LSAC Data and Predicting Number of Applicants for Fall 2015, Part 1

50,000 apps sounds about right. Should mean circa 33,000 matrics and 100,000 total law students. That's still way more than the market can absorb, but getting close to stable until law school loan funding reform passes in two years.

What do you mean “two years”? Do you have some reason to believe that that there will be no meaningful reform of lending in the near future?
I was led to believe that “Hope and Change” would enhance opportunities for millennials. I voted for such theoretical opportunities. Where did I go wrong?

anon: "Where did I go wrong?"

Not voting in the mid-terms.

Rumor is that December LSAT registrations down 1.5 percent

There are three real problems here: (1) lack of good paying jobs for young lawyers; (2) an academy that has been unwilling or unable to acknowledge the crisis in any meaningful way; and (3) the decline of the prestige of the legal sector.

First, it makes almost zero economic sense to enter this field now. The money's not where it once was for the median lawyer, partnership has never been tougher to make at biglaw, and the amount of debt required to enter eats up any incentive to jump in. Law can still be a wonderful public service field, but so too can being a monk, attending to lepers, or community organizing. Public service is not a selling point at your cost point.

Second, with a few notable exceptions, the response from the faculty has been either denial of a problem, denial of the structural nature of the problem, apathy, retrenchment, or impotence. The problems with legal education are not going away, and charging more for a troubled product is not a good business model.

Third, the prestige bloom is off the rose. The law brand is dying by a thousand cuts. Even parents are starting to get the message. It is now objectively, undeniably true that anyone can go to law school. Open admissions policies at the weakest ABA accredited schools hurt all other schools. Few of the students that you want to attend your institutions find it comforting that the bozos who slept through undergrad and were marginally literate can end up in the exact same boat 3 years from now, competing for the same job or the same clients.

The big question here whether the trend of applying later in the cycle increases again. I thought it would be impossible last year, but the schools found a way to generate a lot of applications in March-June. I wonder if all of the promotional work required a significant capital expenditure.

Anyway, this is good news. Applications will be down again this year.

Straight up, JoJo, especially on #2. Stakeholders mocked the voices crying out in the wilderness for years as know-nothing malcontents. The idea that people were trying to honestly say "things need to change in legal education," such that the damage might be mitigated for all concerned, was dismissed out of hand by those who apparantly preferred to whistle past graveyards rather than make difficult decisions. There were few easy answers, but praying to the stone idols of the past as a path to the future was clearly not one of them.

And why newcomer schools still tried to get in on the gravy-train, in the face of all the not-so-recent evidence, is astounding.

Unfortunately, Jojo is correct about #2. Law facilities have been disturbingly complacent. Even ones outside the T14, who should know better. Thomas Jefferson's building is just the most glaring of the errors of out of touch administrators and faculty. The dean who built that tribute to his ego is gone and he's left others to pick up the pieces. Probably most of the people who are most responsible will be retired, if they are not already, before they have to pay the price.

Law faculty and staff are in for some very difficult times, which will include pay cuts (this has already happened at a lot of schools through reduction or elimination of summer grants and travel budgets) and increases in teaching loads. Most of the commentators here will cheer this and maybe they should. More cutbacks, including layoffs, are on the way. The biggest change in the near term is that there will be precious few faculty hires.

The events for which the law school crisis will be most remembered have no happened yet.

What the law academy needs to do is this:

1. Hire more Ph.D.s in fields that have nothing to do with law, and who have no experience or interest in practice;

2. Offer far more courses in meditation and "mindfulness" and decrease the number of subjects that have anything to do with law or practicing law or improving the legal system;

3. Allow anyone to attend who cares to attend, and raise tuition to take advantage of limitless federal loans;

4. Push to eliminate or water down the LSAT and the Bar Exams;

5. Publish more junk economic reports claiming that all it well;

6. Brutally attack anyone who complains about anything above.

Problem solved!

The balance of power between applicants and law schools this admission season is going to be hilarious. Qualified applicants are going to be treated like foreign dignitaries. I hope they squeeze every last scholarship dollar out of the institution they choose to attend. Having just recently put a winning bid on a home, I would favor the "multiple offer" method. Get your acceptance letters from at least 15 schools, narrow the schools to about 10, then ask them all to put in their best offer without sharing any information about each other's offers. Accept the best offer, then continue to relentlessly pressure them for more scholarhip money until 2 days before enrollment.

"The balance of power between applicants and law schools this admission season is going to be hilarious."

There's a marketing opportunity here – set up the law school equivalent of priceline.com.

Have the student post his GPA and LSAT score on the website, and give law schools the opportunity to bid against each other to have that student attend that school by offering tuition discounts, with the student selecting the winning bidder.

Observer:

Wouldn't that be the student offers a certain amount, and then waits to see which school accepts (with specs, such as First Tier, Second Tier, Indistinguishably Lousy so Ranked by Alphabetical Order …)?

Jojo hit upon something – we've seen a number of schools drop their LSAT percentiles like crazy (e.g., the 75th in 2014 less than the 25th in 2010). If they haven't already, a number of schools will have a reputation of flat-zero in a few years. Given that the market is glutted, nobody from those schools will be hired.

This might be good for lawyers who graduated a few years back.

Barry,
It won't be a good thing for lawyers who graduated a few years back. Employers won't look back and see that there was a higher level of matriculating student in the mid aughts to the ones gaining admission on an open-admission standard at the majority of schools. Instead the schools' graduates of all levels will have a greater stigma and devaluation thanks to the schools' greed/desperation.

Besides, the reduced need for new associates has allowed employers to stick with graduates from higher ranked schools. Even for firms that can't attract the best of the best, like the Cravaths and Gibson Dunns, etc., the next tier of firms will just opt for lower ranked associates from the T-14 than the top of the watered down middle and lower ranked schools.

I think it will take years, if not decades, for the overhang from the recent years to clear out. Other than T14 people, I think it will be brutal. Unless they had relevant work experience and passed the bar, I still see employers as picking up recent grads.

I'm a law student and I really appreciate my professors. But I do wish more of them had experience outside of academia so they could mentor us through the job process and our careers. I came to law school to learn the law and to think like a lawyer (still trying to figure out what that means!), but at the end of the day, I came to law school to start a career in the law.

Marie, Many professors at lower ranked schools do have more experience. In fact, at my tier-4 law school, the average full-time professor has about 6 years of practice (compared to about 2 years for tier-1 schools). Many of our faculty were partners or high level government attorneys with over 10 years of practice. Some still are "of counsel" at major law firms. But I guess you don't want to go to a tier-4 school and as long as students continue to choose the tier-1 schools with professors with minimal experience, most schools will continue to try to model the tier-1 experience. For example, even at my school, our two most recent hires, had only 2 years experience each, but also had at least one ivy league degree, law review, clerkships.

AnonProf, at the risk of speaking for Marie, I think what she wants is to go to an elite school that also has professors with more practical experience. Having professors with lots of experience accomplishes nothing if you are at a bottom-tier law school whose graduates' resumes are looked at as if they have something foul spilled on them.

Fair enough, but the elite schools are not going to change unless students show willingness to attend other schools with professors with more practice experience. I do not know which "elite" school has the professors with the most work experience, but high-end students should seek out that school and attend, even if they get into another school a few spots higher. I know Baylor seeks out professors with work experience, but I doubt they count as "elite." If you aren't willing to vote with your feet, don't expect schools to change.

AnonProf, these lower-ranked schools have essentially open admissions and employers know it by this point. It just generally doesn't make economic sense to go to a lower-ranked school that will teach you good practical skills over a significantly higher-ranked school that won't.

I'd actually argue that going to a lower ranked, practice oriented school does make economic sense if, and only if, (1) you are one of the students whose LSAT/GPA they are buying and your tuition is close to zero and (2) you are willing to bail/transfer up if you lose the scholarship or end up outside of the top ten percent or so of the class.

I'm only speculating, but what is there to stop any law school from focusing on practical skills, charging a reasonable tuition ($20,000 or less), and having a class size that is comparable to how many people can be expected to land entry level lawyer jobs?

Wouldn't such a law school find success, even if it ignored by US News? You could pay full-time faculty salaries starting at $50,000, and eventually cap them at $100,000, and draw local legal talent to fill in the gaps. Lawyers are not all the caricatures that many draw of them, and many would welcome a chance to adjunct.

I would even assume some would be willing to start at $50,000 as a full-time faculty teaching 3 classes a semester, as the position would offer other benefits not present in many private practices (much better average "client," no need to generate business, less adversarial). This of course is more realistic for a law school located outside of a major city with high-costs of living. Semi-related, One of my undergraduate professors said that making six figures in the low-cost area that I went to school was semi-equivalent to being a millionaire back in California where he was originally from.

Anyway, I've gone on too long. But if lower-ranked law schools focused to their strengths (faculty with more practice under their belts, often locations where lower cost-of-living) rather than aspiring to be Harvard, I think many of them would be better suited for the downturn AND would be providing their graduates a better deal.

antiro,

For existing law schools what stops them is fixed costs (e.g., tenured faculty, bonds on new buildings). Law schools are, for the most part, stuck with the faculties they have. Some of those faculty can teach practical skills, some of them cannot. All of them, at least as reported in the SALT survey, pay more than you are suggesting. Even a school that, on some level, wanted to go to the model you suggest wouldn't be able to just jettison all of its tenured faculty or reform all of its employment contracts with those faculty to cut pay by 50% or more.

I suppose a brand new school could do this, and it would not totally surprise me to see a state university attempt to open a new law school using a similar model. But, aside from that highly limited pool, what sane person or group would want to open a new law school in the current market? Also, what competent, successful professional would want to leave their current job to teach at a brand new school in the current market, knowing the school may not even be there by the time they are eligible for tenure?

FE,

I realize that what I suggested was essentially a joke due to faculty and schools not wanting to size themselves rightly. But it is an ideal that I think that someone should strive toward.

What I find sort of distressing is a seemingly blatant misreporting in the required ABA disclosures that persists.

For example, check Law School A's website, to determine how many full time profs are listed there. Then, check out the school's ABA disclosure.

Invariably, it seems, the ABA disclosure indicates far fewer full time faculty.

Is there an obvious reason for this discrepancy I'm missing?

Note: Most schools list retired and part time faculty elsewhere …

anon: I believe the ABA data on faculty is a snapshot of faculty teaching in a given semester, as required by the ABA annual questionnaire, so if some profs are on leave, visiting elsewhere, they would not be counted for ABA purposes, although they would still be on the school's website.

Also the ABA breaks full timers down in many categories: tenured, tenure track, long term contract, deans who teach, etc.

I doubt many law schools lie about this. After all, the ABA wants to see a low Student:faculty ratio, so you are not going to not count profs…

This data is also confirmed during a site visit, so if there was a recurring discrepancy, a site team would report that back to the ABA.

Another significant barrier to law school reform is the bar examination, particularly in states that test 10-20 subjects. Law schools have to spend substantial resources teaching many sections of these bar classes even though lawyers are almost never generalists anymore. This reality limits the number of skills courses that students can take.

California tests 13 subjects:

Applicants taking the California Bar Examination may be required to answer questions involving
issues from all of the subjects listed below:
1. Business Associations
2. Civil Procedure
3. Community Property
4. Constitutional Law
5. Contracts
6. Criminal Law and Procedure
7. Evidence
8. Professional Responsibility
9. Real Property
10. Remedies
11. Torts
12. Trusts
13. Wills and Succession

New York tests 14 subjects, though, some are actually just contracts:

1) administrative law [effective with the February 2015 exam];
(2) business relationships, including agency, business corporations, limited liability companies,
partnerships and joint ventures;
(3) New York civil practice and procedure [effective with the February 2015 exam, Federal civil
practice and procedure will no longer be tested on the New York portion of the exam];
(4) conflict of laws;
(5) New York and federal constitutional law;
(6) contracts and contract remedies;
(7) criminal law and procedure;
(8) evidence;
(9) matrimonial and family law;
(10) professional responsibility;
(11) real property;
(12) torts and tort damages;
(13) trusts, wills and estates; and
(14) UCC Articles 2 and 9.

It is sort of hard to believe that a "law school" can't handle teaching these subjects, and that teaching these subjects could actually detract from preparing students for the practice of law.

WHat detracts from preparing students to practice or improve the legal system in other ways are courses like meditation, and mindfulness, and many others that have zero relevance to the practice of law (other than in the sense that some believe that law schools should offer classes designed not to teach law or legal systems, but classes designed to make a person healthy and content, in which case perhaps law schools should start hiring professors who are nurses and social workers).

Not every aspect of life is properly taught in a law school because that aspect of life somehow "intersects" with law. All aspects of life intersect with law. The notion that a law school is a very expensive citadel purposed to pamper the whims of idiosyncratic and sheltered members of an elite academy who don't like lawyers and didn't like the practice of law is the reason that law school admissions are plummeting.

Hiring those who know next to nothing about practice of law, and don't care to, is the reason that law schools are failing to prepare law students to join and reform the legal profession, not the bar exam.

"Hiring those who know next to nothing about practice of law, and don't care to, is the reason that law schools are failing to prepare law students to join and reform the legal profession, not the bar exam."

anon: Do we know this to be correct? Did law schools 20, 30, 50, 75 years ago hire practitioners?
I really do not know the answer to that question.What I think has changed is the increase in "Law and…" courses, as well as a decline in admission standard (now).

I know the school I taught at had a very high number of required (bar) courses and was criticized by the accreditation committee for it years ago. More light electives = lower bar pass rate.

Please tell me what percentage of law school class hours are spent in mindfulness and meditation? Quite low I am sure. More useless anecdotal venting by the scammers.

As for the more useful if repetitive discussion of practical experience versus a research orientation – it is a false division. The point of research is to have a practical impact – namely, changing the way we do things in the real world. Law students who are not exposed at least at some level to that kind of research process are the weaker for it and the market reflects that reality – it rewards research much more heavily than so-called "practical" experience.

Anon 8:28,

I think you might have misunderstood my point about the bar courses. Of course law schools can handle teaching bar courses. My point was that it takes a lot of resources to cover them all and students have to spend a significant part of their time in law school taking courses that prepare them for the bar.

I actually happen to think that mindfulness is a great course with a lot of data behind its utility! This course has cropped up as a direct response to frustrations about what lawyers would benefit from doing in practice. But no need to quibble about that because I think your broader point concerns law schools not providing students with courses directly related to how to practice. This is a really broad generalization. There are law schools out there with lots of skills courses and experiential learning opportunities. Also, there are plenty of professors with practice experience. Granted, the schools with these traits tend to fall more heavily on the lower end of the U.S. News rankings.

It will be interesting to see how this dichotomy plays out over the next few years: lower ranked schools that are more practice-oriented v. higher ranked schools that do not have such a focus. What would happen if U.S. News simply changed the high value it assigned to peer ranking (i.e. ranking other schools' scholarship) and assigned more value to practice-oriented preparation? I bet we would see a shift. Prospective students wanting to go to higher ranked schools would take these new ranks into consideration. And then average GPA and LSAT increases would further accelerate the rankings transformation. In short, the rankers' methodology could very quickly and drastically alter the law school landscape.

ONe has to marvel at the entrenched values in legal academia.

"Higher ranked" law schools were the schools that ranked highest long before USNWR: and these schools are so ranked owing to a number of factors. These factors have been explored in detail, and some excellent research has been produced on what produced the pecking order.

The commenter who stated "the point of research is to have a practical impact – namely, changing the way we do things in the real world. Law students who are not exposed at least at some level to that kind of research process are the weaker for it and the market reflects that reality" is correct, of course. The type of "scholarship" that some blithely associate with "higher ranked" law schools is actually of little or no practical value to anyone. This observation is firmly established in the world of law, if not the legal academy.

As for the volume of courses like meditation and mindfulness, the cliché and expected response is based on the argument that it makes lawyers feel better to eat broccoli, practice meditation, etc. Sorry, but that is precisely the attitude that has ruined the law academy – top to bottom. And folks, if you think the top 100 law schools are immune from the stain, the one suspects some awakenings await.

As for the level of practice experience a generation ago, the fact that no one seems to know speaks volumes. Same for the nature of legal scholarship, about which we know a lot. And, we know a lot about how it has changed. THese are manifestations of hiring persons who never really practiced and don't much like the law, lawyers or the practice of law.

We see the result. A clueless academy with no notion about the reasons it is so dramatically failing in its principle mission.

"My point was that it takes a lot of resources to cover them all and students have to spend a significant part of their time in law school taking courses that prepare them for the bar."

Unless law schools have changed dramatically in the 8 years since I graduated, students by no mean have to spend a significant part of their time in law school taking courses like that.

I never took trusts, wills, family law, negotiable instruments, or state civil procedure and had no trouble passing two bar exams in two different states. After the first year all we had to do were electives, and a month of bar prep is all you really need to pass the bar.

Anon 12:47 – "The type of "scholarship" that some blithely associate with "higher ranked" law schools is actually of little or no practical value to anyone. This observation is firmly established in the world of law, if not the legal academy."

Ha Ha Ha…which is why folks like Jack Coffee, Richard Epstein and Joe Grundfest earn several times their law school salaries in consulting (an underestimate by an order of magnitude in some years I am sure) – because their ideas are worthless.

Please tell me what percentage of law school professors earn several times their law school salaries consulting? Quite low I am sure. More useless anecdotal venting by the stubborn reactionaries in legal academia.

Probably about as low as the percentage of people who aspire to play in the NBA end up playing in the NBA….so what?

That does not mean playing pick up ball in the 'hood is irrational.

Ok. We've gotten to that point where the comments are not even comprehensible. Sort of like a law school class, but without the glamor and excitement.

Anon:

Jack Coffee is leading writer and legal authority on securities law and corporate governance, where there is potentially some expert opinion work available. Most of his work is in writing treatises aimed at general use, something that many academic lawyers eschew as too lacking in original thinking to be scholarship. Joe Grundfest is a former SEC Commissioner with decades of experience and an expert on capital markets; again he has something to offer in consulting.

The problem with your argument is that the consulting work that Coffee and Grundfest can secure have to do with their areas of practice and extensive experience and knowledge outside academia. They are quite different from the more common run of law professors.

This is a question for Anon at 9:49. You ask what would happen if US News replaced its heavy reliance on peer assessment with a measure of practice-oriented preparation. Do you have a suggestion of how we might measure that?

I would have thought one good measure (although it gets at this somewhat obliquely) is employment outcome. Do you have a better measure?

Alfred,

I do think employment outcome is one measurement but I do not believe it's the whole picture. Smart students can obtain good employment even if they did not receive as much skills training as they would have liked in law school. Students from higher ranked schools also benefit from the signaling the school provides to prospective employers irrespective of actual course work. As a result, those signaling devices perpetuate the rankings without addressing the fundamentals of what law schools are actually teaching.

An additional measure could be some combination of 1) number of skills courses offered by a school, 2) average number of skills courses offered in a given year, and 3) average number of skills courses that students actually take per year.

I would add this:

"Skills courses" are often misguided attempts, because they are designed and taught be either: a.) faculty with no clue about practice (a couple of years doing scut work in BigLaw is worse than irrelevant) or b.) persons who are separated and demeaned by the "regular" "doctrinal" faculty.

THis is the arrogance that prevents any real reform in legal academia playing out. The fault lies in the failure to recognize that the insignificance of the activity of producing the sort of irrelevant and largely ignored "scholarship" that supposedly justifies the divorce of the legal academy from practice is destroying the inspiration and spirit that has sustained law schools.

It is not a question of bean counting "courses." It is a question of focus, of content, of knowledge, of experience, of forward thinking: all toward the one and only goal of making legal education fit the needs of the society a law school serves. Start with faculty hiring. The rest will follow.

How to measure this? Here is the answer: Stop running constant beauty contests and ranking this and that ad nauseum (often in an obviously risible and faulty manner to boot) and get to work trying in earnest to solve a problem: the pendulum has swung too far in a direction away from practical orientation in law schools, and it needs to start swinging back.

Why is this so hard to understand for legal academy? Is this stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality simply a matter of self interest, denial, insecurity and fear? (Seems so, hence the constant "Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?")

MacK more or less makes my point – that the market rewards the research dominant model of academia found in most law schools.

The market – I assume we would agree – pays for things it values which I assume is a reasonable way to define "practical." Coffee, Grundfest and Epstein are "ideal types" that make up the model of legal academia. And their incomes reflect their success in becoming ideal types.

Even without the consulting income they are handsomely rewarded and the hierarchy of income and perks associated with law schools reflects a similar market reality.

At the top are faculty who conduct peer-reviewed research and are able to generate ideas that have real world impact.

At the bottom (and I mean this only in an income & perks producing way) are adjuncts and clinicians and those tenure track faculty who cannot or have not yet been able to develop ideas that have the kind of market value of the C-G-E types. This approach I think has much more explanatory power for the nature of the legal academy as well as why it will not change too dramatically, at least not in the direction that many of the critics seem to hope

Anon 6:49-

Skills classes are most certainly not "misguided attempts" – whatever that means. They teach practical skills and plenty of full time professors teach them very well. Careful, please, with the generalizations because it really depends on the school. You refer to "legal academia" as if it were some monolothic entity.

I agree that "bean counting" is not a panacea but if you want to know about a school's internal philosophy, taking note of the number of skills courses and how often they are taught is a start. It does tell you something about the values of the school. And since prospective students are demanding more practical experiences, it would help them align their values with the values of the institutions they are thinking of attending. But none of this will happen unless the influential rankers assign a value to the metrics that prospective students care about.

Anon

I take your point about refocusing the factors that go into the views of "influential rankers" on its own, but put in context, of course, it betrays a mind set in legal academia (yes, legal academia) that is bogus.

To be sure, the top students chase ratings, and so on, down the line. But, the bottom feeders … Look at the number of schools unrated by USNWR. One believes that USNWR stopped ranking these schools for, among other reasons, precisely because it so completely destroys your argument about "influence" of rankings for this significant segment.

ANd, this is the segment most important in this discussion: because you and others seem to equate "practice" with "lower rated" … a manifestation of what so often appears to be a quite desperate desire to think of all those folks beneath you and thereby take some comfort. Hence, the interminable efforts to "rank" everything, often in the most risible and bogus ways.

Why say "misguided attempts" to create "skills courses" and what do the terms "misguided" and "attempt" mean?

To quote Anon above: Ha. Ha. Ha. "Misguided" means, here, well intentioned but inept. "Attempt" means a failed effort. YOur comment illustrates quite well the reason for this: "plenty of full time professors teach them very well." Right back at you, Anon.

What do you mean by "full time professors"? Do you mean all the Ph.D.s recently hired with one or two years doing scut work in BigLaw, if that? Do you mean the second class citizens that most law schools designate to teach "skills courses"? You are describing a group of profs by "Full time" … please, then, don't complain that "legal academia" is a term too broad to countenance.

I posted earlier and someone asked the type of school I attend. I'm at school ranked between 25 and 50. Skills courses would be fine but what I had in mind was if a few more professors teaching our core classes had some experience outside of an academic setting. I think that would be beneficial since they could better mentor us and would be able to better connect classes to the type of work we'll do after law school. It seems as though our classes do a good job of training us to be appellate lawyers, but only a few people will end up doing that type of work. I don't want to come across as disrespectful by any means. I truly appreciate my professors and think they're great, but it would be nice if we had a few more who were both great scholars and also experienced lawyers.

Marie,

To be an appellate lawyer, the faculty would have to teach you things like building a record on appeal, how to comb through a record on appeal, advanced legal writing, etc. they do none of this. The only jobs in law that even the smartest grad is competent to hold immediately after graduation are law professor and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jojo nailed it. I've done a few appeals now. There are hundreds of ridiculous arcane little rules. Even the notice to appeal is tricky – for example a motion for reconsideration invalidates any prior notice of appeal. Of the three appeals I am involved in right now, two of my opponents (attorneys with 20+ years experience) had their briefs rejected for lack of conformity w/rules and had to refile (cost of reprinting is about $800.00). Few law professors and zero new grads know anything about this process.

JM is correct. Young law students find this impossible to believe, which is why the scam has been so entrenched. Law professors know very little about practicing law, or even about the law itself. It's a strange world, and [the good] law faculty spend their time reading appellate decisions trying to decipher trends, thoughts and truths from the judicial tea leaves. With a few notable exceptions, few have much practice experience or could practice again.

Law students, for the most part, are under 28 years old and have excelled in academics. To the extent that they even think about it, they find it impossible to believe that legal education could be divorced from law or that their instructors are anything but the pinnacle of legal knowledge. It's not even an Emperor's clothes problem. It's worse than that. Law students don't even know what clothing is, so they cannot recognize that the Emperor is not wearing any.

If you are fortunate enough to get a legal position, Marie, within about 2 or 3 years you will realize that those who "taught" you law, really knew nothing about it.

Perhaps that's a bit too harsh, because even now I'll draw upon legal concepts that I once learned in law school, but I'll then spend the better part of a day researching it before deciding whether to use it in a brief.

What's taught in law school does have some value, but it has too little value to be worth the cost, and it's taught to too many people to lead to any gainful skill. Therein lies the scam.

"At the top are faculty who conduct peer-reviewed research and are able to generate ideas that have real world impact."

With the exception of those few legal academics who publish in other fields' journals, the research that is published in law reviews is certainly not peer-reviewed. As someone who moved over to an academic field with some overlap of law (public policy), the research in the legal literature is far poorer than what I see in the public policy literature. I mean, I think my favorite was the law journal article in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics that offered a putatively quantitative proof that law school was a great idea but started the article saying this analysis was based on "back-of-the-envelope" calculations. In a legitimate academic field that would not get published, and if it did manage to get published it could potentially end the author's career.

Jojo said: "Law professors know very little about practicing law, or even about the law itself."

I'll disagree with the second part. Law professors know a great deal about the law–at least mine did. The problem is that the law is not really applied in the practice of law. All practioners, including judges, are so focused on the zillion procedural issues, ethical obligations and discovery rules that they have no time or inclination to actually research a doctrinal issue. Many have not read a full case in years. It is total chaos.

I think the law is great. It provides a lot of answers that people are searching for. I also think my first year professors are across-the-board smarter and more honest than any lawyer I have ever met in practice. If civil procedure was simplified and discovery limited, then there would be more focus on applying the correct doctrinal law in practice.