This week the premier legal ethics blog, Legal Ethics Forum, is hosting a symposium on “Legal Education’s Response to the Economic Realities Facing the Profession.” In this symposium, “scholars on the legal profession from the United States and around the world will post contributions about the implications of economic pressures on the way we teach our students.” They have what looks like a fantastic line-up (including my colleague Cassandra Burke Robertson), so this will be a must read for those interested in how legal education and the legal profession are responding to broader economic changes.
Archive for the ‘Law schools’ Category
Next spring semester, I will be teaching a First Amendment class. So I request advice from commenters about what textbooks they liked, or did not like, and why.
For the recommendations, please ignore entirely the textbook’s treatment of the religion clauses. Denver University has a separate class on them, so my class will be entirely on Speech, Press, Petition, Assembly, and Association.
Personally, I prefer textbooks which put their subject in historical context and order, which is one of the reasons I use Randy Barnett’s textbook for Con Law I and Con Law II. Like Barnett, I also prefer textbooks which pay attention to “the Constitution outside the courts,” and not just to Supreme Court cases.
Finally, I like to show students how to use one part of the Constitution to help understand another part. So I would be particularly interested in textbooks that highlight the First Amendment’s interplay with the Copyright clause, the Fourteenth Amendment, and so on. I will of course give careful study to Eugene Volokh, The First Amendment and Related Statutes, Problems, Cases and Policy Arguments (4th ed.).
The National Law Journal reports on a recent panel at the AALS conference on the need for changes in legal education. Readers will recall that Judge Cabranes also spoke at the same conference on the same topic, and he urged a return to traditional doctrinal classes and a reduction in “law and” classes. The National Law Journal article adds several more recommendations, such as adding a year of executive-education classes, recommended by the Susan Hackett, chief executive officer of consulting firm Legal Executive Leadership.
Perhaps I am too cynical, but a common theme of these recommendations seems to be that students should be more directed towards the practice needs of the recommender’s speciality area. Transactional lawyers tend to suggest more transactional training, judges suggest more doctrine, etc. I suppose that’s understandable: Like the blind men with an elephant, we assume that the corner of the legal world we experience reflects the legal market as a whole. Still, that trend makes me a bit skeptical that curricular reform is the answer to current problems in legal education. This aside about employment prospects for graduates of existing programs with new “innovative” curricula seems worth noting:
As ardently as law firm leaders and other practitioners say they want law schools to step up and better train lawyers, the legal hiring market has yet to signal that it recognizes the value of innovative teaching and curricula, said William Henderson, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law – Bloomington who studies the profession.
“There’s no employer out there right now — not law firms, not the Department of Justice, not the ACLU — that are seeking out these graduates. These programs haven’t affected hiring patterns,” Henderson said.
Maybe that’s because employers haven’t realized the value of curricular innovations. But it might also be because curricular innovations have less of an impact on the skills and knowledge base of law school graduates than their proponents realize.
In a recent speech, Second Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes argued that law schools should get “back to basics” with more bread-and-butter courses and fewer “law and” courses, in addition to other changes:
To get back on track, law schools should shift their curricula back to core courses and away from the interdisciplinary classes that have grown in popularity, he said . . .
Cabranes lamented the move by law schools toward specialized, often interdisciplinary courses that can displace “black-letter” law courses — criminal and civil procedure, evidence and federal courts. He related a story about a friend’s child who enrolled in a law school clinic focusing on housing court — but who had never taken a property law course.
Core law courses should come before clinics and interdisciplinary work, even if the latter are more popular with students and faculty, he said.
I’d love to see an empirical study on how much, if at all, the differences in what courses students take impact their skill sets and influence careers as lawyers. These days, most courses after the first year are elective, and students can take a wide range of classes. Students can decide to take all basic doctrinal classes or all “law and” classes. They can take a lot of clinic credits (at most schools, at least) or none. Or they can take a mix of classes here and there, blending different kinds of classes. The diverse choices of different students would seem to allow examination of whether such choices make any difference — or at least if the students who opted for one set of courses ended up with different careers than ones who opted for a different set. I’d be very interested to know if there’s any difference; my first guess is that there is little or none.
Hat tip: Brian Leiter
David Segal’s recent New York Times article on ABA accreditation of law schools makes the important point that the ABA uses the accreditation process to reduce competition for its members by artificially reducing the number of law schools, and thereby eliminating potential competitors for its members. This interacts with laws that require consumers to rely on lawyers even for relatively simple tasks that in many other countries are performed by paralegals and the like. The end result makes even basic legal services extremely expensive, especially for the poor and the lower middle class:
[A new law school] needs the seal of approval of the American Bar Association, the government-anointed regulator of law schools.
That means complying with a long list of standards that shape the composition of the faculty, the library and dozens of other particulars. The basic blueprint was established by elite institutions more than a century ago, and according to critics, it all but prohibits the law-school equivalent of the Honda Civic — a low-cost model that delivers.
Instead, virtually every one of the country’s 200 A.B.A.-accredited schools, from the lowliest to the most prestigious, has to build a Cadillac, or at least come close. Duncan’s library costs $750,000 a year to maintain — a bargain when compared with competitors….
The lack of affordable law school options, scholars say, helps explain why so many Americans don’t hire lawyers.
“People like to say there are too many lawyers,” says Prof. Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama School of Law. “There are too many lawyers who charge $300 an hour. There aren’t too many lawyers who will handle a divorce at a reasonable rate, or handle a bankruptcy at a reasonable rate. But there is no way to be that lawyer and service $150,000 worth of debt.”
This helps explain a paradox: the United States churns out roughly 45,000 lawyers a year, but survey after survey finds enormous unmet need for legal services, particularly in low- and middle-income communities…..
It’s not just that many lawyers are prohibitively expensive. It is that when it comes to legal expertise, there are not a lot of cheaper alternatives — not in the United States, anyway. Britain, on the other hand, has a long menu of options, including a tier of professionals called legal executives, who are licensed after getting the equivalent of a community college degree. Counsel is also
available from nonlawyers at a variety of nonprofits. And you can buy a simple divorce over the Internet for a set fee, or pay for customized legal advice, online or by phone.
“In the U.S., people and businesses have only one place to go for all their legal help — lawyers who graduated from an A.B.A.-approved law school and who follow mostly A.B.A. rules about how they run their practice,” says Gillian Hadfield, a professor at the Gould School of Law of the University of Southern California. “Everyone else who offers legal advice is engaged in the unauthorized practice of law….”
Consider business schools, [Emory law professor] George Shepherd says.
If your dream is to work at Goldman Sachs, “you can go to Harvard Business School and spend a couple hundred thousand dollars, in tuition and forgone earnings,” he says. “If you just want to move up the management ranks at Macy’s, you can take part-time evening classes and spend $10,000 for a degree. The part-time school may not be accredited, but this gets to the difference — state law says you can become an attorney only if you attend an accredited law school. There’s no law that says you need to attend an accredited business school in order to practice business.”
Professor Shepherd says aspiring lawyers should have the same choices as aspiring executives and managers….
A result is an expensive quandary for potential clients, says Professor Morriss of the University of Alabama. “Maybe you need a plumber,” he says. “But you have to hire a brain surgeon.”
These are not new arguments. Critics of the ABA accreditation system have making the same points for years. Milton Friedman did so as far back as the 1950s. I myself did called for the abolition of the ABA’s legal role in the process in this 2006 post:
To my mind, the problem goes beyond the shortcomings of specific ABA standards. The real mistake is allowing an organization with a blatant conflict of interest to take over the accreditation role in the first place. As an interest group representing lawyers, the ABA has an obvious stake in limiting entry into the profession so as to decrease the competition faced by its members. One way of doing so is by restricting the number of accredited law schools, at least in the vast majority of states that require all or most aspiring lawyers to attend an ABA-accredited school in order to take the bar exam. We would not allow an organization run by Chrysler, GM, and Ford to set regulatory standards determining who has the right to sell cars in the United States. Requiring ABA accreditation for law schools is the exact equivalent in our industry.
Although the New York Times article breaks little new ground, it has great value in bringing this issue to a wider audience.
I do have one possible quibble with the article. Segal implies (though he does not say so directly) that all or most existing law schools support the ABA accreditation system. This is far from universally true. In my experience, many administrators and faculty at relatively highly ranked schools (say the top sixty or seventy) either oppose the system outright, or at least would not object to liberalization of the rules. These schools don’t benefit much from excluding marginal new competitors, and the ABA accreditation process saddles them with unwanted expenses and administrative burdens. Harvard and Yale (or, for that matter, George Washington or George Mason) are not likely to lose students and faculty to startup law schools, even if the latter have lower tuition. By contrast, low-ranked schools (e.g. – the bottom 30-40%) tend to support ABA accreditation because they are the ones most likely to be threatened by new competition. Being a member of the ABA-sponsored cartel is often their most valuable economic asset, and they are loath to give it up.
I’m not suggesting that the higher-ranked schools are completely blameless. If more of their faculty and administrators were to speak out against the status quo, we might see greater pressure for change. Hopefully, Segal’s article will help generate a broader debate on the issue.
While there’s a lot worth criticizing in David Segal’s NYT article about law professors and law schools — Matt Bodie covers a lot of good ground in this post at Prawfs — there’s an underlying point that I think is both important and correct: Law professors, at especially the “top” law schools, are becoming less connected to the legal profession. As a result, over time, they are less likely to know — and therefore less able to teach — the perspective an experienced lawyer would bring to legal problems.
Richard Posner made this point nicely in his 2007 essay celebrating the life of his late colleague Bernard Meltzer. Posner begins by describing the professional identities of law professors before the 1960s:
Law professors used to identify primarily with the legal profession and secondarily with the university. . . . Law professors in that earlier era were hired after a few years of practice, on the basis of evidence (heavily weighted by performance as a law student) of possessing superlative skills of legal analysis. A law professor was expected to be a superb lawyer and to see his primary role as instructing generations of law students so that they would become good, and some of them superb, lawyers—instructing them by precept but also by example, by being a role model; and the role was that of a practicing lawyer.
That all changes starting in the 1960s, Posner argues: Now law professors identify academics first, and with the legal profession second or not at all. Posner argues that this switch has real costs to students, as law professors who identified with the legal profession served as role models for students who were trying to master the craft of lawyering:
Even at the most intellectually ambitious of the modern law schools, a large majority of students will become and remain practicing lawyers; and there is a good deal more to the practice of law than economics, or philosophy, or feminism, or theories of race. There is the knack of reading cases and statutes creatively, there is a largish body of basic legal concepts that every practicing lawyer should internalize, there is a bag of rhetorical tricks to be acquired along with a professional demeanor, a procedural system to be mastered, a subtle sense (“judgment”) of just how far one can go in stretching the limits of established legal doctrines to be absorbed.
Posner then argues that while you wouldn’t want every law professor to be completely oriented to the profession, law schools should strive for balance between the profession-oriented legal academics and the university-oriented legal academics.
[The practical lawyer's sense] cannot be the entirety of the modern lawyer’s professional equipment, and their inculcation cannot be the entirety of a first-rate modern legal education, because the law has become too deeply interfused with the methods and insights of other fields—and the law schools are still lagging badly in attempting to overcome the shameful aversion of most law students to statistics, math, science, and technology. Maybe at the law schools that have the brightest students only a third of the instruction should be in the traditional mold. But to reach that level the law schools will have to start hiring teachers who identify more strongly with the practicing profession than they do with academia.
I don’t know what the right balance is, but I do think that students are best served when their classes are taught by professors with a mix of approaches.
Today’s NYT has a lengthy front-page article on legal education suggesting that a major problem with legal education is the failure to teach law students how to practice law. There is something to this complaint — some schools and some legal academics do relatively little to prepare their students for practice and there is much relatively worthless legal scholarship — but the article overstates the case, fails to identify workable alternatives, and makes various errors about legal education and scholarship along the way. For instance, the article identifies a philosophy paper, published in a philosophy journal, as an example of how legal scholarship is divorced from legal practice. The article simultaneously harps on the high cost of legal education and suggests more clinical education is a good way to help prepare law students to practice law. Yet the article makes no mention of the fact that clinical education is more expensive than traditional doctrine-oriented classes.
For more on the article, see these comments from Matt Bodie, Brian Leiter, Jason Mazzone, and Larry Ribstein. As Ribstein notes, if one really wants to understand what’s going in on legal education, the good and the bad, one’s better off reading legal bloggers than the NYT.
UPDATE: Leiter has a fuller response to the article here, and Orin comments above.
Next semester I will teaching the Constitutional Law I class at Denver University. It’s the standard class that almost all 2d or 3d semester law students must take at all law schools:
This required introductory course examines the role of the United States Supreme Court and, in particular, the Court’s power in exercising judicial review in cases interpreting the U.S. Constitution. The course focuses primarily on two topics. First is the doctrine of Separation of Powers: examining the structure and interrelationship of the three branches of the federal government, Congress, the Executive Branch, and the federal judiciary. Second is the doctrine of Federalism: the relationship and power distribution between the federal government and state governments. In addition, all sections will devote part of the course to an introduction to at least one aspect of the large field of individual constitutional rights. The specific rights covered will vary by instructor. . . . Students who wish to gain a deeper understanding of these topics are strongly encouraged to take Constitutional Law (Advanced): Individual Rights.
My particular class will pay special attention to some topics of great modern relevance: the interstate commerce power and the N&P clause, since the Supreme Court will be hearing the most important case in decades on those topics. We will also get into some depth on the President’s war powers under Article II, since those were the subject of much debate under Bush, and remain so under the current administration–including the war with Libya.
I’ll be using Randy Barnett’s textbook, which is mostly chronological. One of the main purposes of the class is for students to learn how to practice constitutional law using originalism AND using living constitutionalism. The latter necessitates a chronological approach, since to counsel clients on how the Constitution might change in the future (or might change now), one must understand how the application of the Constitution has varied during different periods in American history.
In the class, I will explain some key facts in American history, for the benefit of students who may not have much history background. Some students, though, might want to do some additional reading to deepen their knowledge. So what American history survey book would commenters recommend for such students? I’d strongly prefer that the book be available in paperback, and not tremendously long, since first-year students have plenty of reading to do already.
FOLLOW-UP: Things are worse than I had feared. Several commenters mentioned some great books (e.g., Gordon Wood), but I want a survey that goes from no later than 1776 through most of American history. No textbooks for AP or college US History, although I wish my students had the time and the money for the Schlesinger textbook. No books that focus on a particular issue, even if it’s a broad one (e.g., Eric Foner’s book). I’m certainly not going to inflict Howard Zinn on my students. I read the 1st edition of People’s History almost as soon as it came out, and enjoyed it. But that’s definitely not the starting point for someone to learn the actual history of the United States; it’s a book for someone who already knows a lot of American history, and can discern the difference between some neglected stories that Zinn tells, and the incredible amount of chaff. Bill Bennett did so much damage to the Constitution during the Bush administration that I recoil from using his book in a constitutional law class. So in the realm of affordable survey paperbacks, we’re down to Brogan’s Penguin History and Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Based on Amazon reviews, each book is way too didactic for my purposes. Not that the distinguished authors are not entitled to their points of view; I just want something without such a heavy hand. At this point, I’m leaning towards telling students to buy Samuel Eliot Morrison’s Oxford History, which ends in 1963, but is available used for almost nothing, plus shipping. Or his more recent Concise History of the American Republic, also available used for very good prices.
I agree with most of what co-blogger Eugene Volokh writes about the benefits of have a wide range of student groups at law schools, including ones that focus on specific ethnic or religious groups. I addressed a similar issue in this 2007 post:
Those who argue for diversity in higher education implicitly envision a school that has a “critical mass” of whites, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, and other groups. Such a university may well be internally diverse (at least in an ethnic sense), but if every school pursues this ideal, than they will all look more or less alike on the ethnic dimension, or whatever other criterion is chosen as the focus of diversity promotion. There will be diversity within institutions, but very little diversity across institutions.
By contrast, if Brandeis continues to be a distinctively Jewish school, Brigham Young continues to be a distinctively Mormon school, and so on, these schools can make unique contributions to American higher education that might otherwise be lost. Although Brandeis and BYU may not be internally diverse, they definitely add to the overall diversity of the American higher education system in two important ways. First, they give students who want to attend a distinctively Jewish or Mormon school an option they would not have if all schools stick to the internal diversity model. Second, faculty at a distinctively Jewish or Mormon school might well pursue research on subjects that are ignored or at least deemphasized at other types of institutions. Brandeis’ traditional focus on hiring faculty who study the history of Judaism and the Jewish people is an example of the latter.
To be sure, a school built around a particular group identity will have weaknesses as well as strengths. But the weaknesses are offset by the fact that there will always be hundreds of other schools that do not try to foster a distinctive group identity. Students and faculty who don’t want to be associated with a distinctively Jewish school have plenty of options, even if they can’t attend Brandeis. The question is not whether there should be a large number of internally diverse schools, but whether all schools should be that way.
What I said about diversity across schools also applies to diversity between student groups within a given school. By having a distinctive Jewish student group, black student group, Christian group, and so on, diversity across groups is enhanced even if these groups are not internally diverse (indeed, sometimes precisely because they aren’t). Obviously, internally homogenous student groups have limitations. But those are to some extent offset by the fact that there are usually many other student groups available, including many that are not focused on a specific ethnic or religious identity.
For reasons I have indicated in the past (e.g. here, here and here), I have various reservations about the diversity-promoting affirmative action policies currently practiced by most universities. But that does not undermine the point that there are real benefits to having a wide range of student groups, including some which are internally homogeneous.
The National Law Journal has a new blog, Law School Review, focusing on legal education. Contributors include Brian Tamanaha, William Henderson, Erwin Chemerinsky, John O’Brien, Lucille Jewel, Kyle McEntee, and Michael Olivas.
Co-blogger Orin Kerr links to Richard Fallon’s interesting article on the ethics of law professor amicus briefs.
Fallon argues that lawprofs are far too quick to sign amicus briefs that fit their ideological proclivities even if they aren’t really expert in the underlying legal issues and sometimes even if they don’t agree with the particular legal argument advanced by the brief. He further contends that legal scholars should only agree to sign briefs if they 1) have personal knowledge of the major factual claims and legal authorities the brief relies on, 2) agree with the brief’s reasoning (not just its bottom-line conclusions), and 3) the brief makes at least some reasonable effort to confront key opposing arguments and evidence.
I certainly agree that Fallon has identified a real problem. For what it’s worth, I have long refused to sign amicus briefs except in cases where I am an expert on the relevant subject and I endorse the brief’s reasoning as well as its conclusion. This is less stringent than Fallon’s standard of personal familiarity with all the major authorities relied on by the brief. But it does have real bite. For example, I have refused to sign several amicus briefs in Second Amendment cases because, despite my sympathy for the individual rights theory of the Amendment, I feel I’m not expert enough on the subject to opine on it to a court. In another major Supreme Court case that did touch on areas where I am an expert, I refused to sign a brief because, even though I agree with its bottom-line conclusion, one of its principal arguments relied on a theory of the Spending Clause that I had criticized in my scholarship.
Are all legal scholars ethically obliged to follow something like my rules or Fallon’s more restrictive ones? I am not sure that either of us has hit upon exactly the right approach. But I do think that we should apply tighter standards to our participation in these kinds of briefs than seems to be the norm today. Otherwise, as Fallon suggests, we end up using the intellectual authority we have based on scholarship within our fields of expertise to influence courts on issues about which we actually know very little.
An alternative norm is that a law professor might sign an amicus brief on an issue outside his expertise in such a way as to indicate that he’s doing so in his capacity as an ordinary citizen rather than as an academic expert. This approach is, I think, entirely ethical. Experts are not the only ones entitled to express opinions on legal issues, including in amicus briefs. But it does, of course, tend to defeat the main reason why people solicit law professors’ signatures on amicus briefs in the first place. A brief joined by “Professor Joe Blow, constitutional law scholar,” looks a lot more impressive than one signed by “Joe Blow, acting in his capacity as an ordinary citizen.”
Brookings Institution scholar Clifford Winston recently published a good column advocating the abolition of legal requirements mandating that all lawyers must graduate from law schools and pass bar exams:
For decades the legal industry has operated as a monopoly, which has been made possible by its self-imposed rules and state licensing restrictions — namely, the requirements that lawyers must graduate from an American Bar Association-accredited law school and pass a state bar examination. The industry claims these requirements are essential quality-control measures because consumers do not have sufficient information to judge in advance whether a lawyer is competent and honest. In reality, though, occupational licensure has been costly and ineffective; it misleads consumers about the quality of licensed lawyers and the potential for non-lawyers to provide able assistance.
Rather than improving quality, the barriers to entry exist simply to protect lawyers from competition with non-lawyers and firms that are not lawyer-owned — competition that could reduce legal costs and give the public greater access to legal assistance….
What if the barriers to entry were simply done away with?
Legal costs would be reduced because non-lawyers, who have not had to make a costly investment in a three-year legal education, would compete with lawyers, who in many states are the only options for basic services like drafting wills. Because they will have incurred much lower costs to enter the field — like taking an online course or attending a vocational school — and can operate as solo practitioners with minimal overhead, these non-lawyers would force prices to fall. The poor would benefit from the lower prices for non-criminal matters, and poor litigants, who might be unrepresented in criminal matters like hearings because they could not afford a lawyer and because of dwindling state legal aid, would be better off.
At the same time, if corporations — and not just law firms, now structured as partnerships — could provide legal representation, their technological sophistication and economies of scale could offer much more affordable services than established law firms do. These firms, in turn, would have to reduce prices to compete.
Of course, lower legal prices would cause new law school graduates to be paid less, but more jobs would be available for such graduates because the demand for lawyers would increase. And new graduates would begin their careers with less law-school debt, because alternative providers of legal education would force law schools to reduce tuition.
See also his recent coauthored book on this subject.
I have made similar arguments in previous posts, here, here, here, and here. In this post, I explained why it’s better to eliminate the bar exam requirement than try to reform it.
To be clear, neither Winston nor I are suggesting that either law schools or bar exams should made illegal. We merely advocate eliminating the laws forbidding people to practice law without having these two credentials. Consumers, however, might still prefer lawyers who have gone to law school and/or passed a bar exam to those who have not. Moreover, with their legal monopoly gone, law schools will have incentives to provide better legal education and bar associations will have stronger incentives to design tests that really do correlate well with future performance as a lawyer. Voluntary certification has many advantages over the present bar exam system, some of which I covered here:
Voluntary certification is another useful tool for consumers. If state-mandated bar exams were abolished, both bar associations and other private groups would still be free to certify lawyers using either tests or other standards they deem appropriate. If lawyers certified by the bar association are generally more competent than others, sophisticated clients will soon realize that, and the knowledge will quickly trickle down to less sophisticated ones. Over time, lawyers certified by the bar association will command higher salaries and enjoy more prestige than those who are not.
Superficially, voluntary certification seems little different from the old bar exam system. After all, lawyers would still have incentives to meet standards established by some professional organization. However, there are three big differences. First, abolishing state-mandated exams allows different certification systems to compete against each other. This stimulates improvement in standards over time and also increases consumer choice. Second, since no certifying body will have a monopoly, these groups will have strong incentives to improve the quality of their certification systems. If the bar association’s certification system turn out to be inferior to that of the Better Business Bureau, for example, fewer consumers will pay attention to it, and fewer lawyers will pay to take the bar association’s test. For this reason, a bar association that didn’t have a legal monopoly on certification is likely to produce a better test than one that does.
Finally, with multiple certification systems, we would no longer have to have a “one size fits all” system that sets standards for all lawyers and all clients. It could well be that Certification A better meets the needs of some clients, while others have reason to prefer B, and still others need no certification system at all.
Market competition and voluntary certification might not be able to eliminate all need for regulation of lawyer quality. For example, there is the issue of what to do in situations where clients have no real choice, as in the case of court-appointed lawyers for indigent criminal defendants. However, it does obviate the need for crude licensing regimes such as the bar exam that completely block access to the profession to anyone who doesn’t pass.
St. Louis University law professor Aaron Taylor recently published a good column challenging the conventional wisdom that holds that the job market for lawyers is rapidly collapsing:
It’s open season on legal education — falling applications, lawsuits by former students and dooms day warnings about the legal job market. The rampant bad publicity has taken on a sensational flair. Popular blogs and even established news forums are peppered with anecdotes about law school graduates drowning in debt with no good options for the future.
But as is often the case with anecdotes, these compelling tales of woe represent exceptions…
Lawyers have not been immune to the effects of the recent recession. However, they have fared much better than most workers. According to U.S. Department of Labor data, the unemployment rate for lawyers was 1.5 percent in 2010 — more than six times lower than the overall rate of 9.6 percent. Since 2009, while the overall unemployment rate has remained above 9 percent, the rate for lawyers has exceeded 2 percent only once. It is true that unemployment among lawyers has increased significantly over the last few years (it was barely 1 percent in 2007), but the increase pales when compared to other occupations.
Salary data show that the vast majority of lawyers earn relatively high salaries. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, lawyers boast the fourth highest median salary behind medical doctors, dentists and CEOs (some of whom have law degrees). While the majority of occupations have median salaries between $20,000 and $49,999, the median for lawyers in 2010 was almost $113,000. Again, this was the median — the actual midpoint — which means the majority of lawyers made six-figures.
Predictably, starting salaries for new lawyers tend to fall below the median for the profession as a whole, but they still tend to be relatively high. According to NALP, the class of 2010 had a median starting salary of $63,000, a respectable living for a new entrant into any profession. On the downside, the 2010 median was $9,000 lower than the year before. But declining wages have buffeted the entire economy. Fortunately, as the economy sputters back to life, salaries are unlikely to continue falling at the same rate — if at all.
Note that most of the data Taylor relies on comes from the Labor Department and the Census Bureau rather than NALP, which has been criticized for relying on overly optimistic data provided by law schools.
I advanced similar challenges to the conventional wisdom on the legal job market here and here. In this post, I noted that the long-term prospects for the legal profession are likely to be good, because the demand for lawyers is largely driven by the amount and complexity of laws – and that complexity is rapidly increasing.
Some will probably accuse me of wanting to make law seem more attractive than it is because I am a law professor. I preemptively addressed that charge here:
I’m sure someone will argue that I’m just saying this because, as a law professor, it’s in my interest for people to believe that going to law school is a good deal. Maybe so. But note that I advocate several reforms that are definitely not in the interest of law professors, such as allowing people to join the profession through apprenticeships, eliminating the legal requirement of spending 3 years in law school, and so on. More broadly, I favor greatly reducing scope and complexity of American law, which cuts against the longterm interests of both lawyers and law professors.
I have also long argued that too many choose law school as a sort of default option without giving sufficient thought to the question of whether they’re really likely to be happy as lawyers or entering one of the other professions for which a J.D. is valuable. Law is a lucrative profession and likely to remain so. But many lawyers work long hours at tasks that a lot of people would find boring and repetitive.
I’m far from happy about the continued financial health of the legal profession. Much of it stems from the growth of government and the increasing complexity of our legal system, both trends that I oppose. I also oppose the bar exam, ABA accreditation of law schools, and other government policies that artificially inflate lawyers’ salaries by protecting them from competition. These types of policies make it very hard for the poor and lower-middle class to afford basic legal services, which I think is a problem far more worthy of concern than the supposed financial woes of lawyers.
If the long-run demand for legal services really did decline drastically, I would see it as a positive sign. But that’s not what seems to be happening right now. Like most other professions, lawyers have suffered during the current recession, and entry-level job prospects have worsened. But, as Taylor explains, these economy-wide trends are actually much less severe among lawyers than in most other fields.
UPDATE: Some commenters and others claim that the Labor Department data on lawyer pay and unemployment rates are invalid because they don’t take account of people who have left the legal profession entirely. I responded to similar claims here:
[I]t seems unlikely that there is large Marxian “reserve army” of unemployed lawyers [or JDs who would like to return to the legal profession] out there. If there were, one would expect lawyer salaries to drop substantially as competition from the unemployed drives down the pay of those who have jobs, especially at the lower ends of the distribution (e.g. — the 10th and 25th percentiles noted in the post [both of which are relatively high figures]). Yet the Labor Department data shows lawyer salaries holding fairly steady. For example, today’s [2010] 10th percentile salary of $55,000 per year is actually slightly higher than the prerecession 2007 figure. That would be highly improbable if there were large-scale unemployment among lawyers [or if there was a large number of JDs outside the legal profession, but willing to reenter it].
In addition, it seems highly unlikely that nearly all JDs who can’t find jobs as lawyers, but want them leave the profession almost immediately, thereby keeping the unemployment figure at the low measured rate of 2%. One would expect them to hang around somewhat longer than that. The bottom line is that, although the official 2% figure may not be fully accurate, it is still likely that unemployment for lawyers is far lower than in the economy as a whole.
I agree with most of co-blogger David Bernstein’s advice to aspiring law professors. In particular, David is absolutely right to reject the view that you can’t have a major impact on the scholarly and public debate in your field unless you’re at a top 15 school. I had the same fear when I was on the job market. But I was wrong.
Today, it is more possible than ever for professors at lower-ranking schools to have a big influence. For example, 2009 data shows that even the then-untenured bloggers here at the VC had citation counts comparable to those of tenured law professors at top ten-ranked schools, (and none of us teach at schools ranked in the top 15). The same can be said for other VCers teaching outside the top fifteen, such as David Bernstein, David Post, and Todd Zywicki. And the VC itself is an example of how professors at lower-ranked schools can have an impact on public debate, as well as academic discourse.
Modern technology makes it easier for scholars at lesser-known schools to get their work noticed. Thanks to Westlaw, Lexis, and SSRN, well as good old e-mail, you can easily make your work available to interested colleagues even if you aren’t being invited to conferences and workshops at the top 15 schools. Four VCers who don’t teach at top 15 schools are among the top 150 lawprofs in the world in lifetime SSRN downloads, led by Orin Kerr (No. 13), and Todd Zywicki (No. 71). There are numerous non-VCers from non-top 15 schools who rank that high as well. And once you build up enough of a reputation by these other means, the conference and workshop invitations will start to come in too. The internet and the blogosphere also make it easier for non-top 15 professors to influence public debate, if they are so inclined.
There’s no denying that professors at the best-known schools have a real advantage. It’s certainly easier to attract attention to your work if you’re a professor at Yale than if you’re at Podunk U (or George Mason, for that matter). The big name school gives you instant credibility that a lower-ranked school doesn’t. But if you do enough good work and use modern technology to promote it, you can have an impact wherever you are.
UPDATE: Eric Muller writes that “Ilya Somin is of course right that those of us on law faculties below the “Top Fifteen” can do things that have a big impact. But he’s only half right, because he’s only talking about the impact we can have on each other (and on our citation practices).” That’s not entirely true. I also mentioned the impact lawprofs can have on public debate outside the academy. Eric goes on to note that professors at any level can also have an impact on their students and local communities. That’s clearly true. But I don’t think anyone doubts it, which is why I didn’t mention it. What is more debatable is whether professors at lower-ranked schools can influence academic and public debate in their fields.
A wildly disproportionate percentage of law school faculty graduate from a very few top law schools, especially Harvard and Yale. Not surprisingly, graduates of these schools turn to their mentors and references for advice on how to navigate the teaching market.
Some of these professors give sound advice. But the very fact that these folks wound up at the very top schools means that their experiences were exceptional, and they may not have a great sense of the overall market. In addition, for obvious reasons professors at these schools are inclined to think that the market is much more of a meritocracy than it actually is (which isn’t to say that merit doesn’t play a huge role in hiring, just that many other factors also play a role; it’s not that the top schools don’t hire meritorious candidates, it’s that meritorious candidates don’t always get hired by the top schools, or, in some cases, get any jobs at all).
Here are a few examples of terrible advice that I’ve heard students get from their references at top ten law schools:
(1) Go on the job market directly out of your clerkship, with no practical legal experience (and no Ph.D.) because it will signal how serious you are about academia. (This may have worked in the old days, but ONLY if you had a Supreme Court clerkship, which the individual in question did not.)
(2) Don’t bother going into the legal academy unless you can get a job at a top fifteen law school, otherwise you are better off working at a law firm; no one pays attention to what people at lower-ranked law schools have to say, so you will just get frustrated if you wind up at one of them. (Actually, being a law professor at any law school with a good academic environment is one of the best jobs in the world; people do move up; and people do pay attention to good scholarship emanating from outside the top 15).
(3) Prominently display your (otherwise irrelevant) ideological credentials (in this case, officership in a Federalist Society student chapter) on your teaching applications. (Why? Why? Why?)
(4) Sending out a law review article? Start with the top 20 law reviews, and see what happens. (That works if you’re teaching at Harvard or Yale, not if you aren’t even a professor yet.)
(5) Attended a lower-ranked school first year of law school, and then transferred? If anyone asks about it, be dismissive of your original school, to show that you always knew you were better than that. (Any committee you interview with will have at least one member who has friends at that school and will be insulted for them, plus word will get back to your original school where you will have now lost your friends.)
I could go on. But the basic point is, you should double-check any advice you get from your elite-law-school references with professors teaching at less lofty schools, especially ones who have served on appointments committees. Even if you only have a passing acquaintance with such individuals, they are usually quite willing to spend a few minutes to help out future academics.
Joni Hersch and Kip Viscusi have posted an interesting paper counting the number of law professors at the “top” schools that have Ph.D. degrees. Of course, “top” is in the eye of the beholder: Hersch and Viscusi divide schools into the “Top 13″ and then the “Top 26.” A few of the findings:
- At the “Top 13″ schools, 32.3% of faculty members have Ph.D.s. The most prevalent subject area for the Ph.D. was economics, with 9.2% of faculty members having an economics Ph.D. (see page 23)
- At the next tier of schools, those ranked 14 to 26, the proportion of Ph.Ds dropped: 20.4% have a Ph.D. of some kind, with 4.1% having a Ph.D. in economics (see page 23)
- Of the faculty at the Top 26 schools taken together, 979 have only a J.D. degree; 294 have a J.D. and a Ph.D; and 65 have only a Ph.D. and no J.D. (see page 21)
Thanks to Al Brophy at the Faculty Lounge for the link.
With law school scam blogs being in the blogospheric news these days, I wanted to offer a few thoughts.
1. In my view, Paul Campos’s blog has been useful. If Campos had written his blog using his real name, few would have paid attention. By hiding his identity, and by claiming that he hid it to avoid repercussions, Campos created the impression that he was taking a very courageous and daring step. That impression is what made the blog newsworthy, and that newsworthiness led to press coverage. That press coverage generated eyeballs, and it led to people talking about the issues. Campos’s expressed fear of repercussions was basically false, but his plan to generate attention worked quite well. If you think that the law schools could benefit from more discussion these issues — as I do — then that’s a good thing on the whole.
2. The law school scam blogs often overlook the important difference between a law school’s administration and its teaching faculty, and their arguments sometimes miss the mark because of it. In my view, the blogs have some legitimate complaints about the lack of transparency at some law schools; of the way scholarships are structured; and the way tuition is set. Those are important issues. We should talk more about them. But for the most part, decisions about those issues are made by the law school administration instead of the teaching faculty.
Students may not be fully aware of the difference between the administration and teaching faculty, but it’s a pretty important one. If you’ll let me paint with a very broad brush, the Dean and Associate Deans run the law school and determine the school’s policies while the professors teach their classes, grade their exams, and write their articles. The kinds of law school policies attacked by the scam blogs are mostly in the realm of law school administration. The professors who make up the teaching faculty usually learn about these things when they read them in the New York Times or Above the Law just like everybody else. That doesn’t mean the professors should escape criticism. But there’s a big difference between the guilt of creating a bad policy and the guilt of not learning that the policy exists where you work.
3. Building on (2) above, I think the scam blogs should see professors as natural allies on these issues instead of natural enemies. Some of the blogs envision professors as enemies because the professors seem to have a sweet life and students aren’t finding jobs. They reason that professors are scamming students by getting their sweet life based on the students’ suffering. But many of the students are suffering right now mostly because of the weak economy for lawyers. The professors don’t control that economy today any more than they controlled it five years ago when the economy for lawyers was booming.
More broadly, I think there’s less of a gap between the interests of the professors and the students than the blogs imagine. A lot of the professors share the same concerns that the students do. They want law school to be the best value, and to give the best education, and to train students to get the best careers. They’re frustrated by the status quo, and they want to they are open to new ways of doing business. Setting up a bogus faculty-vs-students narrative draws eyeballs to a blog. But it also alienates the group that is most able and willing to enact reforms that could actually improve things.
Brian Leiter argues that the opportunity to speak at Federalist Society student chapters is an important career advantage for conservative and libertarian academics. Co-blogger David Bernstein believes otherwise.
On balance, I think David is right. As he points out, the speaking engagements that really help an academic career are those attended by other academics. And professors rarely attend events sponsored by student groups. They also give little or no weight to speeches before student groups in making hiring and promotion decisions.
Like David, I have spoken at many Fed Soc student chapter events. When I first started doing Fed Soc talks, I almost never saw a faculty member in the audience. Later, as my academic work became better known, I did start to see some (though not much more than David’s estimated median of about one per speech). Most of these academics, however, were people who already knew me or at least had an interest in my work. They would probably have continued to follow my scholarship even if they hadn’t come to the Fed Soc event.
Speaking to student audiences can help an academic career indirectly because it improves your public speaking skills. On balance, however, the academic who wants to maximize his career prospects would do better to spend the same time writing more articles and/or speaking at faculty events.
The real benefit of Fed Soc speaking engagements is the opportunity to influence public debate by presenting your ideas to a wider audience. That’s the main reason why I do it (also, it’s fun!). It’s also, of course, the reason why the Fed Soc sponsors these events in the first place. But I don’t expect it to do much for my career prospects as an academic.
To the extent that Fed Soc speaking invitations are an advantage for right of center scholars, they are offset by American Constitution Society speaking opportunities for liberals. Like Fed Soc, the ACS has chapters at nearly all major law schools, and they too regularly bring in outside speakers. I’ve spoken at several ACS events myself (I was invited to provide ideological balance on a panel with multiple participants). But just as Fed Soc chapters invite primarily libertarians and conservatives, ACS chapters understandably invite mostly liberals.
It’s also worth noting that many law schools have research centers that, while formally neutral, actually focus primarily on left of center ideas. Consider, for example, the many law schools with “social justice” research centers. Few if any top law schools have similar research centers organized around libertarian or conservative issues. Most research centers regularly sponsor academic conferences that invite outside speakers. And unlike speaking events organized by student groups, events organized by faculty-run research centers often do attract a large faculty audience and have a real impact on professors’ career prospects.
I don’t object to the presence of these research centers. Even when they are not ideologically neutral, they can still make useful contributions to scholarship. But the speaking opportunities they offer to faculty have much greater career-enhancing value than those provided by student groups such as Fed Soc or ACS.
The recent NYT story on law schools’ use of grade-contingent, merit-based scholarships to recruit 1Ls has prompted substantial discussion in the blawgosphere (including here and here). At some schools, a substantial proportion (if not a majority) of the incoming 1L class may receive merit scholarships that are contingent upon the maintenance of an above-average GPA. Given mandatory law school curves, this virtually ensures that a significant number of students will lose their scholarships after the first year. Is this sort of policy fair? Are incoming students aware of the conditions placed on their scholarships? Law School Transparency has also called for greater disclosure of law school scholarship policies, a proposal endorsed by U.S. News Robert Morse.
Is change afoot? Will law schools become more transparent, or alter their scholarship policies? CWRU School of Law’s incoming dean, Lawrence Mitchell, announced last week that he will suspend the law school’s policy requiring scholarship recipients to maintain GPAs above those required to remain in good academic standing for currently enrolled and incoming students. He explained the change this way:
Our policy was grounded in the sensible notion that students who are granted merit-based financial aid should be expected to continue to perform at the same level that led us to grant that aid. However, with mandatory curves, a significant number of students who do perform acceptably well find that they drop below the line for a variety of reasons unrelated to effort. Especially in times of economic uncertainty and hardship in the legal market, I felt it was both inhumane and unproductive to continue a policy that, instead of improving student performance, placed additional pressure and created undue anxiety among students that could hinder their performance.
Paul Caron of TaxProf links here to various reactions to the purported scandal that not all 1Ls who receive scholarships can expect to maintain a high enough GPA to retain them.
Let me throw my two cents in. I think part of the problem is that incoming law students are unaware of how law schools use merit scholarships. At one time, a law school that threw a merit scholarship at you would likely have done so because it was dying to get a student well above the school’s median entering student. If so, the recipient of the scholarship could have a reasonable expectation that he would do well enough first year to retain the scholarship.
U.S. News has changed the calculus. Let’s say a law school has a 155 median LSAT, and for U.S. News purposes wants to raise that median to 157. Will the law school chase after students with scores in the mid-160s? Probably not. A 157 or 158 is worth just as much to the school as a 165. Thus, a dean trying to use his scholarship resources efficiently will offer money to the 157s and 158s (who can be lured easier and for less money), and may not even admit the 165s (so as to improve the school’s acceptance ratio, another U.S. News criterion).
These 157s and 158s will be at or only slightly above the law school’s new median, and taking into account GPA, work experience, difficulty of college major, and so on, in some cases may be expected to perform below the class average.
So I suspect that some incoming law students see a merit scholarship as a vote of confidence that they are significantly academically superior to their classmates, when in fact the are likely very close to the median. And it is that disconnect that likely accounts for much of the regret that kicks in when a “merit scholar” student realizes that he is studying just as hard as his classmates, but is struggling to maintain the above-average GPA he needs to retain his scholarship.
In the National Jurist, Rebecca Larsen has an article ranking law schools on the basis of “diversity.” At Balkinization, lawprof Jason Mazzone makes some cogent criticisms of her approach.
Larsen ranks schools on the basis of the percentage of students and faculty who are African-American, Hispanic, or Asian, with a bonus if that percentage is significantly higher than the percentage of these groups in the state population. Under this system, most of the schools that get the highest possible rating (“A+”) turn out to be historically black schools where the student body is overwhelmingly black. Ironically, many of these schools are actually not especially diverse if that concept is understood as having a wide range of different groups represented by a “critical mass” in the student body, the theory adopted by the Supreme court in Grutter v. Bollinger as a justification for affirmative action. For example, one of the schools with an A+ rating is Howard University, where the student body is 78% African-American. Why should Howard be considered any more diverse than a school that is 78% white?
If, as Larsen says, the purpose of pursuing diversity is to ensure that a broad range of “viewpoints” is represented in the classroom, thereby giving students “a better education and classes more reflective of the world,” her ranking system makes no sense. From that standpoint, a school that is 78% black or 78% Hispanic is no better than one that is 78% white.
Howard and other historically black schools should not be blamed for their lack of diversity. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, relative homogeneity within some schools promotes the laudable goal of diversity across institutions. But we should not pretend that such schools have unusually high internal diversity.
Moreover, it makes no sense to focus only on the representation of three groups defined by crude racial categories. Rather, a true diversity ranking would have to take account a wide range of ethnic, religious, political and other groups. Swedes, Utah Mormons, and Bulgarians all have different and unique cultures that could contribute to viewpoint diversity. But under Larsen’s approach, their presence actually lowers a school’s diversity ranking because it increases the percentage of the student body that counts as “white” rather than “minority.”
Larsen’s system makes somewhat better sense if the real goal is not diversity but compensatory justice for groups that have suffered historic discrimination in the US. Blacks, Asian-Americans, and to a much lesser extent Hispanics qualify on that basis. This compensatory justice rationale for affirmative action is, in my view, much more defensible than “diversity,” though certainly not a completely unproblematic one. But the two rationales are different from each other and call for widely divergent policies. If Larsen and the National Jurist are actually promoting compensatory justice for victimized minority groups rather than diversity, they should say so explicitly and drop the diversity rhetoric, which is an extremely poor fit with their ranking system.
This year’s US News law school rankings are now available. For what it’s worth, George Mason has moved up slightly to number 40, while UCLA – home of senior conspirator Eugene Volokh – ranks 16th.
For some of my past criticisms of the US News rankings see here and here.
The rankings aren’t officially out until tomorrow, but there has been a serious leak. Thanks to a prematurely released press release dated tomorrow, I can report that the University of Arkansas Law School is ranked number 84 for 2012.
Now that that’s cleared up, you can sleep soundly.
I agree with much of the advice that co-blogger David Bernstein offers on law school rankings and admissions. I don’t think that the US News rankings are completely useless, but their utility is indeed limited by various methodological weaknesses, such as those that I pointed out here and here. The most fundamental problem is that the rankings are primarily based on surveys of academics, lawyers, and judges who have no idea of what goes on at most of the schools they rank:
A substantial part (25%) of a school’s ranking depends on ratings by randomly selected professors at other schools. Another 15% is based on a survey of randomly selected lawyers and judges.
Here’s the problem: there are some 190 ABA-accredited law schools in the US. The average professor doesn’t know much about what is going on at the vast majority of them. If I spent my time keeping up with the faculty publications, curricula, student quality, and so forth, at the other 190 law schools, I wouldn’t have any time left over to do my own research and teaching….. I suspect that the same is true of the lawyers and judges. They too have their own work to do, and therefore can’t spend their time keeping track of the doings at dozens of law schools.
David is also right to suggest that a school’s average LSAT score is the best shorthand measure of its quality. It’s the students who have the biggest impact on the schools’ reputation with employers. If you want a useful measure of faculty quality, check out Brian Leiter’s ranking. Leiter rates scholarship, which is not the same thing as teaching. Some excellent scholars are terrible teachers. On average, however, good scholars are likely to be better teachers than mediocre ones, in part because they know their subject better. Moreover, a professor’s scholarship is generally the most important indicator of his influence in his field, which in turn impacts his ability to help students get ahead in that specialty.
Like David, I sometimes get questions from people who want to go to law school in order to work in some particular field. As a constitutional law professor, I often get queries from people who want to practice “constitutional law.” When I get such a question, I always start out by asking what the student means. “Constitutional law” covers so many different issues that it’s impossible for anyone to be an expert on all of them. Most lawyers specialize.
The good news is that there are many law jobs where constitutional law comes into play on a regular basis. If you are a criminal lawyer, you will probably often run into Fourth Amendment issues. If you represent a newspaper or TV station, you will often get First Amendment issues. So if your goal is simply to work in a practice area where you regularly deal with constitutional law cases, there are many options to choose from. Just pick the area of constitutional law that interests you and find out which industries, criminal defense practices, or government agencies routinely litigate cases in that field.
If, however, you want to work on cutting edge constitutional law cases that set major new precedents, your options are much more limited. Some public interest firms such as the ACLU or the Institute for Justice do indeed litigate cases like that regularly. So do a few major specialized appellate firms, many of them in Washington, DC. But if you want to get a job with any of these organizations right after law school, you probably have to attend one of the most prestigious thirty or forty schools (here, the US New rankings are a relatively good proxy) and do very well there, usually in the top 10-15% of your class or better. It also helps to do a clerkship with a federal appellate court. If you don’t have those credentials, you can still work your way into a top public interest or appellate job by becoming a successful litigator elsewhere and then lateraling. But it won’t be easy, since lots of other capable people want to do the same thing.
Like cutting-edge constitutional law, international law (mentioned by David), is also a highly competitive field. As he notes, you are unlikely to get a job in it if you don’t speak a foreign language and aren’t a graduate of a top law school. But all is not lost. If you are monolingual, you can fix that problem by studying foreign languages! In most major cities, reasonably priced night school language courses are readily available. I’m learning Spanish that way right now. The foreign languages you learn will probably be valuable even if you don’t end up becoming an international law practitioner; I’m not one myself, but my knowledge of Russian and French has still helped me a lot in various ways. While in law school, you should also take courses on the law and politics of whatever part of the world you want to focus on in your future international law work.
Finally, international law, like constitutional law, is a large and diverse field. Before trying to get into it, you should have some idea as to what type of international law you want to do. For example, there are far more opportunities in international commercial law than in more widely publicized areas such as international human rights law.
With U.S. News rankings due out tomorrow, I thought I’d repeat part of a post from two years ago.
First, U.S. News has several methodological problems. E.g.:
Consider how U.S. News ranked part-time programs [for the first time in 2009]–it sent out a survey asking professors and deans to list fifteen schools with outstanding part-time programs. I am rather confident that no more than a tiny percentage of those who responded to this question are familiar with the particularities of different schools’ part-time programs. Unlike some of our worthy competitors, for example, at George Mason (ranked 5th in the part-time rankings) ALL tenured and tenure-track professors teach in the evening, and evening students are eligible for all students activities including law review. I can’t imagine why a professor at, say, Valparaiso Law School, would be aware of such details, but U.S. News didn’t bother to even attempt to take such factors into account. [As suggested below, the best way to rank the relative desirability of part-time programs is by the LSAT scores of matriculating students.]
Advice for prospective law students:
There are three groups of law schools: the handful of truly “national” law schools, which place almost everywhere; the somewhat larger group of “strong academic” law schools, which place many graduates regionally but also have the reputation to get you a job elsewhere with a little legwork; and the regional law schools, which don’t have placement pull nationally but place their grads locally, often with great success. If you have been admitted only to regional law schools, rankings and the such should be almost entirely irrelevant to you; you should be attending law school in the city in which you would like to live and practice.
The only ranking you should consider with any seriousness:
If you must rely on ranking and desire a superior alternative to U.S. News, look at matriculating students’ LSAT scores. The wisdom of crowds suggests that tens of thousands of law students making hundreds of thousands decisions about accepting and rejecting offers of admission, taking into account everything that prospective law students take into account–location, academic reputation, faculty quality, clinics, placement, specialties, cost, and so forth–provide far more useful information than the hamhanded U.S. News rankings. And unlike GPA, LSAT scores are both a reasonable proxy for student quality (at least when considered across an entire school’s student body) and are not really manipulable by the law schools. [Addendum: You should also consider bar passage rates; no sense spending three years and 100K only to find yourself unemployable as an attorney. And if you are admitted to a law school with LSATs significantly below the schools' median, for whatever reason, you should ask very directly what percentage of students with LSATs within a couple of points of yours have successfully completed law school and passed the bar over the past decade. If the school won't tell you, go somewhere else. LSAT scores don't predict law school performance that well overall, but law school administrators know that that LSATs below a certain lever tend to be highly predictive of failure at their school--but admit students with such LSAT scores anyway.]
Of course, no student is the average student, and anyone about to devote three years and a lot of money to law school should consider how his individual interests and needs may vary from the median. But as a rough approximation as to the true desirability of a law school, I don’t think you can go very far wrong with LSAT scores.
UPDATE: Over the years, I’ve met quite a few prospective law students who express an interest in practicing “international law” [by which, to be clear, neither they nor I mean representing clients in U.S. courts in matters that happen to have an international component.] I always ask, “Do you speak any foreign languages?” “Have you ever lived abroad?” “Do you have the sort of LSAT score that will get you into one of the nation’s top law schools?” The answers are almost always “no,” “no,” and “no.” I then politely try to disabuse them of the notion that there is a significant chance that a monolingual graduate of a middling law school with no international experience will find a job in “international law,” public or private. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. If you fall into this category, consider yourself warned.
