The Million Dollar Law Degree

Given the triumphalism of those who tout a dubious study ostensibly showing that the present value of a law degree for an new graduate is $1 million, I think it's fair to remind them of how the rise in law school tuition, the huge rise in the number of law graduates, and the collapse of the legal job market call all of the authors' assumptions into question:

In June, the legal services sector lost more than 3,000 jobs, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Since June 2012, the latest BLS data shows, the industry has seen a net gain of only 1,000 jobs. In the last two months alone, 6,000 positions disappeared....

The increase in the percentage of applicants being admitted to law schools is one reason that the lawyer bubble continues to grow. Another is the stagnant job market. In 2008, the BLS projected that the economy would add a net total of 98,500 new attorney positions for the entire decade ending in 2018. In 2010, the agency revised that estimate downward to project the addition of just 73,600 positions by the end of 2020.

Even allowing for attrition by retirement, death, and other reasons, the BLS now estimates that there will be 235,000 openings for lawyers, judges, and related workers through 2020—23,500 a year. Last year alone, law schools graduated 46,000 new attorneys.

If law schools as a group reduced enrollments by 20 percent from last year’s graduating class, they would still produce almost 37,000 new lawyers annually — 370,000 for a decade that will require only 235,000 — not to mention the current backlog that began accumulating even before the Great Recession began.

If you're a Harvard or Yale law student, odds are your law degree will return well over that $million over the course of your career. The further you get away from the elite schools, or the upper ranks of the law school you attend, the less likely it is that you'll end up earning a good (or even a decent) income, and the more likely it is that you'll end up working a job that neither requires a law degree nor helps you pay off your student loans. Law is also a profession where your first job will often significantly limit your options for the rest of your career, so graduating into a poor employment market can have a career-long impact on your earnings.

If you're thinking about attending law school, you need to keep in mind that when people are talking about the flexibility of a law degree the odds are (a) they don't know what they're talking about or (b) they work for a law school and you're hearing a sales pitch. If you're not committed to practicing law, consider taking some additional time to think about your options or considering how other graduate degrees (or employment options) might better fit your goals and personality. If you are committed to practicing law, and have done some homework to figure out what that actually means (no, TV dramas don't count as homework), you still need to consider in light of your grades, LSAT score, and the law schools willing to accept you whether that's a good investment. For most students at most law schools, in the present market (which, unfortunately, seems to be the likely market for legal employment stretching into the foreseeable future) it's not going to be worth it - most law graduates end up racking up a large amount of debt and then not finding work in the legal field or finding marginal work that sets them up for a career in which they're excluded from the more prestigious and higher-paying jobs. You can't get around the numbers.

Bar Admission After Two Years of Law School - A Partial Solution or a Huge Mistake?

I am skeptical that anything will come of the proposal, not because of an evaluation of its merits but because it could undermine the system of law reviews - student-edited law journals published by law schools - at all but the upper tier schools, but I think this proposal to allow students to take the bar after completing two years of law school would be a mistake.

The proposal would amend the rules of the New York State Court of Appeals to allow students to take the state bar exam after two years of law school instead of the three now required. Law schools would no doubt continue to provide a third year of legal instruction — and most should (more on that in a bit) — but students would have the option to forgo that third year, save the high cost of tuition and, ideally, find a job right away that puts their legal training to work.

Let's skip ahead to the end:

Some will argue that the two-year option would only create unequal classes of lawyers and glut the marketplace with attorneys who don’t have the skills and training that generations of law school graduates before them have had.

We doubt this will occur.

You doubt that will occur because... Unfortunately they appear to have run out of space before getting to that part.

Seriously, our system already produces unequal classes of lawyers. If you don't have the Harvard or Yale brand attached to you, what are the odds of being appointed to the Supreme Court? The nation's largest law firms focus their recruiting efforts on top tier law schools, and even within those law schools on law review members, and even then they tend to focus on the most elite law journal published by the institution. If you don't have the right job out of law school, the odds of later joining a "BigLaw" firm plummet. If you don't get the right judicial clerkship, the odds of becoming a law professor at a top law school plummet. The difference in employment and career prospects for graduates of top tier law schools are markedly different (and better) than those of graduates from the bottom tier of law schools.

How can you argue with a straight face that a student who drops out of law school after two years will be viewed as an equally qualified candidate as compared to students who graduate? Treated equally, except by law schools looking for professors, judges looking for clerks, law firms looking for lawyers....

The fantasy is that none of that matters:

While this wouldn’t increase the number of available jobs, a two-year option would allow many newly minted lawyers to pursue careers in the public interest or to work at smaller firms that serve lower- or average-income Americans, thereby fulfilling a largely unmet need. As it is now, many young lawyers say they would love to follow this path but cannot afford to because of their onerous debts....

And in any case, the risk ought to be balanced with the varied needs of the American people for legal services.

So... the idea is that although we already have far more law school graduates than available jobs, and although the proposal won't create even one additional job, and even though every single job - including some that can only be described as exploitative - gets flooded with applicants, creating a pool of less qualified applicants will... what? Allow the 2L with a law degree to apply for the public service job he "could not afford" if he completed another year of law school? Why would the public service entity find the drop-out preferable to the many law school graduates who will continue to apply for their jobs? Here's a wild idea: How about expanding the programs that offer loan forgiveness or similar subsidies to students who enter public interest careers?

The suggestion that the drop-outs could "work at smaller firms that serve lower- or average-income Americans" betrays both that they don't believe their own argument about creating "unequal classes of lawyers". They imagine the dropouts would work in low-paying public interest jobs, and for small law firms that offer discount legal services, again at low pay. You know what would be better than telling somebody that you're doing them a favor by letting them drop out of law school after two years, yet still take the bar and then go into a low-paying job? Steering them into a different degree program before they enter law school.

This isn't the first time I've heard the fantasy that if only we could glut the market with lawyers, suddenly quality legal services would be available to the masses. The authors' conceit is that this does not presently occur because the burden of law school debt prevents graduates from taking jobs that "serve lower- or average-income Americans", but those jobs are already being filled.

Is the idea, then, that small law firms serving those populations will pay the drop-outs even less then pass along the savings to their clients? Is the idea that it's so easy to handle divorces, criminal defense, consumer bankruptcies, and the like that the drop-outs will hang out shingles and compete for clients at rock bottom rates - and that the only thing preventing recent law graduates from going solo is the cost of their third year of law school? Having actually started my own solo practice in a past life, I'm having a difficult time relating the argument to the realities of starting a law firm. It's expensive to run a law firm, it's difficult to build and sustain a client base, and you can't make a living representing people who can't afford to pay you. Frankly, if the argument boils down to "You can make maybe $30K a year practicing law out of your apartment," we're back to it's being better to steer students into more suitable graduate programs or encouraging them to seek jobs based upon their undergraduate degrees.

What do the authors believe law schools would do to maintain their revenue stream, were this proposal to go through? You know what I think that they would do? Admit even larger numbers of students. After all, if you reduce the number of students who complete the third year of law school, you reduce your need for law professors, you have a harder time justifying the glorious new law school building, you offer fewer teaching opportunities to your professors outside of the 1L curriculum. I have a difficult time believing law schools would tighten their belts. Law schools aren't as expensive as they are because they need state-of-the-art science labs, medical facilities, computer technology.... The typical law school class involves a professor lecturing a class, or leading a seminar. Law schools charge high tuition because they can, and their administrators and professors enjoy their high salaries.

An alternative approach that would be less likely to create unequal classes of lawyers, and also address the author's valid criticism of the third year of law school, would be to simply shorten law school to a two year program. Law schools could turn the third year into an assortment of certification or LLM programs, allowing students who chose to choose a professorial path, working as law review editors and focusing on scholarship, or to pursue a range of other programs focused on different areas of law or different types of legal practice. That alternative would also put the onus on law schools to prove the value of the third year, rather than creating an illusion of an option - "You can drop out and take the bar" - knowing full well (or, extending the benefit of the doubt, applying a "knew or should have known" standard) that in a competitive job market the vast majority of law students won't take that chance, and that most who did would suffer for it.

Teaching People To "Think Like Lawyers

Behind the firewall, today's New York Times prints "A Skull Full of Mush" from Ann Althouse. (Er... I mean it prints an editorial called "A Skull Full Of Mush"....)

Professor Althouse reminds us of the fictional Professor Kingsfield of The Paper Chase who defends his law school teaching methods by declaring "You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer." She relates this in the context of a conference in which the author of that book rejected the Kingsfield approach to legal education in favor of one which allows students to develop their own narrative. (I'm not sure what that means and Althouse doesn't explain; I suspect she chose to use that particular phrase without providing any context because, standing alone, it sounds so wishy-washy. If that's the case, though, what can I say? She's "thinking like a lawyer.")

We law professors tend to worry about seeming like Professor Kingsfield. But we ought to worry less about that prospect and more about preserving and respecting our own tradition of teaching from the cases.

The students who come into our law schools are adults who have decided that they are ready to spend a tremendous amount of time and money preparing to enter a profession. We show the greatest respect for their individual autonomy if we deny ourselves the comfort of trying to make them happy and teach them what they came to learn: how to think like lawyers.

One of the best student experiences I had in law school was being taught by J.J. White, who was probably the most like Professor Kingsfield of any professor at UM. He knew his material cold, and I had the impression that he spent more time reviewing cases and preparing for each class than did most of his students. He did instill some fear, because you knew that if he called on you and you were not prepared (or were wildly off the mark) you were likely to experience some embarrassment. Some students hated him, but I doubt that there was one who wasn't inspired to work hard and think hard. His politics were obvious, but they didn't factor into his grading.

Had every professor at UM been like him, I would have had to work a lot harder and I would have learned a lot more. Instead, I found that he represented a certain class of older professor who had high expectations for students, had a tremendous amount of knowledge and self-discipline, and wished to impart knowledge of the law. Perhaps some of the more socratically-inclined younger professors eventually develop a similar set of teaching skills, but I was left with the impression that for many of the younger set the term "socratic method" was shorthand for "I don't have to have a lesson plan or prepare for class because I can fill an hour by lobbing questions at students". Some were all about ideology, caring a lot less about whether students came to learn the material than if the students ended up sharing their perspective on the material. Which isn't to say that they're necessarily dishonest - I suspect that they believed their positions to be correct, even if the nation's legislatures and courts hadn't (and still haven't, and aren't ever likely to) come to their senses.

Is there is a sense in which learning to write for such a professor is learning to "think like a lawyer"? You either develop skill in fashioning an argument you don't agree with or you get a lower grade - and is it not true that at times lawyers have to raise potentially meritorious arguments that they don't personally agree with in order to protect the interests of a client? (See? Skip over the "potentially meritorious" part, and it's an important lesson in "thinking like a lawyer.") Well, you might be able to make that argument if the professor is intentionally grading down correct answers on the basis of ideology which, Supreme Court advocacy aside, isn't an approach particularly compatible with "thinking like a lawyer". Maybe it's a lesson in "writing for your audience" - also an important legal skill? Er, maybe I shouldn't have to work this hard to make excuses for bad, lazy teaching. In these cases it wasn't the student who had the "skull full of mush".

In retrospect, when I look at what taught me to write like a lawyer, it wasn't the wretched student-led writing program that UM then inflicted upon its 1L's. It was a clinical class in criminal appellate advocacy, taught by a practitioner. The instructor opened the first session by telling us that whatever we had been led to think constituted "good legal writing" by virtue of law school instruction was largely incorrect, and over the course of a semester demonstrated that he knew what he was talking about. It's much harder to pinpoint how I learned to "think like a lawyer", although I can assure you that not every law professor I had contributed to that process (save, perhaps, as sardonically noted above).

I'm not going to argue that "thinking like a lawyer" means you have to shut up if you don't know what you're talking about. But knowing when to sit down and shut up is a part of good advocacy - whether because you've won the point and continuing would be beating a dead horse, because you risk exposing the weaknesses of your argument if you continue speaking, or because you're starting to sound like you're being arrogant or bullying. (At the same time, sometimes being provocative is a good way to induce your opponent into overplaying his hand.) When I post here, I rarely get a good back-and-forth in the comments, but I enjoy that as an opportunity to improve my knowledge and the way I think about the issues under discussion. (Yes, folks, all rumors to the contrary aside, lawyers tend to be more argumentative than the average person, and to approach debate as something to enjoy, not something to dread. That's not something you learn in law school, but it is something that helps take you there.)

I am not sure that J.J. White ever told my class that he was going to make us "think like lawyers". (He did tell us that law firms regarded us as fungible, and he also correctly forecast that most of my classmates on the political left would prove to be "limousine liberals", casting aside plans for careers in public service for a six figure law firm salary. He was right on both counts.) Had he done so, I would have believed him. But the professors I recall hearing that from, usually as a defense of their dubious teaching methods, didn't have a clue how lawyers think. They knew how to think like a law professor, and perhaps even to think like a Supreme Court Justice they once clerked for, but that was about it. For somebody who admitted hating practice, being unsuccessful in practice, and having a whopping two years of law firm experience in which he admitted the closest he got to courtroom advocacy was literally carrying bags for a partner, to tell me he can teach me to "think like a lawyer"? That's a joke. (And, of course, it happened.)

For the most part the claim, "You're learning how to think like a lawyer," is a cop-out. It's a cover for bad teaching that can't be defended in concrete terms. My challenge for Professor Althouse: Please provide a clear definition of what it means to "think like a lawyer," and which law school teaching methods have been legitimately established to establish those skills.

Law Professor Creativity in Law School Exams

This post over at the Volokh Conspiracy brought back memories, good and bad, about law professors' efforts to be clever in drafting their exams. To some degree, a clever hypothetical can interject a small dose of comic relief into an intense examination process. At the same time, it isn't particularly creative to set the hypothetical in the "State of Grace", "State of Ignorance" or "State of Anxiety". At least to me, such obvious jokes aren't particularly impressive, and aren't likely to help with a law student's State of Mind.

I had one professor who, well, was a lunkhead. He did use one of the obvious "State of" jokes for the context of his hypothetical, but then gave all of the various actors in the hypothetical meaningless, generic and extraordinarily similar names along the lines of the "Mr. Smith of the ABC Company," and "Mr. Jones of the CBA Corporation". The professor's personality left me with little doubt that he was looking for a "gotcha" - that he was less interested in grading the students on what they knew than downgrading them, for example, for mistakenly referencing the "ABC Corporation".

I don't mind the fact that law professors have the time to be creative in writing their examinations, as long as the time they spend being clever doesn't take away from their writing a clear, fair exam. But I am curious as to whether this type of exam-drafting creativity is commonly seen in any other graduate school context.

Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and law professors

According to Law Professor Eugene Volokh, a leading reason law schools have only one exam per course is, that's the way law students want it:

Most law school exams, to my knowledge, involve a single end-of-semester exam. Some comments in this thread argue that this is pedagogically unsound, and that having several exams — a final plus a midterm or two — would better measure people's knowledge. (It might also help students learn the material better.) I'm not sure that this is so, because I haven't looked into the research; but it seems plausible, and colleagues I trust have said that the research does support this. Let's assume then that this is right. Why then the single-exam format?

Some of the commenters identified one important answer: Professors hate grading exams, and would thus rather grade one exam than two or more. . . .

I think there's a lot of truth to this, but let me suggest an extra factor: I suspect that most students prefer the one-exam structure as well, so that there's little pushback against the professors' one-exam preference, and there would likely be some pushback against professors' attempts to shift to the "better" two- or three-exam format.

Well, then, let me propose that most students would prefer no exams at all, with everybody getting a guaranteed "A" or "A+". (Prof. Volokh describes the near-elimination of grades at Yale and Berkeley, and suggests that it is a school's market power which enables it to abolish traditional grading. That's probably true, but is an issue apart from what students would likely prefer.)

Granted, if everybody got the same grade some students would likely resent the students they perceive as having lesser ability getting "A's" just for showing up in class. (Or would you even have to show up? Students probably would also vote down a mandatory attendance policy.) Yet I've never heard students complain that a grading curve is too soft. No small number of law students pick their electives based upon a professor's curve from the prior year.

Speculation that additional exams might increase law student stress is interesting, but the fact is that in most law schools there are professors who hold midterms and I don't recall students wilting from the additional pressure.

Is it presumptuous of me to suggest that graduate school professors should care about which teaching and testing methods are the best means of advancing and measuring student comprehension and ability? That they should implement sound teaching and testing methods even if they prove less than popular with their students?

Professor Volokh speculates that employers don't much care about the accuracy of one grade or another, and presumes that "random noise in the grading probably averages out in considerable measure when you look at the student's entire transcript. Even if a professor views a law degree as nothing more than a rough equivalent to a "union card" which qualifies a student to get employment as a lawyer, I would still hope that the professor would strive to avoid adding "random noise" to a student's transcript.