Failing Law Schools (Chicago Series in Law and Society) [Hardcover]

Brian Z. Tamanaha (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2012 | Series: Chicago Series in Law and Society

On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise, and their resources are often the envy of every other university department. Law professors are among the highest paid and play key roles as public intellectuals, advisers, and government officials. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession.

Addressing all these problems and more in a ringing critique is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades, with the scarce jobs offering starting salaries well below what is needed to handle such a debt load. At the heart of the problem, Tamanaha argues, are the economic demands and competitive pressures on law schools—driven by competition over U.S. News and World Report ranking. When paired with a lack of regulatory oversight, the work environment of professors, the limited information available to prospective students, and loan-based tuition financing, the result is a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.

Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha has provided the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Even those who disagree with Brian Z. Tamanaha and challenge his analyses will be participating in a conversation shaped by his contentions. Failing Law Schools presents a comprehensive case for the negative side of the legal education debate and I am sure that many legal academics and every law school dean will be talking about it.”

(Stanley Fish, Florida International University College of Law 20120301)

“Legal education is a broken, failed, even corrupt enterprise. It exalts and enriches law professors at the expense of lawyers, the legal profession, and most of all the students whose tuition dollars finance the entire scheme. With hard numbers and piercing insights, Brian Z. Tamanaha tells the disturbing, scandalous truth. His book is essential reading for anyone who is even contemplating law school, much less committing to a career in law teaching. With any luck, his book will inspire law professors and law school deans who have no other career options to subject themselves to the deepest levels of ethical introspection, the better to lead legal education back into the service of its true stakeholders.”

(James Chen, University of Louisville )

“Failing Law Schools is destined to have an enormous impact on the future of legal education. … [T]his will turn out to be the definitive account of just how out-of-balance the existing model of legal education has become.”

(William Henderson, Indiana University Maurer School of Law )

"Tamanaha’s book is both thoughtful and damning, made all the more persuasive because he is an experienced and respected academic who builds his argument carefully step by step with an insider’s understanding. It’s definitely worth a careful read—and for defenders of the status quo, a thoughtful response."

(Orin Kerr The Volokh Conspiracy 20120506)

"I would certainly encourage a prospective law student, especially one not likely to get into one of the very top schools, to read this book."

(Brian Leiter, University of Chicago 20120510)

"An essential title for anyone thinking of law school or concerned with America's dysfunctional legal system."

(Library Journal 20120701)

About the Author

Brian Z. Tamanaha is the William Gardiner Hammond Professor of Law at the Washington University School of Law and the author of six books, including A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society, Law as a Means to an End, and Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (June 15, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226923614
• ISBN-13: 978-0226923611
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #107,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Facts and Sound Theory where Hyperbole more often Treads June 16, 2012

By Hank Peace

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The recent recession hit the legal industry harder than most, and to paraphrase Warren Buffet, when the tide receded we learned law schools had been swimming naked. Something is obviously badly wrong, but a deluge of scamblogs and overheated articles notwithstanding, very little intelligent is being said about it. Brian Tamanaha--law professor, former interim law school dean, and traitor to his class--changes all that in this wonderful book, replacing hyperbole with facts and sound theory.

Tamanaha first sets his sights on law professors, showing their pernicious effects on law schools both through the ABA-accreditation process (Part I) and through the law school itself (Part II). He then shifts his focus to the malignant effect on law schools of a single ranking--the US News (Part III), before showing why the law school model is broken and suggesting what to do about it (Part IV).

Law professors have proved a potent special interest force both within and out of the law school. It was they who convinced the ABA to mandate a third year of legal education and to adopt accreditation standards that put a premium on well paid tenure-track professors (the ABA had to backtrack somewhat from the latter in response to a DOJ antitrust suit). Professors have also effectively lobbied for the same within the law schools themselves. No dean can withstand the wrath of a unified faculty.

The law is curious among academic programs for being dominated by a single ranking. The law is prestige driven as it is, and the U.S. News & World Report ranking is waited on with bated breath each year by potential applicants. And so "[t]he annual pronouncement of the surviving rump of a defunct magazine thus mercilessly lords over legal academia." Manipulation is the rule of the day.... Most (most) schools won't outright lie, but they will make the truth dance a mighty fine jig. More rankings (it's a fool's errand to expect rankings to go away) are a solution that Tamanaha doesn't give enough attention, here or in his later recommendations. They could both rely on less imperfect proxies for law school quality and, more importantly, dilute the over-importance of the U.S. News rankings.

A continued influx of large numbers of cost-insensitive students to law schools drives tuition increases and provides the financing for reduced teaching loads and so on. If potential students are acting irrationally, why? Tamanaha identifies three reasons: lack of information and uncertainty make it difficult to estimate a proper long-term rate of return, the optimism bias, and schools are providing misleading and incomplete employment numbers (he gets to another, the government student loan scheme, later, but for some reason doesn't mention it here). The third reason is the most disconcerting. Schools are providing bad data and doing it willfully. Since it's easier to gather salary and employment data from the most successful graduates, numbers can be manipulated by just not trying very hard to collect them. One example drives home how important effort is to reporting rates. Two schools, South Texas College of Law and Texas Southern University, both fourth-tier and located in Houston, Texas, with similar names and full of students with similar LSAT scores (one wonders how many students show up to the wrong school at the beginning of classes each year) have dramatically different results. South Texas salary figures represent only 5% (!) percent of the portion of a recent class employed in the private sector, while Texas Southern salary figures represent 97% of the same. The only explanation is that administrators at Texas Southern are working much harder than their counterparts at South Texas to gather salary data.

In Part IV, Tamanaha moves into an exploration of what the preceding and other trends say about the current law school economic model. His conclusion: its broken. Tuition has skyrocketed at far past the rate of inflation (or rate of increase in legal salaries), student debt has similarly ballooned, and an already tepid legal market contracted severely during the latest recession. Market distortions aside, students have begun to take notice, and are taking the LSAT, applying to law school, and matriculating to law school at steadily declining rates.

Tamanaha parts with some sound advice for potential law students and recommendations how to fix the law school model. Law schools show little interest in changing--new school UC Irvine, touted as the opportunity to build the perfect law school, instead looks like every other first tier school in every way. But if current trends continue, all the market distortions built into the current model won't be able to stop the correction. Tamanaha sees an inevitable end state as a law school model that reflects the bimodal distribution of legal salaries: schools will split between elite schools continuing on much as they have before (along with public law schools offering an attractive price and entrée to the local market) and newly practice oriented lower-tier schools run at a greatly reduced cost.

Tamanaha's primary recommendation is that the ABA-imposed minimum number of classroom hours be cut by a third (thus allowing true two-year programs), standards and official interpretations written for the benefit of faculty be deleted, and rules on law libraries be deleted.
But Tamanaha has understandably little faith in the ABA (after all, are not all professions conspiracies against the laity?) so he suggests a bypass: state supreme courts use their regulatory powers over state legal industries to circumvent the ABA-accreditation process by allowing graduates of non-accredited schools to sit for the bar.

Another bypass is changes to the federal loan scheme. Tamanaha gives two suggestions: apply federal loan eligibility requirements similar to those applied to for-profit vocational schools (and wouldn't that bruise a few egos) and cap federal loan totals by schools (Tamanaha also thinks a path to discharge of student loans in bankruptcy should be restored). Neither suggestion is wrongheaded, but both suffer from being overly crude and reliant on the government. If law students are going to continue to rely heavily on debt to finance their law degrees, and they are, then their creditors must play an integral role in policing their spending decisions (as any bank asked for a loan to buy a home or finance a business does). The government simply isn't competent to do so. They lack the information and the alignment of interests (the current system amounts to massive subsidies to law schools at the students' expense with taxpayers ultimately left to foot the bill, in true government fashion, far down the road).

Tamanaha's contribution to the conversation is welcome, not the least because he takes his subject seriously. Like all commentators, Tamanaha has an ulterior motive, but rather than the more common motive of propping up lawyer (and law professor) profits through further cartelization of the legal industry, Tamanaha's ulterior motive is improving access to justice. It is an admirable aim--and in my mind a moral imperative--and one that requires reform. Unfortunately, Tamanaha is not as effective in his prescription as in his diagnosis.

This review is of the Kindle edition. Reference material and appendices comprise 39% of the Kindle edition, and consist of: a list of abbreviations, a list of law schools references (in-text reference and official name), endnotes (linked from the text to the notes and back), and the index (referencing the hardcopy page numbers, but linked to the text). Read more ›

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A no-holds-barred critique of American law schools June 20, 2012

By Ronald H. Clark VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This provocative book should be of interest to anyone involved in legal education, whether as a student, law professor, law dean, or simply as a taxpayer guaranteeing law student loans. The author is a well respected professor of law at Washington University, who did a stint as interim dean at St. John's University School of Law, and is the author of six other well-received books (including a couple I have reviewed on Amazon). So he knows of what he speaks from personal experience. Briefly put, the author believes current American legal education is in a "sorry state" due to the schools chasing after prestige and revenue as their primary goals, even at the cost of damaging their students.

The book is divided into four parts and some 14 chapters, preceded by an interesting prologue in which the author recounts his experiences as dean at St. John's. The first part deals with his view that law schools are largely self-regulating and utilize this power for their own (and not their students') betterment. The influence of the American Bar Association on legal education is highly detrimental, since it results in excessive faculty retention, uniform legal education no what what the character of the individual school and its students may be, and the inability to use adjunct professors to keep costs down. Moreover, clinical or practical legal education is reduced to a second class status.

Part II takes aim at law professors, by examining their light teaching loads, and the intense pressure to publish, both of which drive tuition costs up. Law professors, the author maintains, generally have had little practical experience themselves, and their published output is largely detached from law and of little use to lawyers and judges in their actual work.... Law schools also place reliance upon clinical and legal writing instructors, instead of placing more of a load on law professors, which further drives up costs. Schools tend to enlarge their faculties not out of need but to match the growth of competing schools.

I found Part III to be highly interesting. Here the focus is the substantial impact (what the author terms "the grip") the highly influential "U.S. News" law school rankings have on the schools. Schools can engage in a variety of techniques to improve their rankings, such as by attracting high LSAT scoring applicants via scholarship offers; reporting false LSAT/GPA data; and by filling vacant seats with transfer students whose LSAT scores are not included in the rankings. These various strategies further add to costs and raise tuition.

Part IV deals with topics about which we are hearing a good deal these days. Law students as a group take on incredible levels of debt to finance their educations, aided by generous government assistance, but yet increasingly large numbers of graduates cannot find legal jobs, which pushes up the default rate on the government-guaranteed loans. Nonetheless, the schools keep increasing class sizes because that is the only way they can meet their high costs of operation. And they keep raising tuition because they can--students have little choice but to pay up to get the degree credential they crave. Several of the chapters in this part seek to educate potential law students as to what should warn them about particular schools.

Wow, to say the least! Quite an indictment. What does the author propose as a solution? Basically, he argues for differentiation in legal education: not every school needs to be Harvard or Yale; courses should be tailored to the goals of their students, whether it is a national law firm, or to get a job in a local firm. And schools need to be candid about their success rates, by not fudging the percentage of graduates who achieve legal jobs. No matter that legal jobs are shrinking, and debt levels continue to increase, I doubt if anything will slow down the rush to law school. A recent study showed that only 55% of 2011 grads secured legal employment, so the beat goes on. This book is full of many more stimulating suggestions, including some with which I disagree. But anyone interested in legal education can benefit enormously, and sharpen up their antennae, by grappling with this explosive 240 page missile. Our public discourse can only benefit from wide-scale reading and discussion of the author's ideas. Read more ›

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all undergrads, and parents of undergrads, considering law school July 11, 2012

By Anthony DeGuerre

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Though a short read at 187 pages, Mr. Tamanaha's book covers quite a bit of ground in that it: lays out the history of law school; the roles the ABA and the AALS have had in shaping the structure of law schools; the relationship and distinction between the academic and professional practice of law; an overview of the shameless gaming law schools have made with the US News and World ranking system to attract students; and a discussion of the "reverse-robin hood" finance structure (see page 98) which taxes those students least likely to find gainful employment after graduation to support those students most likely to find lucrative legal jobs following graduation.

If you are a student considering a legal career, this book is a "must read" prior to sitting for the LSAT. The calculus prospective students should make (page 155-157), which sets out a theoretical "monthly budget" for new lawyers starting out, should be mandatory reading for all prospective law students, as this monthly budget will become your life if you took out loans during law school. Additionally, the overview of the ranking system used by Law Schools and big firms will be useful in helping potential law students find out what their career prospects are in light of the school they are attending.

If you are an attorney, judge or professor, I would read this book to understand the crisis rising in the legal profession in regards to oversupply of lawyers with no practical experience and incredible student loan debt. The discussion of the forces and history that shaped the current legal education model are also a worthwhile return on the time invested in reading this book.