Open Thread: Making Law Schools Better

Yes, cost and debt. How do we make law school less expensive and how do we burden students with less debt?

Also, how many law graduates should we be training? Does it do any one any favors to have a consistent overproduction of law graduates? (ie, the graduates, the profession, the clients, society at large).

Thanks FLRE. Can I ask two additional questions based on your questions, and see what others think …

1/ Does it make any difference whether law schools retain current fee structures and offer more scholarships or is it better that they consider dropping tuition? This may be more a question for administrators and development officers ie a question of how the finances are most appropriately handled?

2/ Whose responsibility should it be to determine how many law grads are trained at law school? We faced a similar issue in Australia years ago when law schools were proliferating but law jobs were not. Some felt that new law schools shouldn't be established and that existing law schools shouldn't take in larger cohorts of students in order to avoid oversupply of grads, while others felt that it was a market-based issue e.g. incoming students would realize that a law degree wouldn't guarantee them a job as a lawyer, and would take the degree for other reasons (it was a LOT cheaper in Aus in those days so that was possible approach to take).

Here's a suggestion and a question:

Assign free or very cheap casebooks. $200 per class adds up.

Can law schools offer bar prep for less than the commercial courses? At most schools, most graduates are taking the same bar.

Does anyone know if the electronic casebooks offered by traditional publishers are appreciably cheaper than the hardcover versions or whether they're just more flexible/interactive? Which is more important to students?

The problem is that there is no market for law schools. Students pay for school with debt — not dollars — and to a large extent students view it as funny money until they graduate. Upon graduation, the debt magically converts to real money. With government deferral and discharge schemes (ie IBR, PAYE, etc.) there is no "market" force asserting pressure against pricing. That's how you end up in the current hot mess.

The truth is that there is nothing law schools can do, other than to place their own students in jobs another school's students would otherwise have gotten. There are too many law grads because there are too many law schools. This is not the fault of the profession. Ultimately, it springs from the way we fund higher education in this country. Economically marginal universities, over the last thirty years or so, have opened law schools as cash cows to provide revenue needed but not otherwise available from other sources. The great majority (but certainly not all) law schools established during that period were established by marginal universities. The law schools have, for the most part, followed suit, and become marginal law schools. That is because the universities (or now, corporate or individual owners) have pocketed too much law school revenue, leaving the law schools unable to do much more than enroll too many students and try to hang on. All that has led to too many law students with too much debt, poor undergrad preparation, poor law school training, and poor job prospects. It is, as Former Law Review Editor suggests above, a "hot mess." It will not soon be fixed, but it could have been avoided if we had had a better way of funding higher education years ago. We still need that better way now.

Consider integrating legal writing with core classes. Students could write motions to suppress as part of evidence, a motion to compel in civ pro, etc. The professor could redact the student's names and critique some of the motions in front of the class. Instead of reading nothing but appellate cases, students could also read trial court cases, and the motions that were submitted.

Like most ideas to improve legal education, this idea costs more money, and the big problem is that we are educating to many lawyers at too high a cost. The only real fixes are (1) increase student/faculty ration by having faculty teach more classes at the expense of research, (2) admit less students,(3) close some law schools, (4) decrease administration by having faculty perform more administrative tasks.

"1/ What can be done to help recent grads find jobs? Is it a question of networking? Additional skills training? Are there bar review/preparation issues? ie to what extent is bar passage getting in the way of employment?"

A few ideas to this great question. First and foremost, it is easier to help recent grads find jobs when there are less grads. Shrink class size. A law school which places 55% of its grads in FTLTBP (full time long term bar passage required) jobs could be posting Harvard-level numbers if they were graduating 1/3-2/5 less graduates every year.

I haven't seen any evidence that "additional skills training" improves job placement rates. That is all the rage now, making law graduates "more practice ready," but if there are only about 20-25K FTLTBP jobs a year it doesn't matter.

One novel way of approaching this is to focus on expanding the type of market that hires JD's, instead of BP/traditional JD advantage jobs. What other types of jobs would a JD be a natural fit for?

"2/ What should we be doing for current students that we're not doing, or not planning to do in the near future?"

This is a loaded question because it circles around to the fact that most law schools have not been acting in the best interests of their students and graduates for at least the last three decades, and is also part of the first question.

"3/ What is the role of the profession in all of this? How much responsibility should law firms/practitioners take to train the next generation of lawyers?"

Law firms and practitioners should have a major role in training the next generation of lawyers. However, due to the decline in the legal economy (as a % of GDP it has declined) and the overproduction of law graduates, many practitioners and firms, especially at the small firms where the majority of law graduates who are fortunate to get FTLTBP jobs go to practice, are squeezed. Too many lawyers/firms chasing less and less clients, leaving less time to train and less funds to hire in the first place. Cynically you could also see some or many lawyers not wanting to spend as much training as the person they are training could take away future clients from them.

Everything that involves making law schools better comes back to cost and law graduate overproduction. As many have pointed out, even entertaining the idea that we could get down to 20-25K law graduates a year, that will not mean everything is dandy, as $150K debt loads on $50K salaries are still unacceptable outcomes, even if we are at 95% FTLTBP placement rates.

Output and cost both have to go way down. The funding scheme for law schools, in which students borrow unlimited amounts of money via GradPlus, needs to go. My post has been long enough, and I'll end here, and I want to thank Ms. Lipton for this post, I have noticed that TFL has been spending less time on issues dealing with the future of legal education and it has disappointed me.

I tend to think that the main problem is the number of available jobs, and that there isn't much that law schools or law professors can do to change that. It's just a question of supply and demand: The number of students attending should and likely will drop until supply and demand are better matched. It would be great if the ABA left schools more room to try low-cost models of education, so students could have more ways of getting a JD without paying high tuitions. But I think it's mostly a problem that the market is in the middle of solving.

One important thing law schools can do is support transparency. It would be a true service to their students and the public if law schools would provide some long-term employment outcome statistics.

I'm not holding my breath.

Why not have law schools run law firms? Take the med school model as an example. Most med schools are huge money-makers because the faculty also practices (ie, treats patients). Why not turn the clinical model of law schools into a pay-for-service. Law schools could bill/charge competitive rates, and have faculty handle cases/corporate matters.

At Kerr:

"I tend to think that the main problem is the number of available jobs, and that there isn't much that law schools or law professors can do to change that."

Yes there is. Close your doors and go out of business. And yes…your tax evading institutions are businesses.

"But I think it's mostly a problem that the market is in the middle of solving."

No…legal ed, like all higher ed is not a real market when the fuel greasing said "market" is unlimited taxpayer $$$ in the form of student loans.

Until the number of law schools are lessened and the student loan spigot is turned off, any "solutions" are just nonsensical window dressing.

As a law student, I wish my professors had more connection to the real world. I know that law school isn't supposed to be a trade school, but I want to my classes to be at least tethered to the actual practice of law and my professors to have spent some time as lawyers, doing the types of jobs that we hope to do upon graduation. I know that the job market isn't great but we would have a leg up if our classes were less theoretical and more grounded in the actual practice of law.

I think your presumption that critics of the law schools are "frustrated students and recent grads" is misplaced. It is true that the spurned and jobless graduates were the first to recognize the problem of the lawyer glut (in 2009 and 2010). But the problems over the lawyer glut have spread across the profession to the point that it is now evident to anybody who hires that there are many more lawyers than legal positions. And it is evident to anybody with access to google that law school tuition has skyrocketed to the point that even students who do find jobs cannot afford to pay for their legal education. The issue has two dimensions:

1. Supply and Demand. There are not enough jobs to justify the number of students.
2. Cost. Legal education is so expensive that only the roughly 4,000 graduates who secure jobs with large law firms will be able to finance their education.

a. Focus more on practice orientated courses. The benefit of law school over law office training is that "learning by doing" means the trainee only learns what they have the opportunity to do. Law schools can teach in such a way as to avoid dangerous lacunae in a their graduates practical knowledge of the law.

b. Have multiple categories of class-taking – GPA contributing courses, pass-fail foundational courses (e.g., basic employment law) and audit courses – with all reflected on the graduates transcript. They can be the same course, but with different exams. So pass/fails would simply show that the student had done a foundational course in a subject and passed a test of basic knowledge. This would be attractive to me as an employer.

c. Recognise that a proportion of law students are not going to be able to practice as lawyers and have courses and subjects in second and third year that equip them better for other fields. In other words, put some flesh on the JD-advantage shibboleth.

None of these are a solution for cutting numbers of graduates and cutting costs.

I sometimes disagree with him on other things, but I must say that I agree with pretty well everything MacK offers here. I'm less certain of (b), but I have nothing against it, and it is at least consistent if not complementary with a similar point I would make, which is that classes ought to contain a multiplicity of evaluation methods and not backload all of them at the end of the semester. And I certainly agree with his last sentence.

A long time ago, when I started writing about some of these issues (which I've done very little lately, in part because I've not blogged much at all lately), I expressed some concern about the "law school crisis" frame: not because there's no truth in it, but because people often respond to crises with quick fixes and ignore deeper structural problems, and because when the "crisis" passes the will to address those problems dissipates quickly. Perhaps there's a more positive way to put it, which MacK's comment above inspires. In "making law schools better," one should acknowledge both "crisis" and "non-crisis" or "permanent" issues and try to address both of them. Closing a bunch of law schools may address some or all "crisis" problems, but the remaining schools still ought to make legal education better. Making legal education better has worth in itself, but will not address mismatches between student numbers and jobs. One might reasonably prioritize one set of problems over another, but prioritizing does not require pitting one against the other as such.

"Does anyone know if the electronic casebooks offered by traditional publishers are appreciably cheaper than the hardcover versions or whether they're just more flexible/interactive? Which is more important to students?"

According to West, E-casebooks are 30% off. So a $200 casebook costs $142.00. Still a large sum when you consider what a casebook is and what is often added/changed on each edition.

Dumping the traditional, expensive, print casebooks for open source e-casebooks would be a small start that could save students a lot of money in the aggregate (just take your school's estimated annual books/materials budget and multiply it by 120,000 for an idea of the size of this market, discount for how big you think the secondary market is). Several law professors have already done or suggested this, but, like many ideas that would cause law professors to have to do things they don't really want to do just to *gasp* save students money, it has not gained general acceptance.

Institutions and systems expose their true values by where and how money flows. Currently, because legal education is not a price sensitive market, money flows in response to rankings, which in turn are largely a metric based on the quality of incoming students and the reputation of the school. Thus, law schools have lots of incentive to promote scholarship and recruit the best students, but little incentive to actually be value added to those students. If the "culture" of legal education moved to an "outputs" weighted ranking then the incentive would be to improve the ability of schools to actually be better educational institutions. Because law students are not (yet, at least) sophisticated consumers, this will change only when and if the hiring market pressures it to change — which will not occur by asking for more practice ready lawyers, but rather by interviewing and hiring from the schools that produce them, rather than the traditional approach of interviewing based on class rank and US News rank.

Here is a sensitive one – Law schools work with the law school reformers (scambloggers) to press the rankers (especially US News) to modify their ranking system to be more objective, transparent and to remove from the criteria the more pernicious factors such as per-student-spending. The latter might better be replaced by a simple percentage of revenue retained by the law school metric. I would also seek that better employment data and long-term happiness and employment data be included.

One are where law school critics and most law professors seem to agree is that the law school rankings by USNWR have had a malignant impact on law schools.

In response to John, how does closing law schools create jobs? I think we all expect that some schools are going to close as enrollments drop, but I think the number of student enrollments ultimately determines the number of schools, not vice versa. As for changing the student loan system, I'm certainly open to that, but I wonder how important that would seem in a future in which the number of jobs better matched the number of graduates.

There are different problems floating around — the one that seems most apparent is the mismatch between recent law grads and desirable law jobs. Law schools need to be responsive to this reality, and I think it is too late in the day to think the change is anything other than structural. But students also need to be responsive to the changes, and that appears to be occurring with the continued decline in applications. It is less clear to me that there is a huge problem with students being practice-ready — very few employers seem to be saying, "I would love to hire more students if only they were better trained," though there might be some of that going on. To the extent that is going on, it might be because law schools still seem to want to train generalists (as reflected by the first-year curricula), and it might be desirable to introduce students to more relevant subjects (Employment Law, IP, Env. etc.) during their first year so they can begin to specialize. Otherwise, it is often not until the third year that a student develops a particular interest, and for employment purposes, that is often perceived as late. But focusing more on practice is a difficult issue since (1) it is costly and (2) many current faculty are really not equipped to teach practical skills because they either did not practice or, and this to me is worse, they practiced many years ago — there is nothing worse than students being trained to practice like it is 1970 or 1980, carbon paper copies and all. I would also add that the sense that students need to be more "practice-ready" is a relatively old issue that is not a product of the recent market changes. The book issue strikes most Professors as less essential because it is hard to understand why students balk at the cost of books but not tuition, though they are often paying for the books out of their own pocket so I suppose it makes sense, though in the scheme of things, hardly something that would count as reform. Looseleafs are often the cheapest, and much cheaper than bound versions but they can't be sold back and many students dislike that aspect.

To BoredJD:

Students punish innovation on evaluations, so only tenured faculty can switch to low-cost or free casebooks. You're right that e-casebooks are poor value, esp. since there's no market in used e-casebooks.

To MacK:

Related to your point, teaching in 3 and 4 credit blocks creates gaps. Every student should know some employment or securities law, but doesn't need 3 hours per week. Either schools could offer many mini-courses or larger survey courses, but students need coverage they aren't getting in 1L.

I'll throw this out there to before the law school defenders scoff at trade schools and anything that will inhibit the student from thinking like a lawyer, whatever that means.

With one or two exceptions (e.g. tax and other code heavy subjects and jurisprudence and other soft co) law school is teaches law in the form of a post-litigation autopsy. Students are asked divine the rule, post-mortem, from an appellate court's decision at the end of the case. In some ways this is nice, and it certainly is useful to future caselaw research, but it is woefully short of most everything that lawyers do.

No instruction on fact development, no instruction on client interaction, no instruction on strategy. No instruction at all on real estate work, title work, drafting and negotiating contracts, the conducting of due diligence, document management [ie how to handle the paper chase, which though not classically academic is extremely important to all real lawyers], how to demand and respond to discovery, how to take depositions.

I propose a new model. Keep first year the socratically same, but with more writing and more grading of writing from the first year professors. Second year should be more courses of shorter duration and largely pass-fail. Instead of 10 classes over 2 semesters, how about 15 substantive classes over 2 semesters. Students can be presumed to know how to read cases, this can be learning the black letter of the law. Like upper level bar review. Learn substance — evidence, bankruptcy, secured transactions, corporations, agency, first amendment, antitrust, crimpro, conflicts, employment, family law, administrative, environmental, etc. Have some caselaw method, but have most of it be black letter instruction supplemented by case method. Like a commercial outline, plus caselaw. You'd learn the substantive law here and be worked hard to learn it. This can be done. Barbri has been doing a version of it over a period of 6 weeks for more than 40 years. Imagine antitrust barbri, plus some caselaw. Lots of instruction on the rules. Lots of cases to see application of the rules. Students have already undergone the socratic method for a year at this point, and can be presumed to know how to read a case and spot the issue.

Third year could then be practical and skills based. The students could be presumed to have a modicum of substantive knowledge. Third year would be focused on skills. Seminars on strategy and on drafting (contracts, pleadings, etc.) Workshops on depositions, billing, dealing with clients, professional conflicts, managing a small practice, negotiating, how to on representing a criminal defendant, juries and grand juries in the criminal arena, electronic filing, jury selection, etc. Plus lots of legal writing — and I mean lots of legal writing. Third years could be seconded to legal aid or appointed criminal counsel for the limited purpose of legal research and brief writing. These folks could use the help, you wouldn't be robbing paying clients from practitioners, and students could actually do something constructive – research and write.

Why is this so difficult? This would be akin to the medical model. First year you learn anatomy and some very basic systems and biochem. Then second, more classes — tons of classes. Then third and fourth are rotations where you work for a short period of time in every medical area. Other than inertia and lack of faculty competence, there is no reason not to modify the Landellian model and replace it with this one.

Is there anyone who would not find this model better than the current one?

Anon –

I agree – however, learning by doing creates even bigger gaps – I have run into them in apprenticeship trained lawyers and they can be surprising. For example employment law (and non-US employment law too) is in fact relevant to intellectual property practice, while TUPE is a big issue in M&A. Family law has a surprisingly common role in venture capital situations (a lot of startup founders get married & divorced.) The law relating to set-off has a strange interaction with arbitration agreements. Law school taught in 3-4 credit blocks tends to miss whole topics that a well rounded lawyer should have at least a basic understanding of – which is where a (- Passed) section for courses in addition to the GPA credit courses recorded on the student transcript might be a good idea.

Thanks to everyone for answering questions and raising others and engaging in such a helpful discussion here. I want to respond to more comments in more detail, and will do so later. But a couple of issues keep going around in my mind as I read what people are posting here and I'd like to throw them out there and see what the responses are.

The first question is whether law school is a better approach to teaching law than a system based solely or largely on apprenticeships (like back in ancient times!) Even when I was in Australia, there was a relatively recent generation of lawyers ahead of me who had the option of taking an apprenticeship rather than going to law school at all. For the skills a lot of us are talking about, mightn't it make sense if more of the training was done "on the job" rather than in a university setting? I learned more in my articles year (articled clerkship in Australia) about the actual practice of law than I did in my whole time at law school which is not very surprising. Much of what lawyers do on a day-to-day basis isn't theoretical or philosophical and doesn't necessarily need to be taught in a university degree, particularly if existing faculty are not the most appropriate people to teach it. Couldn't we think about a "trade/on the job" training model at least as an option to university (or adjunct to it) for legal training?

The other question – and I admit this one is maybe more sensitive and I'm less informed than maybe I should be – is that I have a little trouble understanding the tenor of comments about law students being uninformed consumers when it comes to borrowing money for law school. Please remember that I'm coming at this from a very different pricing model in another country so I've never dealt with the American model of student loans in my own education i.e. as a personal issue, although obviously I've talked to my students here about it. But why don't people considering a law degree have the knowledge of the risks and potential rewards in mind? Why do they consider a loan "funny money" until they have to pay the loan back and can't get a job? Is this a general problem with a culture that relies so much on credit? Or are there aspects of this that are particularly specific to law schools? I know that the US News may facilitate misleading statistics about jobs and employment prospects, and law schools may play into that whether intentionally or because they feel they have no choice. But who is advising students on taking out loans and what kinds of advice are they getting? Presumably most students have already taken out some loans for college so they're not completely "uninformed". What is it about law school loans in particular that is such a hot button issue in terms of the feeling that students are not sufficiently informed when they take out the loan in the first place? I really want to understand this better.

Jacqueline:

I too came from a different pricing model in another country to a US law school. At the time I started it was then the most expensive law school in the US for tuition (it is not any more, but it is expensive.) At my old university tuition has been raised by the equivalent then of $100 – and there were huge rows, protests, sit-ins, etc.

In my first year of law school the most expensive tuition in the US was raised by 15% (with circa 3% inflation), the next year by 10% (2% inflation) and I saw my fellow students line up at the financial aid office and simply borrow another $2000 or so. (I was ineligible for student loans and earned most of my tuition working.) This surprised me and led me (over 20 years ago) to ask more about the student loan system. US colleges and universities have been raising tuition at rates well over the rate of inflation for the last 3 decades or more – and currently enrolled students have been queuing up at financial aid to borrow the increase for most of those years. The result is that at my old law school tuition today is 3 times what it was when I attended – and significantly higher in terms of US household incomes.

The core complaint about student loans as a system of financing is that there are no underwriting standards – educational institutions can charge what they like. This has created a system where there is a un-noticed profligacy that results from the lack of constraint. Compare this with other countries education systems and you see what I call the "marble versus linoleum" effect.

Jacqueline,

The American government now guarantees all students enrolled in qualified programs (including law schools) direct student GRAD Plus loans up to the full cost of attendance. Not full cost of tuition. Not up to some repayment limit. Full cost of attendance. The student financial aid offices work with students to develop a funding plan and discuss repayment options that they may qualify for in the future. Just sign on the line, Mr. 22 year old, and please come back for the repayment seminars later. Students are either actively misled or passively misled about what lawyers do and what lawyers earn. They've signed a Note for tens of thousands of dollars, just like the rest of their classsmates. With one (or maybe 3) signatures that begin immediately, you've wound up $250,000 in debt. It's paper money that you don't feel, until May of 3rd year, when you realize what you've gotten yourself into.

Schools have raised the "cost of attendance" to capture the federal government's generous lending policy. There are some poorly understood repayment plans (IBR and PAYE) that suggest that the burden will not be the burden — or that the burden will be passed, in part, to the taxpayer. It's a crazy system.

In short, the students are uninformed and it is funny money, because students do not pay for school in tuition dollars, but in future nondischargeable debentures, and the cost of attendance bears no relationship to economic price theory in any meaningful sense.

As far as advice is concerned –

40 years ago the prospective US law student watched To Kill a Mocking Bord and maybe Matlock

20 Years ago they watched LA Law

10 years ago they watched Ally McBeal

Next year they'll be watching Better Call Saul

for the rest of the advice consider a modified version of the dialogue from the Graduate (1967)

Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing?

Benjamin: Well, I would say that I'm just drifting. Here in the pool.

Mr. Braddock: Why?

Benjamin: Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here.

Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about graduate school?

Benjamin: No.

Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me then what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?

Benjamin: You got me.

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: [Law School]

Benjamin: [That's two words]

A lot of it is cultural. Students are told from Day 1 that higher education is the answer, education debt is good debt, and that college should be the goal of every American. They are told this by everyone from the POTUS to their parents and relatives. That provides the foundation for the decision to pursue law school and it takes a lot to break through this barrier. Law schools know this and feed off it.

Second, law students suffer from the same cognitive biases as everyone else. They overestimate the probability that they will be winners in the game, and assume that there are more and better paying jobs that are out there. Like many college students, they also tend to equate cost with quality of both education and employment opportunities.

Third, the rate of financial illiteracy in this country is remarkable, and there is no reason to think law students are better able to figure out exactly what they will owe and what the monthly payments are. In my experience and the (admittedly anecdotal) experience of others, undergrad pre-law and loan counseling is either non-existent or ineffectual. I'd be surprised if more than 50% of your students could tell you the interest rates on their various forms of federal loans, that there is an origination fee that is a percentage of the principal, or how much interest they will owe. You said you talked to students, but it might be interesting to give a short jobs/debt survey to classes and see how much students really know.

As a primer. higher education is organized inter-generational theft with a government imprimatur.

Students take on huge amounts of non-dischargable debt at high interest rates, because in a post industrial-economy you can't exactly go to work for the GE plant and raise a family, and schools get the money up front.

I like to call this 'monetizing' the cognitive biases of the youth.

It's built plenty a college town McMansion.

Kerr:

Your line: "how does closing law schools create jobs?"

Closing law schools does not create jobs. Closing law schools lessens the glut of lawyers searching for those jobs. There is nothing law schools can do to create jobs. Only the market (the same one you mentioned in one of your posts) can create jobs. This is the same market that does not apply to the over-production of graduates because of the taxpayer infused juice the schools receive upfront from students. Law schools exist to "educate", which they do very poorly.

"As for changing the student loan system, I'm certainly open to that, but I wonder how important that would seem in a future in which the number of jobs better matched the number of graduates."

I think the only way to get to this balance is to turn off the student loan spigot, which would cause schools to close, which would result in fewer graduates, which would result in a decrease in the over-saturation of graduates. Oh…and trust me, I think allowing BK protections and linking a school's access to federal student loans to job outcomes would be very important to graduates.

I left out the punch line: not more jobs, just livable wages at the jobs that exist.

Law Schools can do little to create jobs except hire graduates with the money that new students are paying with debt.

Also known as eating your young or robbing peter to pay paul.

Former law review editor: What you propose makes sense to me — certainly for many law schools and many students, even if not for every law school and every student.

There's one other thing, though: all of this curricular change could occur only if our requirements for licensure changed significantly too, right? Surely we couldn't change the law school curriculum in these ways and then license lawyers on the basis of their recall of certain legal rules in the area of, say, commercial paper or inheritance or conspiracy. Would you change the bar exam process? How?

It is easy to understand the appeal of apprenticeships, and in many ways the growth of externships in law schools represents a return to that model of legal education. Still, a page of history is worth a volume of logic, and it is worth remembering why the apprenticeship model fell into disrepute in this country. There is a fundamental conflict between the interests of master and apprentice — the apprentice has an incentive to maximize the value of the training s/he receives, but the master has an incentive to minimize the resources invested in training and maximize the amount of low or unpaid labor that the apprentice performs that inures to the benefit of the master, regardless of its value in terms of training. This is among the reasons why the apprentice system failed to effectively educate most trainee-lawyers, and was bested by Langdell's academic model. Today, similar concerns about the kind of work assigned to externs are often warranted. I am all for incorporating more experiential learning into legal education, but I think there is ample reason to be wary of an externship model.

Larry Rosenthal
Chapman University School of Law

Mr. Muller,

Why could you not license lawyers on the basis of their recall of certain legal rules? We do with our physicians. Or we could have different "steps" of study. Say the Multistate test after the first year, then substance after 2nd. If you pass the multistate, you get to continue with your schooling and take substantive coursework. Then you could take a state-specific 1 day long bar after 2nd year or after 3d year.

Med students take "step" boards during med school that begin quite difficult, but get easier. (The adage is 2 months of study for the first boards, 2 weeks of study for the second boards, and 2 number 2 pencils for the third set of boards).

The Langdellian case law/Socratic method approach is useful for the first year of law school; when employed properly, it does seem to get students to "think like lawyers" (or, at least, like litigators.) The first year can perhaps be supplemented with some bar-prep material.

Beginning in the second year of law school, however, there should be different tracks for different types of careers: civil litigation (broken down by general subject areas — business law, environmental law, constitutional impact-litigation, etc.), criminal law (prosecution or defense track), transactional, IP, tax, COMPLIANCE (an area where demand actually seems to exceed the supply), government/policymaking, non-governmental public-policy work, etc. We may not be able to increase the number of traditional "attorney" jobs out there, but we can prepare students for a variety of other careers in which *specialized* — i.e., more-than-just-case-law — legal training will help them land jobs and hit the ground running.

1. Get ride of the semester system. Teach in blocks. Crim law every day for 8 weeks and then the exam. This would allow students to be exposed to more courses, more material. Some topics, like evidence perhaps, need two blocks. Others like corporations, need only one.

2. No more Animal Rights Law, Deliberative Democracy and the Law, and other irrelevant courses.

3. It's often said that law review is valuable b/c it helps students read/write better. Why should this be available only to the top 10% of the class? Writing should be integrated in every course.

4. No more essay exams. The education lit is clear that this is not a good measure of material mastery.

5. If a law students wants to be a PD, there are various innocence projects to participate in. If you want to be a prosecutor, you're on your own. Why?

6. Hire a more rounded faculty. Getting everyone from HYS is suffocating (perhaps one reason legal scholarship is so boring).

7. Faculty should be more available to students. They aren't at most schools. Students are viewed as a nuisance.

8. Why are law schools sending faculty to conferences in Europe when their finances are so bad?

9. Recognize the long-standing problem on law that there are those who are connected and those who aren't. Law schools need to spend more time helping the latter.

Better than e-books: unless there is some compelling new legal development, why not assign the second-newest edition of the casebook instead of the most recent? Old editions often sell for $20 or less. And yet in many (most?) cases they are nearly identical!

Yes, I'm going to assign an older edition of a casebook in the spring and I have colleagues who do the same. When there are new editions that are hardly different from the previous, it doesn't seem worth the trouble and cost of changing it up. Good point.

One problem with using the old editions is that the secondary market may not have enough supply, and you'll have some students that buy the new edition for convenience. This might lead to confusion. That's one of the potential benefits of the free or nominal cost e-casebooks.

One thing you might want to look into, if your school does not already have it, is starting a book buyback or donation program that takes old books and sells them for cheap. My school had a used bookstore that sold casebooks for a flat price of $20 with the profits going to the public interest program. It worked well.

If you're concerned about having not enough second-most-recent textbooks available (and I expect this will very rarely be a problem given how few professors assigning them currently), you could two sets of page numbers in the syllabus, one for each edition. This would probably take about half an hour. If I were a student in your class and you endorsed the effort, I would do it for you myself as a public service.

It is extremely unrealistic to expect to get a used version of a current textbook for $20–at my school's sale of this type, nearly all the casebooks available are old editions, for good reason. Anyone who donates a current-edition textbook for free is making a serious gift to her classmate–a gently-used current edition that would cost $225 new can often command $150 on Amazon or Ebay.