Last week, Brian Tamanaha critiqued the LSAC’s decision to increase LSAT fees in response to a declining number of test takes and law school applicants. The LSAC responded, and Tamanaha has fisked the response.
Archive | Law Schools
Shrinking Sales? Increase Prices!
The number of prospective law students taking the LSAT has declined significantly in the past few years after peaking in 2009-10. So what is the Law School Admission Council doing in response? Increasing the test fees. The fee increases include a substantial increase (in percentage terms) in the cost of sending LSAT scores to schools. […]
IHS Online Conference for Aspiring Legal Academics
If you are a law student interested in pursuing a career as a legal academic, you may be interested in the Institute for Humane Studies’ upcoming online program for aspiring legal scholars: a series of online lectures on various topics related to getting into legal academia that will be followed by question and answer sessions. […]
LSAT Takers Continue to Decline
The NYT reports that the number of people taking the LSAT test has declined for the second year in a row. The Law School Admission Council reported that the LSAT was given 129,925 times in the 2011-12 academic year. That was well off the 155,050 of the year before and far from the peak of 171,514 […]
Responding to Online Outlines
Many law professors are distressed by the proliferation of online course outlines and case briefs. Commercial outlines have been available for years. Now those students inclined to rely on such study tools have access to lower-cost alternatives. That’s not the problem. Rather it’s the existence of outlines that purport to represent how specific professors teach […]
Legal Ethics Forum Symposium on the Legal Education and the Legal Profession
By Jonathan H. Adler on February 6, 2012 11:25 am in Law School Tuition and Loans, Law Schools, Legal Profession
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 […]
Recommendations for First Amendment textbook
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 […]
Legal Education Reform, But How?
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 […]
Curriculum and Legal Education Reform
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 […]
The New York Times on ABA Accreditation of Law Schools
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 […]
What the NYT Article on Law Schools Gets Right
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 […]
What Should Law Schools Teach? (What Should the NYT Learn?)
By Jonathan H. Adler on November 20, 2011 1:42 pm in Academia, Law Schools, Legal Profession, Legal Scholarship
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 […]
Bleg: Recommended US history book for Con Law I?
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 […]
Diversity Within Student Groups vs. Diversity Across Student Groups
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 […]
Law School Review
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.