‘Clever Plans to Reform Legal Education Won’t Make Legal Services Any Cheaper’ up on Am Law Daily

It’s a revised version of my post from a couple weeks ago, “WSJ Op-Ed Reaches Acceptable Conclusion on False Premises.” Link is here: “Clever Plans to Reform Legal Education Won’t Make Legal Services Any Cheaper“ Hopefully this will inspire better proposals from reformers.

FixUC Stumbles onto Human Capital Contracts

Nanette Asimov, “Plan Would Eliminate Tuition to UC’s Benefit,” in SFGate.com Leanne Maxwell, “UC Considers Students’ ‘Delayed Tuition’ Proposal,” in sfist.com News outlets are reporting on a proposal (PDF) produced by a student organization, FixUC, which operates out of University of California-Riverside. More importantly, the university is actually considering it. The proposal is essentially the [...]

WSJ Op-Ed Reaches Acceptable Conclusion on False Premises

Distantly following the op-ed published by Clifford Winston and Robert W. Crandall that called for deregulating legal services entirely, the Wall Street Journal has now published an op-ed by a law professor and a lawyer, John O. McGinnis (Northwestern) and Russell D. Mangas (Kirkland & Ellis, Chicago), advocating allowing undergrads to sit for bar exams. [...]

Petitions and Protests

Here’re a few things for you activists to keep an eye on: two petitions and a protest. There’s one petition going around the Internet asking the House of Representatives to pass a resolution favoring forgiving student loan debt per Michigan representative Hansen Clarke’s proposal (H. Res. 365). It’s close to getting the 90,000 signatures it’s [...]

Quick Link: In Japan, Blame for Widespread Bar Exam Failure Placed on Exam, Not Scores of “La Vernes”

Before reading Miki Tanikawa’s New York Times piece, “A Japanese Legal Exam That Sets the Bar High,” you should read Takahiro Saito’s law review article, aptly titled, “The Tragedy of Japanese Legal Education: ‘American’ Law Schools,” in the Wisconsin International Law Journal (2006ish). Saito writes: In 1985, about five hundred candidates, out of twenty-five thousand, [...]

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 [...]

Dead by Dawn: Law Schools & Law Students per Capita (1960s-2010)

I recently exhumed Jack Crittenden’s March 2010 bottleneckus maximus piece defending the legal education system, “A Wise Investment?” in The National Jurist. Rereading it shows just how badly he misinterpreted the data he gathered, and rather than dismember all his zombie arguments like I’m Ash from Evil Dead II, I’ll limit myself to his mischaracterizations [...]

NUMBERS CRUNCHED! The ABA’s Number of Attorneys per State and per Gross State Product

[****WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS OUTDATED INFORMATION. THE PERMANENT VERSION OF THIS POST CAN BE FOUND ON THIS PAGE. PLEASE LINK TO THAT INSTEAD.****] Turns out the ABA has been collecting data on the number of attorneys “resident and active” in each state for the last two years from state bar associations and licensing agencies.  These [...]

The Charge of the Juris Doctor Brigade, Part III: Back from the Mouth of Hell

Did I say I’d get back to doodling?  I lied.  Here’s one more table.  Compare it to Table 6 in the previous post. Table 7: Gross State Product (2009)/State’s ABA Students, incl. part-time

The Charge of the Juris Doctor Brigade, Part II: Half a League Onward

In Part I, I described why a breakdown of law schools per state is necessary.  Behold!  The data, far earlier than I expected.  No doodles because data’s just as much fun.