

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  May 29, 2011 at 4:30 pm   Posted in: Law School, Psychology and Behavior   Print This Post   2 Comments

Law Schools and the Curve

posted by Solangel Maldonado

The New York Times has published yet another article accusing law schools of misleading students, this time of failing to inform admitted students with merit scholarships contingent on maintaining a certain grade point average of the possibility of losing their scholarships. I agree with many of the article’s points and the comments in response.  For example, I completely agree that law schools should inform admitted students of the curve (it varies from a 2.67 at some schools to a 3.4 at others)  and provide them with their grading guidelines.  I found the following information on the websites of four law schools:

Law School 1

A+      1%

A         8%

A-       15%

B+      25%

B         20%

B-       12%

C+      7%

C         4%

C-       4%

F        4%

Law School 2

A or higher No more than 10 percent

A- or higher No more than 25 percent

C+ or lower At least 15 percent

C- or lower At least 6 percent

Law School 3

A+      0-2%

A         7-13%

A-       16-24%

B+      22-30%

B        Remainder

B-       4-11%

C         2-5%

D/F    0-5%

Law School 4

At least 20% of grades are A- or above and at least 20% of grades are C+ or below.

***

Given that grading guidelines vary from school to school, knowledge of a law school’s grading system may help merit scholarship recipients assess their likelihood of retaining their scholarships.  However, I disagree with the article’s suggestion that the curve is the main reason why many students lose their scholarships. The curve is generally not the reason why a student who never had a grade lower than a B+ in college may earn a B- or C in law school. In my experience, the curve does not lower a student’s grade but instead bumps the grade up or has no effect at all. In other words, in the absence of a curve, many more law students would earn B minuses and Cs in their first semester (or first year). The reason is that few first semester law students write good exams. This is understandable. Law school exams are generally very different from the exams students took in college or other graduate programs, and it takes a while to figure out how to take a law school exam. A student may have memorized the “black letter” law, but lack the skills to apply it to a complex fact pattern with numerous legal issues.  As the article acknowledges, law students, especially those with merit scholarships, assume that because they performed well as undergraduates, they will automatically perform well in law school—even in their first semester.  However, this is not the case.  Many students do not learn how to apply the law to a new fact pattern or how to advise a client of “all the potential claims and defenses” (a common law school exam question) until after their first round of exams when they meet with their professors individually to review the exam. Maybe law schools need to do a better job of providing students with feedback before they take exams and with formative assessments, as the Carnegie Report on Legal Education recommends, that focus “on supporting students in learning rather than ranking, sorting and filtering them.”

  May 4, 2011 at 9:59 pm   Posted in: Education, Law School   Print This Post   8 Comments

Innovation in Law School Education

posted by Dave Hoffman

A number of law faculties have sent out resolutions that attack the proposed new ABA Accreditation standards.  The basic claim is was articulated by the AALS: the proposed standards would decouple accreditation and tenure, thereby making it possible to run an accredited law school without a tenured faculty.  (Tamanaha memorably fisked the AALS here.)  Last week, Temple’s faculty joined the chorus against the changes in the rules.  In light of my priors on this issue, I voted against the majority’s resolution, and I am happy to report that eleven of my colleagues joined me in supporting the ABA’s proposed new standards.  [Yes, friends, I'm proud of losing 2 to 1.  I thought the vote would be different.] For me (and I guess for the other dissenters), it would be better to live in a world where schools could offer different kinds of legal education – presumably at different prices – so long as they produced students qualified to be lawyers.  The majority may have been motivated, by contrast, by a fear of a “race to the bottom.” Once a single law school offers cheap legal education without tenure (and without incumbent-protecting rules such as those that prohibit law students’ outside employment), we’ll all circle the drain and become diploma mills.  I think that argument depends on an odd view of applicant behavior.  Prospective applicants assess multiple variables when deciding which law schools to attend.  If they picked price alone, the admissions market would look quite different.  (Just as an example, more students would pick Temple over Penn.  Now, I happen to think that for many students, that choice would be value maximizing.  But it’s not the path that many applicants take.)

It’s easy enough to believe that this is precisely the kind of symbolic display that isn’t worth engaging in, let alone repeating on a blog.  I am strongly tempted by that view. After all: what difference does it make if one faculty (or ten, or one hundred) votes against the ABA’s standards?  The relevant decision makers aren’t the subject of regulation (law schools) but rather members of the ABA’s general assembly.  Why not similarly announce the faculty’s opposition to global warming?  Or dislike of the generic Republican ballot entrant?  Or move in favor of kittens and sunbeams?  Or, heck, against grading exams?

That all said, if you are on a faculty that is considering one of these resolutions, or if you are a student at a school that hasn’t yet passed one, I urge you to argue for the ABA’s proposed rules.  The package of changes proposed would move the ABA moderately away from its current regulatory mode – which tends to tell a law school how it must organize its program of education, physical plant, and employment relations.  The changes would instead (mildly) emphasize outcomes and (mildly) back away from mandated employment rules.  This is a better way for an accreditor to act, and, not incidentally, it would bring the ABA more in line with the way that every other regulator of American higher education behaves.  I think that on balance the proposed changes would reduce the cost of legal education  and thus make it more likely that graduating students can choose their own paths, rather than the one dictated by their debt service obligations.  The proposals on net promote innovation, and reduce the monocultural model of American law schools.

In the end, faculties, who benefit from the current system at the expense of their students, and therefore at the expense of consumers of legal services, shouldn’t be given a free pass to lobby for their own job protections.

  April 9, 2011 at 5:06 pm   Posted in: Law School   Print This Post   8 Comments

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