Quick Link: National Law Journal Praises Richard Matasar as He Steps Down

Karen Sloan, “Reformer Dean to Step Down after Long Tenure at New York Law School,” in the National Law Journal Sloan proclaims: Matasar has been one of the few legal educators publicly supporting controversial proposals to change the American Bar Association’s law school accreditation standards, including removal of what many law professors interpret as a [...]

Quick Link: EMSI Mostly Gets It Right on Attorney Overproduction

[UPDATE: The New York Times Economix blogger, Catherine Rampbell has reposted EMSI's findings. Unfortunately, she does so uncritically.] Joshua Wright of Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc. has generated his own calculation of attorney overproduction. Readers may recall that I did something similar here. I should say that he’s measuring overproduction of licensed attorneys while I look [...]

Law Schools Oblivious to Applicant Nosedive

As you can see, I’ve been on a law school input kick recently, completely accidental. Although I’ve been aware of the LSAC Volume Summary for quite a while, the ABA’s chunk of the Official Guide also provides some numbers going back to the 80s (it’s completely wrong about the total number of LSATs in the [...]

The Unofficial Guide to the “ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools”

The LSAC and ABA websites have posted portions of the 2012 edition of the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools. The LSAC’s two-page spreads of each of the 198 JD-conferring ABA law schools is here; the remainder of the Official Guide is on the ABA’s website here. The Official Guide is a great resource [...]

Open Source Law School?

A few weeks ago, Richard Vedder asked whether we could take advantage of all these technological advances of the last half-century and sell education for a fraction of the cost we do today: [W]hy doesn’t someone—say, the Gates Foundation—hire 100 or so stellar professors in 20 disciplines to offer perhaps 150 to 200 absolutely superb [...]

La Verne’s Lessons

[UPDATE: The National Law Journal reports that UC-Irvine received provisional accreditation while Elon University and Charlotte School of Law both received full accreditation from the ABA] The news is in, and as predicted, the University of La Verne lost its provisional ABA accreditation. La Verne’s administrators argue that it was improving, for its first-time bar [...]

The 2011-2012 LSAT Year Begins

I didn’t realize the June 2011 LSAT administration occurred a week ago. I await the numbers, but we can expect them to be depressed as they were last year due to widespread knowledge of the legal education system’s failures. Before the LSAC’s chart is updated though, it’s time to put the numbers in context, particularly [...]

Quick Link—ABA Death Spiral?

From TaxProf Blog, “ABA to Continue as Law School Accrediter, Despite Noncompliance With 17 Regs,” via The PresTTTigious Legal “Profession”. [S]everal members of the [National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, Dept. of ED] expressed reservations about approving that status for the ABA, which was found to be out of compliance with 17 regulations, [...]

Consumer Credit Update (2011 June)

It’s the fifth business day of the month, which means the Federal Reserve has updated its G.19 Release, its estimate of outstanding consumer credit. One problem the U.S. economy faces is that consumer credit is growing faster than the economy. While the G.19 Release doesn’t quantify how much nonrevolving debt is student debt, it is [...]

Income Elasticity: Why The ABA is Not an Apolitical Trade Organization

Writing on lawyer oversupply and demand for legal services Andrea Hable concludes: [M]aybe we’re framing the question wrong. Maybe there are too many lawyers for the legal profession as it stands today. But maybe there aren’t too many lawyers for society. If we all practiced more efficiently, and if we could have our ideal jobs [...]