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New book criticizes law schools from the inside
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: August 30, 2012
With the incessant, pounding criticism that law schools have taken from all sides recently, maybe a book by a law professor called Failing Law Schools, by Washington University School of Law Professor Brian Tamanaha, is just piling on.
But the book, recently published to generally positive reviews by the University of Chicago Press, may go further than most modern critiques of law schools. The main theses of the book literally bite the hands that feed Tamanaha and his colleagues.
His basic themes are now legal journalists’ memes: There are too many law schools, they are too expensive, those schools don’t actually teach new lawyers usable skills to any great degree, there are too many graduating lawyers for the modern job market, student debt is so high after graduating from law school that the education is barely worth it and so on.
Tamanaha’s book also attacks those things that make being a law professor, in his view, such a great career. For instance, the idea of law professor tenure, which bases hiring, salary and job continuity on publishing rather than on teaching prowess.
"Being a law professor is a good life,” said Tamanaha, who said that law professors make more money than most attorneys, while putting in far fewer and far less-stressful hours.
His basic thesis is that there are both too many law school graduates and too much money changing hands. The result is a system that bleeds funding sources for money, while pumping out graduates who, last year, had about a 55 percent chance of landing a job as a lawyer.
He pointed out, for instance, that Ohio has nine law schools—five of which are state-supported and four of which are private schools. “That is a large number of law schools in one state,” he said. There are 201 accredited law schools in the country.
That theme was echoed by Ohio Northern University School of Law Interim Dean Stephen C. Veltri. ONU is a private school and Veltri feels the effect.
“The state awards money per student to each state law school, regardless of the student’s qualifications,” said Veltri. That is the sort of transfer of cash that Tamanaha points to as helping to flood the market with too many law school graduates.
Tamanaha feels that there is simply too much money floating around the system. “Every year for the past 25 years, law schools have raised tuition and the loan guarantees have gone along with those increases,” he said.
At the same time, law professors’ salaries have increased at the same time as their workload has decreased, because the tenure model for those professors emphasizes publishing and research instead of classroom skills, which are also the criteria used in ranking law schools by U.S. News and World Report.
It is those forces that Tamanaha feels underlie the ultimate failure of the law schools—producing too many new lawyers with too few real-life skills for the marketplace.
His solutions are radical—so radical that he does not feel that they will ever be implemented, he said.
They include recognizing that there are different tiers of legal education, and creating a system that corresponds to that.
Some schools produce lawyers who have the skill sets to be law professors or to work in the major international schools. Other schools produce lawyers who work locally and on a small-scale.
Tamanaha thinks that those types of schools should not be forced to follow the identical, ABA-accredited model. That would include creating two-year law schools. “We have known for a long time that students can get a legal education in two years,” he said.
He also feels that the student loan structure has to be reconstructed so that it reflects the actual marketplace that new lawyers find themselves in, by limiting the amount students can borrow. This will also have the effect of driving down tuitions. This will probably have the effect of giving the law schools less money, which may, in the, end affect the lifestyles of law professors.
It is an irony not lost on Tamanaha, who said before publication that, “this is not a career-enhancing book, and people early on told me not to write it for that reason."