The effects of the general dearth of J.D. jobs are being felt in the academy. As Karen Sloan reported in The National Law Journal, “The number of new law professors hired at American Bar Association-accredited law schools fell nearly 55 percent between 2011 to 2015, according to data compiled by Sarah Lawsky, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Just 70 people snagged tenure-track teaching jobs last year, compared with 155 in 2011, Lawsky’s data shows.”
70: not a big number. Meanwhile, at the other end of the great lawyer assembly line, 23,238 aspiring lawyers sat for the LSAT this past June. Which, if you do the math, gives us a probably meaningless though strikingly lopsided ratio of 23,238:70.