So argues this op-ed piece in the L.A. Times. Here’s a snippet of the argument:
Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being “a good start”? Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys.
Part of the problem can be traced to the American Bar Assn., which continues to allow unneeded new schools to open and refuses to properly regulate the schools, many of which release numbers that paint an overly rosy picture of employment prospects for their recent graduates. There is a finite number of jobs for lawyers, and this continual flood of graduates only suppresses wages. Because the ABA has repeatedly signaled its unwillingness to adapt to this changing reality, the federal government should consider taking steps to stop the rapid flow of attorneys into a marketplace that cannot sustain them.
Perhaps, as a law professor, I’m biased on this. But I don’t see a general market failure requiring federal government action, although perhaps (as the author suggests) regulation of self-reported data on job placement should be considered. The author also contends that the ABA has a conflict of interest in regulating law schools. I agree — but not because (as the author maintains) the ABA is allowing too many law schools. If there are too many law schools, prospective law students can surely figure that out. The problem with ABA regulation is that it seems to get diverted from focusing on educational issues to extraneous, political issues.
Jardinero1 says:
Thanks for putting this up. Much of the demand for law school and for higher education in general is driven by an implicit federal subsidy made explicit through the guaranteed student loan program. Without the easy qualification and low interest rates provided by the program there would be not nearly the same demand for law schools and higher education which exists today. The big question for this blog is how would that effect the legal profession. Bear in mind that it was not that long ago that law school did not present a barrier to entry to the legal profession.
January 8, 2010, 10:45 am.cjwynes says:
The law blog community has been making this criticism for a while now, and it certainly seems to have validity. With legal work being outsourced to foreign countries and firms not hiring or paying like they used to, having a law degree is not the free ticket to a relatively decent life that it used to be. Now it’s a $100K+ piece of paper that too many people hold, and unless it has the name of a Top 14 school on it, it’s quite likely a ticket to nowhere. If you want to earn $20/hr as a temp working in a basement under constant surveillance by supervisors, you don’t have to go six figures into debt to find a job like that.
The market won’t correct this, b/c gov’t is handing out student loans without any regard for the prospects of the student to repay the loan. Giving somebody $100K to attend a third tier law school is a bad investment no reasonable person would make, but the gov’t is not reasonable. The students themselves are largely either deluded about the prospects for young lawyers, or else are just trying to delay entering the job market for 3 years and are ignoring the long-term costs.
January 8, 2010, 10:48 amTatil says:
Isn’t that what AMA did (is still doing?) with medical schools to create artificial doctor shortages? It allowed the medical schools to charge exorbitant tuition rates as well. Fresh out of school lawyers may get higher starting salaries with this proposal, but the law schools will inevitably start charging higher tuition rates, so the graduates will have much bigger student loans to pay back. Once the dust settles, I doubt they will feel any a difference in their standard of living.
This is such a shameless proposal, no wonder he is an attorney. :)
January 8, 2010, 10:51 amMalvolio says:
There’s an old joke to the effect that the only lawyer in a small town will starve to death unless another lawyer arrives; then the two of them can keep each other employed with civil suits.
If the article is correct, this is only a joke — lawyer apparently do not generate litigation as Aristotle believed sunlight generated maggots. Given that there is market pressure, no, there is no pressing need for government intervention.
In California, you can apprentice to a lawyer for seven years (as a paralegal, I assume) and then take the bar exam to become a lawyer yourself without going to law school.
January 8, 2010, 10:52 amJohn says:
Funny, we’ve been having this same conversation here.
http://volokh.com/2010/01/07/declining-minority-enrollment-percentage-at-u-s-law-schools-1993-2008/#comments
January 8, 2010, 10:53 amSteve says:
This is why I find it so amusing every time someone in the VC comments section starts ranting about the ABA’s insidious plot to create barriers to entry in order to keep legal fees high. Nowhere else in this great country can you find people arguing that there aren’t enough lawyers.
January 8, 2010, 10:57 amJRL says:
“There is a finite number of jobs for lawyers, and this continual flood of graduates only suppresses wages. Because the ABA has repeatedly signaled its unwillingness to adapt to this changing reality, the federal government should consider taking steps to stop the rapid flow of attorneys into a marketplace that cannot sustain them.”
I propose the establishment of an attorney czar (or better yet, a “bar czar”) who, from Washington, can determine the “correct” number of attorneys our society needs. Then, the government can take the appropriate number of children from their homes and send them to the appropriate training. I’m sure this will solve all problems.
January 8, 2010, 11:17 amJay says:
Steve–I don’t think it’s so much an ABA plot, but more the province of state bar admission authorities. Even putting aside the question of the initial bar exam, there is no defensible reason why a lawyer who, for personal or professional reasons, wishes to move to a new state, should have to spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours studying for a new bar. Nor is there any justification for refusing to allow unlimited pro hac vice appearances, other than protectionism on the part of (generally) state courts of their own bar. With the possible exception of Louisiana, if someone is qualified to be a lawyer in one state, they’re qualified to be a lawyer in them all.
January 8, 2010, 11:17 amSteve says:
Well, okay, but that’s a completely different complaint having nothing to do with the ABA.
January 8, 2010, 11:21 amRandy says:
“Much of the demand for law school and for higher education in general is driven by an implicit federal subsidy made explicit through the guaranteed student loan program.”
Well, that’s probably true, but we all know that demand for law school is driven by tv shows. I recall that when I was in law school in the mid-80s, applications for law school surged after the debut of “L.A. Law” on tv. Since then, there has been a veritable flood tide of legal shows, which make the law profession look sexy and glamourous, which of course it is not.
If you want to decrease the number of people applying to law school, then ending all these shows would be a good start.
January 8, 2010, 11:23 amFitz says:
Can this not be intergrated into the Scalia conversation
January 8, 2010, 11:27 amShag from Brookline says:
It might be worth exploring whether law school tuitions would be as high as they are it were not for the “subsidized” federal subsidy regarding guaranteed student loan programs.
I have commented (on other blogs) that the tuition for my last year of law school (1953-4) in the Boston area with its five private law schools was $400.00. (I lived at home so there was no room and board.) It was then possible to work a summer and save enough for most of the tuition and still be claimed as a dependent on parents’ income tax returns. So I had no debt when I passed the bar the year of my graduation. At that time, the two biggest law firms in Boston (Hale & Dorr and Ropes & Gray) each had less than a dozen partners and few associates. So many of us would work with a lawyer to gain experience and strike out solo. The world of the practice of law has changed dramatically since then with – until recently – the big firm starting salaries in the stratosphere for top students from the top law schools. Presumably those salaries were necessary so the associates could afford to pay off their student loans. So perhaps the potential rewards justified the increased tuition over the years that may have been encouraged by these student loan programs, with the result that tuitions increased as student loans increased for an opportunity to grab at the brass ring of becoming an associate at a large firm. But of course not all law school students were able to grab the brass ring, thus finding it difficult to pay off their loans. Was all this a form of legal creative destructionism?
January 8, 2010, 11:47 amDunstan says:
When the L.A. Times starts running op-eds about shutting down some journalism schools because of the lack of jobs in the field, then maybe I’ll start taking them seriously on this issue.
January 8, 2010, 11:55 amalkali says:
Part of the problem can be traced to the American Bar Assn., which continues to allow unneeded new schools to open and refuses to properly regulate the schools, many of which release numbers that paint an overly rosy picture of employment prospects for their recent graduates.
I think this last point bears some consideration. Accredited schools have de facto(*) immunity for misrepresenting their graduates’ employment prospects, and yet the adverse impact of such a misrepresentation on students considering applying to the school can be quite profound.
(* I say de facto immunity because even if there is some legal theory on which a student who accepted admission in reliance on such a misrepresentation could potentially recover damages, I am not aware of any case in which such a claim against an institution has ever made it past a motion to dismiss.)
January 8, 2010, 12:16 pmmatth says:
I went to a low-second-tier school for my first year. My eyes were open: my undergraduate record was terrible, and I knew that transferring was my only path to a T14 school. But I can attest that many of the students at my first year school had no idea how horrible their job market would be (and this was before the crash!).
I’m not trying to make the case for a regulatory intervention or anything. And even from my first year school, a significant fraction of the graduates got decent work. I do think, though, that those who publicize the challenges facing lower-tier law school graduates are doing a public service.
January 8, 2010, 12:26 pmSmooth, like a Rhapsody says:
Is this problem specific to law?
How many useless PhDs in English or philosophy were granted in the last 5 years?; how many degrees in Theatre/Drama for aspiring actors, writers and directors?
January 8, 2010, 12:30 pmMark says:
I’m with Jardinero1, although I’ll make the point explicitly: the United States should stop subsidizing law-school education. The problem here is not one of bad/inadequate information, it’s one of pricing. If people had to put down cold cash, they’d make better decisions. Better yet, if LENDERS had to put down cold cash and take the risk whether a student would be able to pay them back, THEY would make better decisions (and the pool of candidates would shrink).
Of course, the downside to this is that downward pressures on law-school costs, particularly salaries (for professors and others), would ensue.
This is just a microcosm of our economic situation: government largesse has warped pricing as a primary source of cost/benefit information that we don’t even know what things are worth on a relative basis. The pain of readjusting is so great that we don’t want to contemplate it.
God help us all.
MP
January 8, 2010, 12:34 pmNashville, TN
Michael B. says:
Also bearing mention is the non-dischargeability (with few exceptions) of student loans, which enables lenders to open their spigots in an undisciplined market environment… and enables law schools to reap (i.e, capture) the downpour.
January 8, 2010, 1:07 pmdcperson says:
ending student loans results in only law school for people who can afford it out of pocket…which results in only people who are ungodly rich or who have unbelievably rich family members.
maybe I’m pandering to liberal ideas or whatever people here sometimes accuse people of doing…but that sounds pretty atrocious to me. I’d like to think that there’s a way to make the profession accessible to all.
Limiting the numbers of school–sure. Creating more restrictions on who qualifies–sure. But eliminating people’s ability to finance it will create a profession that’s run by no one but the wealthy. And to me, that’s a shame.
January 8, 2010, 1:11 pmTim says:
I find this an interesting discussion, because it seems as if the legal market is as competitive as ever. I have had law school admissions deans tell me to my face that because the best students will have their choices of which law school to attend among many, schools fight almost as much for the best students as bottom “tier” students fight for admission.
I’ve heard people say that of the 187 law schools, 30-50 are unneeded. I have my doubts. I suspect that the future market for lawyers may look very different to the market most of the posters here faced when they graduated from law school, and thus the future value of a legal education is hard to predict.
January 8, 2010, 1:26 pmTemple 3L says:
My first instinct re: the ABA’s conflict of interest in regulating law school’s was that the ABA benefits from there being more attorneys and law students to contribute to their coffers.
January 8, 2010, 2:05 pmShag from Brookline says:
Maybe there is a bubble involved. For example, might easy financing have contributed to the housing bubble? Hopefully the result will not be subprime lawyers.
January 8, 2010, 2:17 pmBen P says:
Medical Schools make for an interesting comparison.
In 1900 there were 141 Medical Schools in the U.S. by 1940 this had dropped to 77. Today it’s come back up to 131.
In the same time period law schools have nearly doubled. There were 124 Law Schools in 1910, today there are more than 200 accredited law schools.
January 8, 2010, 2:43 pmJT says:
“If there are too many law schools, prospective law students can surely figure that out”
January 8, 2010, 2:47 pmHAHAHA
Surely you have not spoken to any 21 year olds recently. I have had dozens of conversations with members of this group in the past week who are taking their LSATs and applying to Law school. Many are planning to pay sticker price at St Johns or Hofstra and are looking forward to working in structured finance at a white shoe firm before moving on to setting up their own sports agency or entertainment boutique. It would be very funny if it wasnt so incredibly sad.
SP says:
Paul says ” If there are too many law schools, prospective law students can surely figure that out. ”
They can, but many don’t. I didn’t. And most of my classmates didn’t either. I now work doc review with hundreds of people who didn’t either. And let me be clear, it isn’t that we mistakenly believed we could beat the long odds. We did not understand that the odds even were long. We did not understand the situation we were in. We did not have all of the relevant information.
Perhaps the blame should be ours. We didn’t do the research, true. Does that mean that nothing should be done to prevent this from continuing to happen? Something is not working right. The message is not trickling down. The attitude of many, including many law professors I see, seems to be “fuck ‘em”. That just can’t be right.
January 8, 2010, 2:52 pmyankee says:
Count me in as one of those who thinks the obscenely high cost of legal services is evidence that we still don’t have enough lawyers. But there the problem is less the number of law schools than the existence of “law school” at all. It should be a bachelor’s degree like it is in other countries.
January 8, 2010, 3:04 pmsureyoubet says:
This might be true for many of the lower tier schools that specialize mostly in profiting from cashing student loan checks or collecting tuition, but it’s certainly not the case for most top tier schools. Most, if not all, of those schools actually have pretty healthy endowments and fund raising pipelines that allow them to ensure that their school is affordable to the students that they want to accept. It is pretty much the case that if you are poor, yet highly desirable to Harvard as a prospective student, Harvard will make sure you can afford to attend.
January 8, 2010, 3:38 pmBama 1L says:
The student-debt problem is not quite as big a deal in other fields, particularly traditional arts-and-sciences academia for a few reasons.
First, you normally don’t go into massive debt to get a Ph.D. in an academic discipline, because you know your earning potential isn’t that high. On the other hand, every law school is telling you you can get a six-figure job.
Second, grad schools tuition is just lower than law school tuition. Compare UVa’s in-state rates: $12k for GSAS against $35k for law. I suspect this has something to do with faculty salaries and teaching loads.
Third, there is more funding available for grad students. Grad students are paid to teach undergraduates, provide research assistance, as well as not to attend other grad schools. Teaching almost always carries with it a tuition waiver. Ph.D. students have to be bringing in their own research grants or piggybacking on their advisors’ to be professionally viable. Law students, on the other hand, are really only paid not to attend other law schools. Law students don’t teach and don’t do the type of research that gets them outside funding.
January 8, 2010, 3:44 pmdcperson says:
The problem is that the way that it happens, among other options, is by making student loans available. Yes, there are scholarships and grant money…all of that helps and is given to various degrees from schools. But in the long run, I can’t imagine many schools that will completely fund the education for a student. Even when you get a full-scholarship, they rely on you to take out loans to fund the living expenses (or at least that was the case when I applied).
January 8, 2010, 4:03 pmJT says:
To Yankee: you claim that the high cost of legal svcs means we do not have enough lawyers. Here is the problem with your logic: The average law school grad is not yet trained to represent anyone. You would not want a recent grad writing your will, reviewing your contract or representing you in court. And the grad would not want to do so because they will likely get sued for malpractice after they screw up. To do those things a lawyer must work for a firm who will actually train them. Unfortunately, firms are not hiring and ‘lawyers’ are not being trained. If law schools trained students to be lawyers the system would work much better.
January 8, 2010, 4:22 pmDavid Sucher says:
“There is a finite number of jobs for lawyers, and this continual flood of graduates only suppresses wages.”
And isn’t that a good thing? Lower wages for lawyers mean that more people can hire lawyers. That should decrease the structural advantage afforded to rich people, large corporations and government by the high cost of legal talent.
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January 8, 2010, 6:32 pmq says:
There are both market failures and distortions going on.
1) Schools are deliberately hiding information about the job prospects of their graduates. Fortunately, this is changing due to the internet. People are starting to realize what a poor deal law school is in general.
January 8, 2010, 7:19 pm2) Law schools also exercise some market power due to ABA restrictions, which is why every single one of them costs ~$35k and takes 3 years when any practicing attorney will tell you how completely unnecessary this is.
3) Finally, the government subsidizies law school education in an actuarially poor way. I’m not advocating that government stop subsidizing law school education, but they, like any good creditor, should certainly evaluate the chances of the student being paid enough to pay off the loan. Maybe condition the loan on a certain grade level and of course, charge different interest rates depending on the school one is attending.
q says:
“And isn’t that a good thing?”
January 8, 2010, 7:22 pmIt’s a bad thing to law school students and a good thing to everyone else. Most people would take that trade-off, as law school students tend to be upper middle class anyway. However, much of the efficiency gains go straight to the pockets of the universities, which is hardly equitable.
Shag from Brookline says:
Back here in MA in colonial days up to (and perhaps beyond) the Civil War, when there were few law schools, law office training usually for at least three years was required for admission to practice law. There were local bar associations back then that imposed limits on the number of “students” (usually three) a lawyer could take on to train in his law office. The primary purpose of such limits was to protect the economics of practicing law, even though these “students” usually augmented the lawyer’s income with the payment of “tuition.”
January 9, 2010, 8:23 am------ says:
And how has the population changed in that time?
There are WAY too few medical schools in the USA right now, that’s for sure.
January 9, 2010, 4:15 pmShag from Brookline says:
Since the financial/economic crises in 2008, questions have been raised as to how to identify a bubble along the way of its expansion so as to prevent it from bursting. Is there a lawyer bubble? Does this post and a later post raise the question of a possible lawyer bubble?
Yesterday’s NYTimes (1/9/10) in its Business Day section has an article by Ron Lieber titled “The Damage of Card Rewards.” Credit cards are a part of the financial industry. Within the bubble of the financial industry, is there a credit card bubble? I was late to getting a credit card and when I did, it was not to utilize credit; rather, it was a matter of convenience as I felt uncomfortable carrying around a lot of cash. For the many decades that I have had credit cards, there have been only one or two times through inadvertence that I failed to pay credit card bills on time (to avoid the high interest charges). Lieber’s article points to how credit cards increase costs in addition to interest charges.
Segue to student loans, especially for law school, and consider whether costs for a legal education and enrollments have significantly increased because of easy borrowing. So is there a lawyer bubble? If so, is there deflation coming up?
A lawyer friend of mine who was quite successful that I frequently saw at lunch at Winter Place in Boston paid for lunch with cash. I asked him why he did not use a credit card. He said he gave up on credit cards (for the most part) because he spent too much; that paying with cash provided discipline, resulting in his spending less.
January 10, 2010, 10:27 amToo Many Lawyers? « Notes From Babel says:
[...] H/T Volokh. [...]
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