'Everyone Should Go To Law School' Poster Child Goes Full Tilt

When you think about it, the idea that students should uncritically go to law school is a classic poker bluff. And when someone calls your bluff it can make you crazy.

One of the preeminent voices peddling the idea that students should run, not walk, into their nearest law school — regardless of ranking — and get that degree has gone full tilt this month, raging against the New York Times for daring to suggest that maybe going into debt for a law degree doesn’t get you a million dollars at the end of the 3L rainbow.

Stay tuned for the new reality show: When Academics Attack!

Earlier this week, the Times published a piece highlighting the difficulties that law school graduates face when bad job prospects meet crippling debt. The piece opens, as formulaic mainstream journalism stories do, with a sad personal anecdote, supposedly to “humanize” the topic, before transitioning to the abstracted nuts and bolts. In this case, we met Columbia Law 2010’s Jonathan Wang, who can only find work as an LSAT tutor, before focusing on Ohio State University Law[1] Professor Deborah J. Merritt’s new study, What Happened to the Class of 2010? Empirical Evidence of Structural Change in the Legal Profession. Slate’s Jordan Weissmann sums up Professor Merritt’s study:

In February 2011, 68 percent of all law grads were working in positions that required a law degree. In December 2014, that number had only reached 75 percent. That, Merritt writes, compares poorly with the national class of 2000, which also graduated into a recession thanks to the dotcom bust. By 2003, 85 percent of that group had found its way into a career in which a J.D. was necessary, and 62 percent were employed at law firms. Only 40 percent of Ohio’s class of 2010 are now at firms. They are also almost twice as likely to work as solo practitioners, who often barely scrape by financially. Merritt argues that this is a sign that the legal job market has indeed contracted for good and that there won’t be a sudden surge of new hiring to soak up excess graduates.

Professor Merritt’s study may not be perfect, but it provoked a swift and weird response from Seton Hall Law Professor Michael Simkovic[2]:

Instead, The New York Times compares law graduate outcomes today to law graduate outcomes when the economy was booming. But not all law graduates. The Times focuses on law graduates who have been unusually unsuccessful in the job market or have unusually large amounts of debt. For example, The New York Times focused on a Columbia law school graduate working as an LSAT tutor as if that were a typical outcome for graduates of elite law schools.

Now that’s just disingenuous. Yes the story opened with a down-on-his-luck Columbia Law grad who is undoubtedly not typical, but since we can walk and chew gum at the same time, we all understood that it was a framing story and had nothing to do with the study. Come on, man. The butthurt over the Times runs even deeper:

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A few weeks ago I asked a research assistant (a third year law student) to search for stories in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal about law school. Depending on whether the story would have made my research assistant more likely or less likely to want to go to law school when he was considering it or would have had no effect, he coded the stories as positive, negative, or neutral. According to my research assistant, The New York Times reported 7 negative stories to 1 positive story in 2011 and 5 negative stories to 1 positive story in 2012. In 2013, 2014, and 2015, The New York Times coverage was relatively balanced. In aggregate over the five-year period The New York Times reported about 2 negative stories for every 1 positive story. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage was even more slanted—about 3.75 negative stories for every positive story—and remained heavily biased toward negative stories throughout the five-year period.

Damn liberal media! Who makes shaming media outlets a research project? And how much fun is it being Professor Simkovic’s research assistant, eh? That’s an easy day’s work. It turns out chasing down the rabbit hole a little further, we start to see the source of Professor Simkovic’s beef with the Times. Apparently, the paper deviated from its stated mission of printing all the news fit to print and published a piece by Berkeley Law Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon that stuck up for the Simkovic and Rutgers-Newark Professor Frank McIntyre knee-slapper about the $1 million law degree. I guess Professor Simkovic had been hoping this would usher in a new era of the Times embracing the status quo law school delusion.

Then he got hot because Kyle McEntee of Law School Transparency took to our pages to poke holes in that Times article by Solomon. McEntee suggested we shouldn’t judge whether or not lawyers have jobs using the same standards on the oft-criticized Bureau of Labor Statistics model. Professor Simkovic wasn’t having any of that:

Mr. McEntee’s problem is not that The New York Times got the facts wrong. His problem is that The New York Times got too many of the facts right. Mr. McEntee simply dislikes the facts.

Jeesh. Simmer down. It’s also not true: if Kyle hated facts so much, there would be a lot less on his website. In any event, this attack went so far afield that even Professor Simkovic’s friend Professor Bernie Burk of UNC Law got involved, writing over at The Faculty Lounge:

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With all respect to Mike Simkovic, that’s really quite unfair. In my own view, McEntee and Harper both nailed it. The op-ed author used cherry-picked statistics including non-lawyer employment and lawyer underemployment to predict (among other things) the future demand for lawyers. That’s misleading.

If there’s one lesson a really hefty drinking habit teaches, it’s that when your friends start telling you to step off, you’ve probably gone too far.

Look, once you get past all the nattering nabobs of negativism stuff, Professor Simkovic makes a couple good points about deficiencies in the Merritt paper. For example, he questions whether Ohio is a fair prism through which to judge the legal market. Which… OK, I agree with that criticism, but who cares? Steven J. Harper has a great point in the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review:

But the microeconomic level is even more interesting. Most of the academic discussion about post-graduate employment outcomes, as well as predictions of future financial opportunities for law graduates generally, ignores a key point: individual law schools operate in different submarkets. Conflating them serves the interests of schools in the weakest submarket, namely, those whose graduates have little prospect of obtaining a job that requires a J.D. It also obfuscates a meaningful analysis of the problems plaguing legal education.

And that’s the fundamental point: the whole argument of those of us opposing the “go to law school, it’s terrific” movement is not to end the institution of law school. Rather we want law schools to recognize that the status quo model overcharges students at all levels and then graduates students from sub-optimal schools who, if they get jobs at all, are dumped in markets where they’re on the losing end of the bimodal salary curve — a la Ohio. Instead of trying to make a sweeping model that describes a uniform law school experience, we need to be honest about the segmentation of the profession.

Harper notes that in the infamous $1 million law degree article, Simkovic and McIntyre “bury this disclaimer near the end of their analysis: ‘We also cannot determine the earnings premium associated with attending a specific law school.'” Hm. That seems important. Talk about hating facts.

And maybe that’s why Simkovic is spending so much time nitpicking studies and blasting the media: getting called on your bluff hurts.

Burdened With Debt, Law School Graduates Struggle in Job Market [New York Times]
Is the Lost Generation of Law School Graduates Still Lost? [Slate]
New York Times relies on unrepresentative anecdotes and flawed study to provide slanted coverage of legal education (Michael Simkovic) [Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports]
Law Schools and Industry Show Signs of Life, Despite Forecasts of Doom [New York Times]
Heat vs. Light II: It Matters Who Counts and Who Cares [The Faculty Lounge]

Earlier: Another Garbage Study Offering Misleading Statistics On The Value Of A Law Degree
Deceptive Statistics 101, Courtesy Of A Law Professor And The New York Times



[1] Fine. THE Ohio State University Law.
[2] Writing on Professor Brian Leiter’s blog because of course.