Everything That's Wrong With Legal Education -- According To Law School Deans
Props to these law school deans for talking honestly about what's wrong with the legal academy.
Law school deans and professors can be a defensive lot — and, to be fair, I can’t blame them. Over the past few years, they’ve taken a lot of criticism, some fair and some unfair (and much of it from my co-writers here at Above the Law). So I can understand why they sometimes tend to circle the wagons when attacked.
Still, it was impressive and refreshing to hear leading legal educators candidly acknowledge, during a panel at the recent Fifth Circuit Judicial Conference, that no, not everything is perfect in the academy. Acknowledging the existence of problems is the first step toward fixing them.
The panel’s moderator, former federal judge turned North Texas Law School Dean Royal Furgeson, Jr., did state at the start of the panel that he didn’t want to talk too much about solutions. Why? He and the other deans are very interested in solutions, but with just 75 minutes allotted to them on the schedule, there simply wasn’t enough time.
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Dean Leonard Baynes of the University of Houston Law Center kicked things off with a discussion of problems related to scholarships. Tuition discounting has increased significantly in recent years, as law schools fight for a shrinking pool of applicants. Dean Baynes cited these statistics from the ABA Task Force Report on Financing of Legal Education (2015):
Tuition discounting through grants and scholarships occurs, is widespread, and is generally increasing. For private schools, the net tuition in AY [academic year] 1999-00 meant a discount of 16% in inflation-adjusted dollars (CPI). In AY 2013-14 the discount had increased to 25%. For public schools the discount in AY 1999-00 was 22% and it increased to 28%. With increased discounting, fewer students are paying full tuition. The percentage paying full tuition in private law schools declined from 57% in AY1999-00 to 38% in AY2013-14. For public law schools the figures are 58% and 40%.
Growth in scholarships gives rise to a few problems. First, these scholarships tend to go to applicants with high LSAT scores and GPAs (coveted by the schools to help their U.S. News rankings), and these applicants tend to be wealthier and less diverse as a group than applicants with lower numbers. Second, there’s the problem of “exploding” scholarships — scholarships that won’t be renewed unless the student maintains a certain GPA, which the schools know won’t happen because of the grading curve, giving rise to a “bait and switch” problem.
Although he wasn’t tasked with solving the problem, Dean Baynes did identify some possible solutions. He said that schools could address the first problem by focusing more on need-based rather than merit scholarships, and they could address the second problem by being more transparent about the requirements for renewing a scholarship.
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Dean David Meyer of Tulane Law School covered the problem of student debt. Here’s a sobering slide:
This doesn’t include debt from undergraduate education, which averages about $18,000 per student.
These crushing debt loads have very negative consequences, according to Dean Meyer. They limit career paths (only certain jobs can generate enough income to service such debt), create stress and mental health issues, and deter people who’d be great lawyers from going to law school in the first place. He didn’t have time to explore the answer to this problem, but Dean Meyer noted the importance of cost containment.
The topic of costs led Dean Meyer somewhat naturally into the discussion of law school faculty, a major contributor to law school overhead (law schools generally don’t require costly labs or physical plants). He noted that for more than 25 years, judges and lawyers have been criticizing the utility and value of the scholarship produced by law professors. It’s a major theme of Judge Richard Posner’s new book, Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary (affiliate link), but it’s also a topic that Judge Harry T. Edwards wrote about 25 years ago, in an influential Michigan Law Review piece.
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Critics argue that law professors are writing less about legal doctrine and more about esoteric topics that aren’t very relevant to practicing lawyers. Some critics blame this trend on the increased emphasis on PhD degrees and decreased emphasis on practice experience in law professor hiring. But Dean Meyer cautioned that this critique can go too far, failing to recognize the enormous value to the legal profession of high-quality scholarship by law professors, much of it interdisciplinary in nature. The real solution is not to stop hiring PhD holders but to focus more on quality control in legal scholarship, Dean Meyer said.
The most passionate remarks of the panel came from Dean Bradley J.B. Toben of Baylor Law School, who got to discuss something that everyone loves to hate: the U.S. News law school rankings. The U.S. News ranking system, Dean Toben argued, is “a pernicious device that has gravely affected the quality and direction of legal education for about 25 years.”
Dean Toben’s critiques of the U.S. News rankings should be familiar to those who follow the subject. The academic reputation or peer assessment component, by asking legal academics to rate schools they often know very little about, is misguided and unreliable. And yet it accounts for 25 percent of a school’s overall score, less than the more legitimate input from judges and practicing lawyers. The weight placed on LSAT scores and GPAs, which together account for 22.5 percent of a school’s score, causes schools to fixate on these numbers during the admissions process, play all sorts of ridiculous games, and reject students with low scores who could enhance the diversity of the student body.
(Shameless plug: our own law school rankings here at Above the Law — which are outcome-focused, based on employment outcomes, graduate debt, and alumni satisfaction — don’t suffer from these problems, and will be coming out very soon.)
Speaking of diversity, that was the subject of the next educator to take the podium, Dean Wendy B. Scott of the Mississippi College School of Law. After playing part of a video featuring African-American UCLA law students discussing the challenges they face, she made the case for diversity in legal education, citing (1) the education benefits of diversity as a compelling state interest, (2) the need to remedy the effects of past discrimination, and (3) the importance of role modeling. Echoing our own diversity columnist here at ATL, Renwei Chung, Dean Scott lamented how diversity in the legal profession hasn’t really grown since the year 2000.
What can be done? It’s a tough problem to solve, but Dean Scott suggested moving beyond a singular assessment tool (the LSAT), lowering financial impediments to legal education (perhaps through diversity scholarships), and enhancing cultural sensitivity in law school curricula.
Finally, Dean Darby Dickerson of Texas Tech tackled two topics of great interest to young lawyers: the bar exam and mental health. She noted a phenomenon that we’ve chronicled in these pages, declining bar exam passage rates, but questioned the narrative that the declining quality of students deserves the blame. Instead, she argued — as did our columnist Tamara Tabo — that the the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) needs to provide the profession with greater access to its data on bar exam passage.
Dean Dickerson also identified a number of problems with the bar exam: excessive emphasis on memorization (which doesn’t accurately reflect the practice of law, where you look things up); testing too many topics (when lawyers need to know just a few); insufficient emphasis on lawyering skills (although some bars are improving on this front); insufficient portability from state to state (although the spread of the Uniform Bar Exam could help); not letting people take the bar until after graduation (but note the Arizona pilot program); and the high cost of bar exam prep courses.
In the last few minutes of this very packed panel, Dean Dickerson quickly touched upon the mental health challenges that confront law students (and carry over into their careers as lawyers). These include depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and bipolar disorder. She gave a shout-out to the Dave Nee Foundation, which we’ve previously mentioned, and its great work addressing mental health issues affecting law students and lawyers. As for solutions, she cited the need to collect more data, reduce stigma, educate faculty and staff, and enhance the resources available to law students facing mental health issues.
Talking openly about mental health and mental illness in the legal profession is an important step toward addressing these problems. If you have a story to share, we’d very much like to hear from you.
Earlier: ‘The White Man’s Burden’: A Frank And Funny Interview With Justice Clarence Thomas
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David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].
