The persistent drumbeat of doom that accompanies discussions about law schools is scaring students away from a rewarding profession and ignoring the innovations taking place in law schools today, leaders of the Association of American Law Schools told reporters on Thursday as they kicked off their annual conference.
The meeting, in New York City, was expected to draw 3,000 law-school deans, professors, and others concerned about the myriad challenges facing legal education. The AALS represents 176 law schools.
“The broad narrative of legal education is ‘Don’t go to law school. Law schools are all the same, they cost too much, you can’t get a job, and law schools don’t understand there’s a problem,’” said the association’s immediate past president, Lauren K. Robel, provost and executive vice president of Indiana University at Bloomington.
That narrative, she said, is sending the wrong message to prospective students whose services are badly needed at a time when the law is more complex and global, and clients are more diverse, than ever before.
Ms. Robel was one of three current and former association presidents who did their best to put a positive spin on the status of their profession during a nationally broadcast news conference.
They acknowledged that times were tough for the nation’s 202 American Bar Association-accredited law schools, which enrolled just under 40,000 students this past fall—the smallest incoming class since 1975, when there were only 163 ABA-accredited schools. That’s down 11 percent from the previous year and 24 percent below 2010’s peak of 52,488 students.
Incoming class sizes shrank in the fall of 2013 for about two-thirds of ABA-accredited law schools, with 81 schools seeing declines of more than 10 percent.
Challenging a ‘Dire Picture’
Those numbers don’t tell the whole story, the speakers said. They took a swipe at the central premise of Failing Law Schools, a provocative 2012 book in which the author, Brian Z. Tamanaha, argued that skyrocketing debt and lousy job prospects have made law school a losing bet for most students.
Mr. Tamanaha, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, was not immediately available to respond on Thursday to the assertion, by the association’s president-elect, Daniel B. Rodriguez, that the book’s title “paints a dire picture that is, by and large, unwarranted.”
While facing serious economic hurdles, “our law schools have proven remarkably adaptive and creative in the face of these challenges,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who is also dean of Northwestern University School of Law.
Among the innovations he cited:
- Washington and Lee University’s School of Law replaced its entire third-year curriculum with a practice-based approach, in which students counsel real and simulated clients.
- Arizona State University’s law school is creating a nonprofit law firm that will provide supervised training for recent law graduates as well as representation for underserved clients.
- The University of Colorado at Boulder’s law school has joined forces with Cisco to allow a group of students to spend seven months as paid interns, from the summer after their second year through the first semester of their third year. During the semester of supervised practice, students pay no tuition to the law school.
The association’s current president, Leo P. Martinez, said law schools were no different from other professional schools that are just now emerging from years of a bruising recession.
“If law schools are failing in this environment, so are M.B.A. schools, veterinary schools, and, dare I suggest, even journalism schools,” said Mr. Martinez, who is also a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law.
Facing the Consequences
But critics argue that law schools have been hit harder than most, in part because they continued to expand and raise tuition even as the number of graduates eclipsed the number of available jobs.
Faced with plummeting application numbers, many schools have cut class sizes in order to maintain academic quality and avoid dropping in national rankings.
After years of gravity-defying tuition increases, a handful of law schools, including those at the University of Arizona, the University of Iowa, and Pennsylvania State University, have responded to falling applications by cutting prices.
Some have quietly begun trimming their faculty ranks, mostly by offering early-retirement packages to senior professors, not renewing the contracts of nontenured professors, and leaving vacancies unfilled. And some are responding to national criticism of the escalating cost of a law degree by examining ways to shave a year off the usual path to a degree—four years of college plus three years of law school.
This year saw an expansion of “3+3" programs, which allow students to finish their undergraduate degrees in three years by giving them dual credit for first-year law classes.
In August, President Obama, himself a graduate of Harvard Law School, chimed into the debate by suggesting that students would be better off if, instead of a third year of law school, they spent that year in a clerkship or apprenticeship position.
As enrollment in their J.D. programs has nose-dived, many law schools have expanded master’s programs for nonlawyers.
In September an ABA task force weighed in, recommending that accreditation standards, including the requirement for tenure, be relaxed to give schools more leeway to deal with the stresses they’re facing.
It also suggested that schools help develop a process to allow nonlawyers to offer basic legal advice to people who can’t afford lawyers, a proposal some felt could cheat needy people out of quality counsel.
Despite all the turmoil law schools are facing, Ms. Robel said, legal education “is absolutely the right choice for the right student.”
