Some law schools have actually faked admissions data to boost their rankings. The ABA recently imposed a $250,000 fine on the University of Illinois College of Law for reporting six years’ worth of inflated test scores and grades through 2011. Villanova has been censured by the ABA, though not fined.
A degree from Harvard or Yale, expensive though it may be, is still a ticket to lucrative employment. The problem is that the vast majority of students attend the vast majority of other law schools. Of the 201 ABA-accredited schools, only 12 reported that 80 percent of their 2011 graduates had landed full-time, long-term legal jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal. At almost two dozen less-prestigious schools, fewer than 40 percent of graduates had secured such jobs.
(Univ. Of Chicago) - \"Failing Law Schools\" by Brian Z. Tamanaha
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“Many law professors at many law schools across the country are selling a degree to their students that they would not recommend to people close to them,” Tamanaha writes. He also accuses them of lying about it: Some schools have been caught luring students with inflated post-graduation employment statistics.
If you think those claims sting, consider Tamanaha’s argument that law school effectively transfers money from students to relatively well-to-do professors, via student-loan debt — much of which is ultimately guaranteed by federal taxpayers who are generally not as well-off as the typical law professor.
Law school faculties are also bastions of liberal politics, and this irony is not lost on Tamanaha, who accuses the professoriate of not only enriching itself but also erecting de facto barriers to upward social mobility and true public-service law practice, all in the name of “academic freedom” and other abstractions.
Tamanaha argues that most law schools should emphasize lower-cost practical training, perhaps in fewer than the three years of study that are standard now. The resulting lawyers would serve the mundane but vital needs of ordinary people, a surprisingly large number of whom cannot afford representation even though they are not indigent. It would be an honorable calling and a decent living.
Tamanaha’s message — that law schools fail to fulfill this social purpose and that their failure is due to their selfishness and myopia — may not go over well in faculty lounges. But it is an important one nonetheless.
Charles Lane
is a Washington Post editorial writer.
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