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Needing Law Schools

March 22nd, 2015 / By

I agree entirely with Noah Feldman that society needs law schools. He couldn’t have said it better. This, however, is exactly why law schools need to fix their financial model. Most schools lack the big endowments of Harvard and other elite schools. Students, meanwhile, are increasingly unwilling to pay so much more tuition than Feldman did in the 1990’s or I did in the 1970’s. We need to keep asking: Why does it cost so much more today to learn what the law “can be”?

I learned a lot about what the law can be from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, my constitutional law professor at Columbia in 1979. I also learned from Herbert Wechsler, author of the much-cited article on “neutral principles” in constitutional law; William Carey, one of the New Deal architects and an early chair of the SEC; E. Allan Farnsworth, Reporter for the Restatement (Second) of Contracts; Maurice Rosenberg, one of the earliest legal scholars to apply social science research to legal problems; and many others. Why were all of these luminaries able to teach me and my classmates for so much less tuition than Columbia and other schools demand today?

In part, they earned less. I know that, because I am the daughter of yet another Columbia professor from that era: William K. (“Ken”) Jones. Our family did just fine financially, but we didn’t have the affluence that law professors enjoy today. Another explanation rests on the enormous number of staff members that law schools now need to operate. Communications staff, admissions staff, development staff, student services staff . . . . Each seems indispensable in the modern law school, but how many contribute to our mission of teaching students and others what the law can be?

I doubt that it’s possible to unwind the contemporary law school, to dismiss all of the staff, and go back to an earlier, simple world. Although it’s a charming notion, isn’t it? We could simply post our lower tuition, admit students who apply (without spending time marketing to them), teach them, and send them into the world knowing something about both what the law is and what it can be. Meanwhile, we would publish and engage in law reform efforts–as Ginsburg, Wechsler, Carey, and the others did–while teaching four courses a year.

I know that’s unlikely to happen, so we’ve got to find other ways to fix the financial model. Shifting the first year of law school to the undergraduate curriculum makes sense to me. Let’s teach more people about both the power of law and what it can be. Meanwhile, let’s lower tuition for those who will actually practice law. We, as professors, can teach people what the law can be–but our graduates are essential to make those changes happen.

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Symposium on the University Presidency

August 25th, 2013 / By

I haven’t had much time to post during the last two months, because my university asked me to take a leadership role on our presidential search committee. Our search, however, is connected to an upcoming event that may interest some of you: this Symposium on the University Presidency.

Ohio State’s Board of Trustees had the innovative idea of framing the university’s search by convening a panel of current and former presidents to discuss the presidential role in a modern university. If you’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, this Friday afternoon, you’re welcome to stop by. If you’ll be anywhere else in the world, you can follow the proceedings by live webcast; web information will appear soon on the page linked above.

The symposium includes Teresa Sullivan, the President of the University of Virginia who clashed famously with her university’s Board of Visitors. Scott Cowen, the Tulane University President who helped his campus survive Hurricane Katrina, will also speak–along with three other articulate and knowledgeable presidents.

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Berkman Center Webcast on “Creating a Law School e-Curriculum”

June 27th, 2013 / By

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law has a live webcast on July 9th at 12:30 pm eastern called “Creating a Law School e-Curriculum.” The speaker will be Oliver R. Goodenough, a fellow at The Berkman Center and a Professor of Law at the Vermont Law School.

Here’s the description:

Legal practice and legal education both face disruptive change. Much of how and what we do as lawyers and how and what we have taught as legal educators is under scrutiny. Legal technology is an important factor in driving these challenges. Law schools reform their curriculums law and technology is an area that is ripe for expansion in our teaching. It also provides ample room for scholarly examination. Creating opportunities for learning how technology is shaping legal practice should be a priority for any school looking to provide a useful education for the lawyers of the present, let alone the future.

To watch the webcast, simply visit this page at 12:30 pm eastern on July 9th. If you’re in Boston, the same page provides a form for you to RSVP to the luncheon.

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Too Soon to Tell

June 21st, 2013 / By

At Washington & Lee, as at most schools right now, we would prefer that our students were more successful in obtaining employment. But the 2012 employment figures, unfortunate as they are, say nothing about our our curricular reform. It is simply too early, . . . much too early.

The 2012 numbers refer to the first full class to pass through the reformed third year curriculum. Ours is a slow-to-change profession. Employers as a group do not change their settled practices on a dime. Nothing in the employment numbers that we see for the next 3 to five years should be seen as reflecting on the reception given to the curriculum reform. No curricular reform I know of, including Langdell’s, changed settled practices of others overnight. (more…)

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What’s driving change in legal education and why you should care

May 30th, 2013 / By

This piece was originally published by the ABA Journal.

Change is coming to a law school near you. Economics will drive the change, but the exact configuration will depend on choices made by law schools, state supreme courts, the ABA, and Congress over the next few years.

Without intervention, market forces are likely to segment law schools. Are schools and the profession content with that outcome? The question warrants serious debate.

Law schools have entered crisis mode as word spreads about their costs and job outcomes. In recent years, tens of thousands of graduates have struggled to enter the legal marketplace and find professional jobs with salaries that permit them to service student loan debt. As a result of a steep drop in applications and enrollment, schools face a budgetary crisis—one certain to change the face of legal education. We can bend the future, but only if reform happens through the lens of fixing law school economics.

The drivers of this change are on course to stratify legal education for lawyers into two layers.

One group of law schools—perhaps a few dozen “elite” schools—will continue using the traditional model. Research faculties will teach high-achieving students from around the country and world. Graduates from these schools will continue to obtain the most competitive jobs after achieving traditional market signals like high GPA and law review membership.

These schools will be cheaper by today’s standards, yet expensive by any reasonable measure. Classes will follow a curriculum designed using core lawyering competencies and will involve more simulations and more writing.

Overall, elite schools won’t look much different than today’s law school—a professional and graduate school hybrid that tries to simultaneously serve both the legal profession and the pursuit of knowledge. Nevertheless, they will feel different because the educational product will be more skills-oriented.

The second group of law schools—perhaps a few hundred “local” schools, including new ones—will use a model centered on teaching faculty. These schools will have similar educational approaches to the elite schools, but look much different. The faculty will be hired for their experience as lawyers, judges, regulators and policy wonks. Scholarship may not be part of the job description, but will endure because the desire to analyze the world around you is human nature. The schools may teach undergraduates, paralegals, and other professionals in addition to lawyers. Ultimately, local leaders and lawyers will shape an education that is less graduate studies and more professional development.

Affordability will be a feature, but local schools will be defined by the ownership the local legal community takes in educating future members. The result will be a faculty that fluidly moves between practicing and teaching.

A transient faculty will provide opportunities, but also a set of challenges for these schools, particularly how to ensure a high-quality, consistent product that’s capable of teaching each student what they need to succeed. To overcome some challenges, schools will share faculty—sometimes across town, sometimes across time zones—and course materials because it’s more efficient than trying to hire for every need and having part-time teachers reinvent the wheel each term.

Although it’s the broken economics of law school accelerating reform discussions, demands for change concern just about every aspect of law school and come from diverse perspectives. Many stakeholders view the crisis as an opportunity to shape the future. Not everything needs to or will change, but widespread dissatisfaction has put everything on the table.

There are three main drivers of change, each tied to the future I’m predicting:

First, the cost of becoming a lawyer is too high. Tuition skyrocketed because law schools operated in a completely dysfunctional market. Law students (and therefore law schools) had unfettered access to student loans with little downward pressure on the borrowing. Attitudes about student debt were unsophisticated and schools enjoyed an information asymmetry about post-graduation employment outcomes. While the loan system still provides blank checks, applicants now have credible employment information and are becoming increasingly price-sensitive.

As the applicant market becomes more functional, at-risk schools will cut their budgets to meet demand. Surviving schools will be those that accept the need to reinvent rather than rely on minor changes. Budgets are largely personnel-driven, so most schools will need to figure out how to more leanly deliver education. This will all but necessitate involvement from the local bench and bar.

This brings us to the second driver: the bench and bar. Practicing lawyers and judges are fed up with the quality of education. The steady drumbeat for more practical skills training isn’t new—in fact it’s a century old. But the opportunity for reshaping law schools is new because of the information about and coverage of their broken economics. The trouble: Creating a law school experience that the profession wants requires a redefinition of the law school mission. It must become more professional school than graduate school.

The opportunity stems partly from the third driver: the legal profession’s structural transformation. The media began paying attention to law graduate struggles when it became apparent that even graduates of the country’s most elite schools struggled in “the new normal.” This accelerated the decline in the JD’s perceived value and invited a multitude of skeptical voices to shout their discontent.

Yet the structural change has been more gradual. Over many decades, practice has grown more complex and specialized. Technology, globalization and the unbundling of legal services have accelerated the change. The legal profession of the future looks different; so too will the education system that produces its members.

Upholding the broad and often elusive principles of the American legal system—such as equality, opportunity, and justice—requires a legal education system that’s not merely subservient to market forces. Successfully addressing the drivers of change without flattening essential principles depends on whether the solutions explored and adopted provide more than lip service to the broken economics of the modern law school.

If we lose sight of what’s causing the change, we may lose the opportunity to bend the course for the better.

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Tenure

May 15th, 2013 / By

In my comments to the ABA Task Force, I endorse an accreditation standard that embraces academic freedom but does not require tenure. Brian Tamanaha made the same proposal in his book Failing Law Schools, but most academics vigorously defend an accreditation standard requiring tenure. Why do I favor the looser standard? Here are my top five reasons:

1. Tenure is not the same as academic freedom.

Tenure is an excellent way to assure academic freedom; in fact, it may be the best method of attaining that end. But tenure is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Tenure is like the absolute immunity that prosecutors enjoy when acting in their role as advocates. Just as absolute immunity promotes prosecutorial independence, tenure promotes academic freedom.

The distinction between means and ends is important, because means carry costs as well as benefits. Absolute immunity is a great way to protect prosecutorial independence, but a number of scholars and judges have questioned the wisdom of that immunity. Given the costs of absolute immunity (which include dishonest, retaliatory prosectuors), and the availability of other means to protect honest prosecutors (such as qualified immunity and insurance schemes), is absolute immunity the only acceptable means for protecting prosecutorial independence?

We need to ask the same question about tenure. Accreditation standards set a floor. Tenure is an excellent way of securing academic freedom, but is it the only acceptable means to achieve that end?

The answer to that question, I think, is clearly “no.” Long-term contracts, review processes, and other mechanisms can shield academic freedom. Those means may not be as effective as tenure, but they also lack the costs of tenure. An accreditation standard should require adoption of policies and procedures to protect academic freedom, but we need not mandate a single means to that end.

2. Lawyers take unpopular positions, without benefit of tenure.

In law school, we tell students that some of them will represent unpopular clients. The client may have murdered a child, contaminated seas with spilled oil, or distributed Nazi propaganda. All of these clients, we declare, have a right to legal counsel. We urge our students to represent those clients, regardless of the economic or social costs to themselves.

We also teach students that lawyers have ethical obligations to the court, the law, and third parties; those duties often require them to give clients advice that the clients don’t want to hear. Again, the lawyer must adhere to those ethical obligations, even at the risk of losing a valuable client.

For practicing lawyers, these costs are real. Suppose an associate agrees to pro bono representation of a human trafficking victim who is attempting to expunge a series of prostitution convictions and start a new life. If a paying business client objects to the former prostitute’s presence in the firm’s reception area, should the associate drop the case? What if a conservative partner suggests that the associate would be “prudent” to refer the prostitute to a “less business oriented firm”?

Or suppose that a junior partner attracts a promising start-up company as a client. The new company’s legal work poses no conflict with existing clients, but an existing client perceives the start-up as a business competitor. If the managing partner asks the junior partner to send the start-up to another firm, should the junior partner comply?

Finally, consider the lawyer defending her firm’s major client in high-stakes civil litigation. The client’s CEO tells the lawyer he “has things under control” because a vice president will lie about a key point at trial. Does the lawyer tell the client that, contrary to what he may have seen on television, lawyers are not allowed to call perjuring witnesses to the stand? Clients can, and do, fire their lawyers for this type of advice.

Many practicing lawyers, in other words, face challenging situations in which they must weigh truth, ethics, or client interest against their own economic and social interests. Given the hardiness that our profession demands from practitioners, why should our academics receive extraordinary levels of protection for their freedom of expression? Or, to phrase the question from the perspective of accreditation standards, why should we require law schools to provide that extraordinary protection as the only possible means of securing academic freedom? We call on other lawyers to speak the truth to their clients, partners, and supervisors, at considerable risk to their own livelihood.

3. Tenure confers unwarranted economic value on professors.

Universities adopt tenure as a way of promoting academic freedom, but the protection also gives professors economic security beyond that enjoyed by their peers in other occupations. Decades ago, when businesses showed more loyalty to their workers, and when law firms rarely dismissed partners, tenured professors held an economic position analogous to that of senior corporate managers or law firm partners. Short of gross malfeasance or the organization’s bankruptcy, all of those workers could count on secure employment until retirement.

Today the picture is quite different. Very few organizations offer their workers the type of economic security that tenured professors enjoy. Some of my peers at law firms or corporations lost their jobs after the Great Recession. They were at least as talented as me, brought great value to their organizations, and demonstrated integrity in their dealings with clients and others. But when times got tough, they were laid off. Professors are protected unless their schools close; even then, the university may have to find them a roost in another department.

As other industries have become more volatile, the economic value of tenure has grown–completely apart from its connection to academic freedom. I value my tenure, not only because it grants extraordinary protection for my academic freedom, but because it gives me a virtually impenetrable shield against economic downturns. Universities don’t grant tenure for the latter reason; the end is academic freedom rather than job security during bad economic times. But I get the latter along with the former.

Some tenure defenders claim that tenure purposely confers this economic benefit. They argue that professors are underpaid compared to other professionals, and that universities use tenure to make up that economic difference. Under this argument, it is cheaper for universities to grant tenure than to pay professors the amounts they would demand absent tenure.

I doubt that this argument is true, at least for law professors. Law faculty salaries have climbed over the last generation, at the same time that the economic value of tenure has increased. These increases don’t seem related to a diminishing supply of potential law professors; if anything, the supply has grown significantly. The lifestyle attractions of law teaching have also grown compared to high-stakes law practice, making the academy even more attractive. Law professors have used their gatekeeping power to raise salaries at the same time that other benefits have risen, producing a financial windfall.

For the purpose of setting accreditation standards, however, we don’t need to know whether tenure substitutes for higher salaries; we should simply leave that choice to law schools. If law schools find it cheaper to grant tenure than to pay higher salaries, they may follow that path. If they find it cheaper to grant higher salaries in place of tenure, or find that high compensation is not necessary, they should have that choice. The point here is that tenure confers a substantial economic advantage that is not part of its avowed purpose. Law schools should have the choice whether to grant that advantage, along with the premium protection that tenure provides for academic freedom, or to provide other forms of economic benefit along with alternative protections for academic freedom.

4. Tenure discourages organizational innovation.

Observers frequently note the academy’s resistance to change. Why are professors, who try to push the boundaries of knowledge, so reluctant to alter the ways they teach, admit students, or perform other institutional functions? I think tenure plays a significant role. Professors run little risk of losing their jobs, whatever students, the public, or others think of their institutional norms. The lack of usual market pressures reduces incentives to change.

Consider how law schools might have responded to changes in the legal market if professors lacked tenure. When Bill Henderson and other scholars started noting structural changes in the legal job market, untenured faculties might have taken more notice. “Gee,” they might have thought, “if our graduates can’t get as many jobs, we may not get as many applicants. If that happens, the school might downsize and I could lose my job. Maybe we better look into this and do something about the situation!” Instead, tenured law faculties largely ignored the trends until this year, when the effects became too glaring to overlook.

The same is true of rising tuition and mounting student loans. In any other industry, insiders would have realized years ago that their economic model was broken and that a crash was inevitable. Worried about losing their own jobs, they would have moderated tuition or found other ways to avoid disaster. Tenured professors have little incentive to worry about these challenges. Even an industry tsunami–like the current plunge in law school applicants–will result in relatively few tenured professors losing their jobs. A few schools may close, with those professors losing their tenured positions, but most schools will lay off staff, trim other expenses, and hold off replacing retired professors. Tenure means that relatively few professors place their own livelihood at risk by ignoring market forces.

Tenure shields professors from market effects, but students and graduates aren’t as lucky. While professors pooh-poohed talk of structural changes in law practice, and ignored cracks in our economic model, law schools kept admitting students and raising tuition. If we’d faced facts earlier, would we really have raised tuition in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012? Would we have reduced class sizes earlier? Would we have moved more aggressively to find better ways to prepare students for available jobs? Quicker, market-based reaction could have helped our students and graduates.

5. We’ve lost the pension-plan hedge.

Until recently, pension plans gave universities a hedge against some of tenure’s worst financial effects. Many pension plans provided defined benefits that lured professors into retirement at age 65. If a university faced rocky economic times, it could sweeten the deal to tempt even earlier retirements. Some of these deals were literally too good to refuse. If working more years won’t increase your pension, and if the promised pension is close to your current salary, it makes economic sense to retire. At public universities, these deals shifted costs to state pension plans–with the calamitous effects some state plans now face. But that’s a different story. From the law school’s perspective, defined-benefit plans provided a way to move senior (and highly paid) professors off the payroll.

At the turn of the century, defined-contribution plans became popular and more professors opted for them. These plans offer very little incentive to retire. On the contrary, as long as a professor can satisfy the minimum job demands, defined-contribution plans encourage senior professors to stay in the workplace. As a University of California website explains, traditional defined-benefit plans “can be designed to encourage early retirement” and “may financially penalize workers for working additional years beyond the normal retirement age.” Defined-contribution plans, in contrast, “cannot be designed to encourage early retirement but instead rewards employees for working additional years.”

I’m part of the rising wave of potential retirees with defined-contribution plans. As I look ahead to age sixty-five, I see no reason why I would retire. By that time, I will have been a law professor for more than thirty-five years. Even if I’m burned out, fatigued by age, or suffer a partial disability, I’ll probably be able to handle a few hours of teaching a week, plus a few committee meetings and office hours. After decades of experience, those things come pretty easily to me. And with tenure protecting me against pressure to publish or volunteer for extra duties, I could spend the rest of the week gardening, playing poker, or resting up for my campus appearances. Teaching is a nine-month gig, so I could also forego the summer research grants and spend my summers traveling the world in flat-out retirement mode. I may even persuade myself that my elder wisdom compensates for any other shortcomings in teaching or research. Surely the students and younger faculty will want to know what law practice was like in 1980!

With the benefits of modern medicine, tenure, and the supportive academic lifestyle, many of us will be able to follow that game plan well into our eighties–twenty years or more after the traditional retirement age. We’ll keep earning our senior professorial salaries, most likely with at least annual inflation increases, while socking more money into our retirement accounts. Best of all, we can even use the money in those retirement accounts without actually retiring! Conversely, if bad investments or a poor market shrink those accounts, we’ll have even more reason to keep working.

Some of these senior professors, of course, will continue making valuable contributions to both teaching and research. Sixty-five, seventy, and eighty are still young for many people. The professors doing that today, however, often are drawing their pay from pension plans rather than the law school’s budget. The big switch, which will start over the next few years at many schools, is that these highly regarded, highly paid professors will continue drawing their salaries from school budgets long after age sixty-five. Whether they contribute mightily or meekly to the school’s mission, they will be very, very expensive.

Universities have started talking internally about the financial threat of defined-contribution retirement accounts, but I haven’t heard of solutions. The costs of tenured faculty are going to rise significantly–beyond what schools have been accustomed to paying–just at a time when tuition revenue will start falling. Tenure combined with defined-contribution retirement plans will create an unprecedented financial crisis in the academy–and that’s saying something given the extent of the current crisis.

Once again, there’s no reason for accreditation standards to force this crisis on law schools. If a law school believes that the benefits of tenure outweigh this financial threat, it is welcome to grant tenure. But if a school wants to protect academic freedom in less financially ominous ways, it should have the power to do so.

Conclusion

Tenure has other costs, which I’ve omitted here. It protects lazy professors, incompetent ones, and even the truly malicious. In theory, a university can de-tenure professors in the last two categories, but the process is difficult. Other means of protecting academic freedom would give universities greater latitude to weed out professors who harm the academic mission. The absence of tenure probably would deter some of that harmful behavior from occurring.

The absence of tenure, on the other hand, might well expose some professors to job loss for expressing unpopular views. Tenure is the premium plan for academic freedom; other plans won’t work quite as well. But other plans also cost less. Law schools–and their students–deserve the opportunity to balance these costs and benefits, choosing the plan they prefer to for protection of academic freedom. Potential professors will also be free to choose whether the proposed benefits suit their needs.

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Core Faculty

March 24th, 2013 / By

The tenured and tenure-track professors form the core of a law school faculty. At most of our schools, those faculty teach doctrinal courses and seminars; they also devote considerable time to research. Over the years, we have added clinical and legal writing professors to our faculties, but they rarely are part of the core. These writing and clinical professors are paid less, usually lack tenure, and bear fewer expectations for scholarly research. They may vote on curricular matters; they may even chair committees and perform significant administrative work for the school. Their lack of tenure and lower status, however, make them more cautious about their votes and the opinions they voice. They know that they are outside of the core.

I would flip this structure. If I were starting a law school, I would hire experienced legal writing and clinical professors as the core tenure-track faculty. At existing schools, I would move as quickly as possible to that structure. Why? The legal writing and clinical professors are the ones who know best how to teach what we claim to teach in law schools: how to think like a lawyer.

Legal writing professors have analyzed the components of thinking like a lawyer, developed the vocabulary for explaining that process to students, and created hundreds of well designed exercises. Where does a student really learn how to analyze and synthesize cases? In a class of 75-120 students, where the professor calls on one student at a time for 150-200 minutes a week, offers little individualized feedback, requires no written product until the final exam, and tests students on issue-spotting during a 3-4 hour exam? Or in a class of 18-20 students, where the professor offers a sequence of assignments designed specifically to teach analysis, synthesis, and other critical reasoning skills; provides frequent individualized feedback; requires several written assignments; and grades students on their ability to produce well reasoned analyses of a problem that requires research, analysis, and synthesis of new cases and statutes?

The traditional law school classroom, with its case method and socratic questioning, is better than pure lecture at teaching critical reasoning. But it is still a woefully inefficient and ineffective process of teaching students how to read cases and statutes, how to synthesize those materials, and how to apply them to the facts of novel problems. During the last thirty years, our legal writing programs have developed at a remarkable rate. They now surpass other first-year courses in their ability to teach critical thinking. If you want a professor who knows how to teach legal analysis to first-year students, and who has studied the pedagogy of teaching those skills, then choose a legal writing professor.

The same is true of clinical professors in the upper level. These professors know how to build on the reasoning skills that students developed in the first year. They don’t greet students with the same casebook/socratic method of instruction. Whatever its merits in the first year, that style offers diminishing returns in the upper level and bears little relationship to how practicing lawyers learn new areas of law. Clinical professors are accustomed to helping students identify unfamiliar areas of law that may affect their clients, research those issues (using an appropriate combination of secondary sources, cases, and statutes), and think critically about the sources in connection with a particular case. They are also experienced at the other types of critical thinking (fact analysis, separating wheat from chaff in client or witness interviews, problem solving, etc) that students should encounter before graduation.

If we want a tenured law faculty that focuses on teaching students how to “think like a lawyer,” then legal writing and clinical professors fit the bill. I would put them at the core.

These professors could also teach doctrinal courses. Currently, we swamp legal writing professors with too many students. If each taught a section of 18-20 students, the professor could teach two legal writing courses (one each semester) plus a large section of a doctrinal first-year course. These professors would bring their pedagogic skills to those doctrinal courses, enhancing the teaching of analysis and reasoning throughout the first-year curriculum.

Similarly, a clinical professor could supervise a clinic each semester and also teach a doctrinal course one semester. Many clinicians already do that; their ongoing practices keep them up-to-date in many areas. A school could hire additional tenure-track faculty to teach other doctrinal courses, although I would encourage each of those professors to teach at least one writing, clinical, or simulation course: that is where we really teach students how to “think like a lawyer,” whether that thinking requires close reading of a case closely or thoughtful questioning of a client.

What about research? I’ve taught doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical courses during my almost thirty years in teaching. A course load of two reasonably sized writing courses and one doctrinal course allows plenty of time for scholarship. For a clinician, the balance is somewhat closer; it depends somewhat on the nature of the clinic and the clients’ demands. Many clinicians, however, have already shown their ability to combine clinical teaching with scholarship–as have writing professors. The strongest barriers to scholarly work by these professors, I believe, are the second class status we currently afford them, together with the constant suggestion that they’re not capable of excellent scholarship.

There is room for many types of teaching and scholarship on law faculties. Our biggest error, perpetuated at most law schools, has been keeping legal writing and clinical courses at the periphery of the curriculum and faculty. If we move those professors and their courses to the core, where they belong at any institution devoted to teaching students to think like lawyers, we would solve many of the pedagogic problems plaguing law schools today. We could teach doctrine and new “practice ready” skills, while improving the ways we teach traditional methods of thinking like a lawyer.

We could also solve some of our budget problems. Legal writing and clinical professors typically earn half of what tenured doctrinal professors bring home. What if we split the difference? If we paid all professors a salary between the one currently offered legal writing/clinical faculty and the scale used for tenured doctrinal faculty, we could moderate faculty salaries to where they were a generation ago. Those salaries would still exceed wages paid to professors in other disciplines and, I predict, would be more than enough to attract and retain talented professors in the academy.

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Summer Research Grants

March 20th, 2013 / By

A survey of law faculty salaries, conducted by the Society of American Law Teachers, suggests that the overwhelming majority of law schools offer summer stipends to at least some faculty. The reported stipends range from a low of $5,000 to a high of $25,000. Notably, those reports do not include any of the schools with the most highly compensated faculty; you won’t find the summer salaries for schools like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, the University of Chicago, or Stanford on this list.

These summer stipends supplement salaries that already rank among the highest in the academy. They are also quite unusual in the academy; other university faculty do not receive summer research grants with the ease or regularity that law faculty do. Professors in other disciplines usually apply for outside grants if they want summer support. More often, they do without: they devote their summers to research even though they technically are unpaid during that time.

Why do law faculty need so much financial encouragement to produce research? Why aren’t we encouraging our faculty to seek outside grants if they want that summer support? Summer research grants are wonderful bonuses, but they shouldn’t be necessary to encourage research. People join the academy to research and teach, so that’s what we should do.

A first step in reducing the cost of legal education would be to eliminate summer research grants for full professors. We could continue to award grants to junior faculty, who are seeking tenure and may bear their own student debts. For full professors, summer research grants seem like a luxury we can give up to help both our students and our institutions.

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Letter to the ABA

March 10th, 2013 / By

A “Coalition of Concerned Colleagues,” which includes me, has submitted a letter to the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. Although I can claim no credit for drafting the letter, I think it offers a succinct statement of the economic distress faced by law students and recent graduates: tuition has climbed dramatically, scholarships rarely address need, entry-level jobs have contracted, and salaries in those jobs have declined. The combination is oppressive for students and unsustainable for schools.

The brief letter notes a number of changes that might ameliorate this burden. All of those deserve exploration; I have posted on several already and will explore others in upcoming weeks. The letter, however, leaves a key point unstated: tenured professors at most schools will have to change their expectations if we hope to address this crisis. Faculty salaries and other perks account for a substantial share of the budget at most law schools. We can try to cut corners in other ways, by trimming staff and begging central administration to leave us a higher share of each tuition dollar. But in the end, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about the professional lives we’ve designed and the pay we demand.

Law professors earn high salaries, considerably higher than the pay drawn by most of our colleagues across the academy. Much of that money comes from the tuition paid by our students. With job and salary prospects down for lawyers, and with more transparency about those outcomes, fewer students are willing to pay our tuition. Faculty are going to have to adjust their financial expectations–and I think we should. We have enjoyed artificially high tuition and salaries for many years, due largely to our powerful economic status as gatekeepers to the legal profession. States didn’t create those restraints to enrich law schools, and we have served few interests (other than our own) by aggressively raising tuition and salaries over the last three decades.

In addition to lowering our financial expectations, faculty most likely will have to adjust the courses they teach, the ways in which they teach, and other professional activities. Distance education, for example, can help reduce the cost of legal education–but only if faculty are willing to use those techniques and then to consolidate courses across schools. One faculty member can teach Antitrust or Remedies to students at several law schools, but the faculty at those other schools must be willing to shift to other courses.

Adding apprenticeships and externships, similarly, will affect what current faculty do. We can’t expect students to pay for the full range of courses and scholarship our faculties now support plus the cost of apprenticeships or externships. These hands-on experiences will have to replace some of our current offerings, with traditional doctrinal faculty downsizing or taking on new duties.

Changes of this type are implicit in the letter from Concerned Colleagues, although I haven’t discussed these specifics with other signatories. Schools may find alternatives to the particular changes I’ve mentioned here; we need creativity to address the challenges before us. But it’s essential to avoid magic thinking when confronting those problems. The key difficulty for our graduates, students, and prospective students is that legal education has become too expensive for the career paths it supports. There is no magic solution to that problem in which we all become richer.

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Merger

February 28th, 2013 / By

Rutgers University has announced a plan to merge its two law schools (Rutgers and Camden). Details remain to be worked out, but the university hopes that next year’s applicants (those applying to enroll in fall 2014) will apply to a unified school, with a choice of campuses.

The announcement raises interesting questions about how law schools can work together to meet current challenges. Few schools may be in a position to merge; those arrangements are particularly difficult when the schools reside in different universities. But are there other ways for schools to collaborate to reduce costs, improve job prospects for graduates, develop new clinical programs, or achieve other goals? Some schools are already starting to share courses by internet; what other collaborations are possible?

I welcome here comments on law school collaborations of all kinds–up to and including mergers.

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