Liberal Law Professors Shielded by Hostility Towards Lawyers

I read Brian Tamanaha’s “The Failure of Crits and Leftist Law Professors to Defend Progressive Causes,” which castigates politically liberal law professors for participating in institutions that encourage both the class schism in the legal profession and law students to borrow unpayable debts. How could they not know what was going on? Tamanaha writes:

Seduced by the allure of prestige of material comforts, Crits and progressive law professors have become a part of the system they set out to reform. Watching market-thinking become pervasive and the gap between rich and poor in America steadily increase, knowing that on broader economic issues we had lost, we succumbed to the temptation to grab what we could for ourselves and our families. (35)

Ouch. It occurred to me while reading this passage that of all the topics I think or write about, legal education is the one where I think we need more “market-thinking,” so I end up sounding like a perfidious neoliberal. I’m not. Instead I think that what passes for “market-thinking” has largely shielded liberal law professors: Lawyers are regularly perceived as playing outside market rules. They chronically overcharge their clients—a belief that’s readily reinforced by actual instances of file-churning, etc.—and they don’t do enough for the poor given their awesome privilege. For the more conspiratorially minded, they file frivolous lawsuits against one another to drive up business, or they use their dominance in legislatures to enact laws that create yet more work for themselves. Even corporate America is powerless to negotiate lower rates against the almighty leveraged, billable hour.

The public’s uncharitable perceptions aren’t helped by economists who misunderstand the effects of professional licensing. Anyone who reads Dean Baker’s Beat the Press will regularly find the author complaining that free trade advocates are willing to subject manufacturing workers to competition with cheap foreign labor, but they hypocritically use professional licensing regulations as trade protectionism. Never mind that professional services aren’t as fungible as precision-made goods; that lawyers’ contributions to legal matters are usually more valuable than assembly line workers’ to their products; or that most states, including California, New York, D.C., Texas, Illinois, and Florida, allow foreign-trained lawyers to take their bar exams (subject to various other requirements, admittedly) with no evidence of lower lawyer incomes there as a result. For some inexplicable reason, foreign lawyers will be able to topple biglaw in a way that tens of thousands of unranked law school grads cannot.

An even better example is Clifford Winston’s, Robert W. Crandall’s, and Vikram Maheshri’s 2011 book, First Thing We Do, Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers. The authors calculated that lawyers earned 50 percent more than people who had the same amount of education. They also found that over time lawyers’ incomes increased even though their GPA and LSAT scores did not, and that the number of lawyer jobs created each year is significantly less than the number of people who apply to law schools. Therefore lawyers must be creating a huge deadweight loss to society.

No one pointed out to them that (a) demand for legal services is income elastic, which means rich people and corporations spend more money on brand-name firms as they become wealthier (and they have become wealthier); (b) the wages of lawyers are determined by their marginal product, not their education; and it might just be the case that lawyers are more productive than people who drop out of English PhD programs; (c) incomes for high-test-scoring people have increased generally over the last few decades as credentials from elite universities have led to higher-paying jobs; and (d) demand for legal education is not the same thing as demand for legal services.

One need only read First Thing We Do‘s introduction (PDF) to understand the methodological problems with the authors’ argument:

As regulatory economists, we find it natural to reason that occupational licensing, like other regulations that restrict entry, benefits existing suppliers by limiting competition. Thus its primary effect is to generate earnings premiums to practitioners in a particular profession such as law—earnings premiums that could be inefficient.

In short, it’s an argument from incredulity nestled in a begging-the-question fallacy: We can’t believe the legal profession would allow more people to purchase legal education than there are jobs available for them because that would mean lawyers are bad at creating licensing restrictions, and they would be callously dumping over-indebted, underemployed law graduates onto the labor market and tolerating a massive wealth transfer to law professors that doesn’t directly benefit lawyers. Therefore, the licensing requirements must be restricting supply and raising incomes.

However, the fact is, applicants’ willingness to risk rejection, which indicates they would pay full freight if accepted, increases with tuition. Behold the number of rejected full-time applicants at private law schools (ex. Puerto Rico’s and Brigham Young) and public law schools whose tuition is higher than the average private law school’s.

Those of you who wanted an upward-sloping demand curve, here is your upward-sloping demand curve.

Even in my private life, I’ve encountered two economists (whom I respect) who thought “licensing = labor cartel” applied to lawyers ipso facto. In fairness, it’s not self-evidently untrue, but it shows the heuristics that go into analyzing who’s cheating society and who isn’t.

Okay, I didn’t write this post to rehash First Thing We Do—not that I didn’t savor the empty calories and hope you did too—rather, I brought it up to show that “positions, not interests” explain conventional views about lawyers and law schools:

• Lawyers = cheaters, thieves
• Law students = greedy turds who refuse to serve the poor at lower pay and are whining because they’re bitter they didn’t get to be cheating thieves
• Law professors = tragic figures because despite their liberal agendas, their students still refuse to serve the poor and aspire to be cheating thieves
• Student debt for education = good because education = “upward mobility” = good

Once this framework for the law school debate sets in, it’s no wonder that Tamanaha’s peers call him an outrageous elitist conservative. It takes the ideological equivalent of a spontaneous reversal in the earth’s magnetic field to recognize that law schools have more in common with Bain Capital than they do with Legal Services NYC, which has been working without a contract since July 2012 and might go on strike soon. The dominant liberal story over the last thirty years is that rich conservatives and neoliberals (including cheating thieving lawyers) captured the government to crush labor and redirect incomes from the poor to themselves. Thus, liberal law professors are the types of people we’d least expect to support too-big-to-failist institutions. The fact that conservatives tend to hold anti-higher education and anti-student lending views further warps the discussion along ideological lines.

That law schools were caught fighting on the wrong side of the class war at the same time the banksters wrecked the economy is only a coincidence, but it doesn’t appear that way to the students, who are increasingly seeing a generational war between entrenched, entitled boomers and themselves. Law schools’ legacy will be a severely cynical generation—not something supposedly labor-loving liberal academics see themselves as promoting.

Speaking of Bar Passage Requirements…

I used a good part of my latest Am Law Daily article criticizing the ABA’s bar passage requirements in its accreditation standards, so I would disserve readers by not bringing up the recently proposed standard that would overhaul and standardize the bar passage requirement. (By “standardize” I’m pointing out that the current bar passage requirement (PDF) is just an interpretation deep in the general requirement that law schools prepare people for the bar.) Here’s what the proposed standard says (PDF):

Standard 315. BAR PASSAGE

(a) No later than the end of the second calendar year following their graduation, 80% of the graduates who took a bar examination must have passed a bar examination.

(b) A fully approved law school must demonstrate compliance with this Standard in three of the most recently completed five calendar years.

…

In some ways this is an improvement over the current interpretation. Now, law schools have to track down graduates from as many as five years into the past to find out if they passed the bar, which, as some deans reported to the ABA Journal, is a difficult, tedious task.

The key difference, though, is that the proposed standard requires 80 percent of graduates who take a bar exam to pass it. This means that law schools that admit applicants who have little hope of ever passing a bar exam might instead discourage them from trying to take one at all. Then again, this might be an awkward conversation, especially if it’s accompanied by a cash payment. “Hi graduate. You put a lot of effort into becoming a lawyer, but if you stop to think about it, maybe the bar exam would be a little too hard for you. Here’s $2,000 to consider an ‘alternative’ career for using your JD. You get cash; we get to keep enrolling students who can’t pass the bar. Deal?”

However, the proposed standard does away with the 15-percent-first-time-passage-rate-within-the-state’s-mean-rate requirement, which allows the schools in Puerto Rico to almost certainly maintain their accreditation.

Here’s an apples-to-oranges comparison from the Official Guide:

First-time bar passage isn’t the same as two-calendar-year bar passage, but my guess is that under the proposed standard Pontifical Catholic would lose its accreditation, maybe Inter American too.

‘Why Are There No Puerto Rican Scamblogs?’ on the Am Law Daily

“Why Are There No Puerto Rican Scamblogs?“

A question that needed to be asked.

Here’s some Felt:

********************

First Law School Closes … In Japan

Editorial, “Reviewing Legal Education Reform,” Japan Times.

In the last decade, Japan went on a 74-law-school binge (!!) because too many people were failing its bar exam. The belief was that American-style law schools would better-train people to pass the test. Instead, the result is more law school graduates who’ve wasted a lot of money on a legal education that opens no doors to them. It’s an old, old story that I’ve written on before here and here.

So the Japan Times is back with another editorial on the topic. Now it appears that people have wised up to the Failing-Law-Schools-Japan-Edition, and they’re not applying. The result is that one law school shuttered its doors in March. The government’s current solutions are to drop its 3,000 annual bar passage rate target and consolidate some of the law schools. Kill the metric, not the messenger.

The Times believes the problem is that some law schools are just bad at teaching to the test, not the licensing system itself, so it argues:

The government, bar associations and law schools should redesign the system for nurturing legal professionals. They should think about how to increase [rural] job opportunities for novice lawyers and how to improve legal services for people even if the pace of reform slows.

Although the editorial may be right that the government isn’t willing to analyze “what went wrong,” it too still seems unwilling to admit that American-style legal education doesn’t in any way increase access to legal services or create jobs (except in the law schools). That’s the lesson that’s slowly being learned in the United States with no thanks to resistance from law schools and indifference by licensing authorities. Can someone direct me to the first Japanese law school scamblog?

‘The Real Problem With Law Schools” Real Problem Is Poor Research, Flawed Reasoning

Eric Posner, “The Real Problem With Law Schools (They Train Too Many Lawyers),” Slate.

“A crisis is looming in legal education,” writes the author. Why this isn’t a “student debt crisis” or “jobs crisis” instead of a “legal education crisis” is unclear, but the article earns a response because it so heavily leans on my new favorite logical fallacy, argumentum ad econ one-o-oneum: the misapplication of neoclassical economic principles to a policy (non-)conundrum due to a failure to research the underlying facts, or the misunderstanding of the neoclassical economic principles themselves.

Posner believes that the group of law school professors from mostly prestigious universities who sent a letter to the ABA calling themselves the “Coalition of Concerned Colleagues” “will make the crisis worse than ever.”

If you think that handing vouchers to everyone 18 years and up to attend law school at full cost to the government plus living expenses would be the only way things could get worse than ever (if people still even bother to apply at that), you obviously don’t know economics.

The crisis could have been predicted. Demand for legal services boomed in the 1990s and 2000s. College graduates, drawn by skyrocketing pay and subsidized by government-guaranteed loans, flocked to law school in ever greater numbers. Law schools, rational market actors that they are, hiked tuition. The higher prices people were willing to pay for legal education encouraged universities to enlarge classes and open additional law schools. Not surprisingly, supply overtook demand. The mismatch is now exacerbated by the development of technological substitutes for some legal work, including online services that enable people to fill out legal forms, and a weak economy.

Begin.

(1)  If the “crisis” could have been predicted, did anyone? Did they comment on the government’s decision to nationalize graduate student lending in 2005-06?

(2)  Did demand for legal services boom in the 1990s and 2000s?

(3)  If the federal loans are part of the problem why not cut them?

(4)  Did pay for all lawyers grow in the 1990s/2000s, or just for those lawyers who happened to work in biglaw? Is there a difference between compensation for lawyers and compensation for J.D.s? Was this difference carefully given to applicants on a school-by-school basis? Is it today?

(5)  Did “skyrocketing pay” draw applicants, or was there a correlation to the overall (negative) employment level? If not, then why do deans sometimes argue that people hide out in law school to wait out recessions?

(6)  Did law schools hike tuition before the 1990s? After the 2000s? Do they hike tuition even when the number of applicants drops?

(7)  Does higher demand for legal education influence universities’ decisions to open law schools? If so, why are some law schools still opening after 2010 when demand has already tanked?

(8)  When did supply overtake demand? Supply for what and demand for what? Is demand for legal services the same as demand for legal education?

The “crisis,” then, is just part of the normal cycle of the economy—familiar to anyone who has held a job as construction worker, software engineer, salesman, or journalist. And the market is reacting in a predictable way. Fewer people are applying to law schools; class sizes are shrinking; some law schools may shut down.

But since the 1990s applications have been counter-cyclical: People apply to law schools when they don’t have jobs, now apparently, they’re not.

Posner then argues that the “Coalition of Concerned Colleagues’” proposals don’t “make sense in light of the group’s diagnosis of the problems lawyers face” because:

(a) Reducing the number of years of law school will counterintuitively encourage more applicants, and

(b) It’ll dump lots of lawyers on the market in the transition year.

(b) is right on; (a) is silly. Demand for legal education/law licenses is no longer such that people will apply if it’s cheap even if there are no jobs, and it’s not like law schools are obligated to accept everyone who applies.

(c) More clinical courses raise prices.

True! They also don’t create jobs.

The next one is the kicker:

[Y]ou can’t blame government subsidies for the plight of young lawyers. Government guarantees lower the cost for lawyers to obtain training. If the subsidies create a larger supply of lawyers, it should also create a greater demand for their services, by reducing the costs that they pass on to clients. Depriving students of government-guaranteed loans is hardly a solution to the problem that legal education is too expensive.

(1) Government loans (they’re direct, not guaranteed) enable tuition increases per the Bennett Hypothesis 2.0. Who would be able to afford law school at current prices if Grad PLUS loans were eliminated and bankruptcy protections restored to private loans?

(2) Once the market is saturated, the cost of legal services is determined by demand for legal services. Poorer lawyers will simply quit to work in Wal-Mart or they’ll practice out of a cardboard box. They do not pass their law school costs onto their clients, but things like malpractice insurance, bar fees, etc. create a price floor that makes it harder to serve people who don’t have money.

Posner then argues that loan forgiveness/bankruptcy will create a moral hazard, but IBR has been in operation since 2009 and the mass of IBR freeloaders has yet to apply.

[P]roposals to create a two-year curriculum and other fast-track routes to the bar will mainly help clients by reducing the cost of legal services.

No it will reduce law schools’ incomes. Who benefits? Everyone else.

Did I say that defending unlimited government student lending was the kicker? Ha! This is better:

The only realistic way to help lawyers today is to increase the demand for legal services—somehow convincing governments, for example, to pay for adequate representation of indigent defendants—but in the long term, greater demand will create the expectation of yet more job growth, and that could lead to another bust. The critics seem to think the legal profession can escape the logic of the market. It can’t.

In other words, after the law schools get their cut of the tax base, then the government should tax people to fund services we more urgently need. Readers are invited to enlighten the LSTB as to how an article whose title indicates we should train fewer lawyers can conclude by arguing for not training fewer lawyers.

The worst thing anyone can say about the “Coalition of Concerned Colleagues’” letter to the ABA is that it was too cautious re. the Direct Loan Program, which isn’t even worth a comment on a scamblog. Rather, Posner’s argumentum ad econ one-o-oneum is the only kind of logic we really need to escape from.

Good Recommendations From Illinois Bar Association Report

“Special Committee on the Impact of Law School Debt on the Delivery of Legal Services: Final Report and Recommendations,” Illinois State Bar Association.

Some good primary stuff:

Congress and the Department of Education should place reasonable limits on the amount that law students can borrow from the federal government. Student loans should also be made dischargeable in bankruptcy so private lenders have the incentive to properly screen loan applicants based on the chance that the school they attend will prepare them to be successful in the job market. That way, law schools will have an incentive to restrain costs to the level that students can borrow. If a school fails to do so, most students will not be able to afford to attend, and the school will close. (4)

And go diploma privilege:

Consider Ways to Reduce the Cost of Becoming Licensed: For example, supreme courts could allow qualified students to take the bar exam in February of their third year, thus avoiding the cost of studying for the bar exam after graduation, and reducing the delay before beginning work. Such a proposal should be careful not to restrict the time law students have in their third year to become practice ready. Alternatively, supreme courts should consider offering bar admission to qualified graduates of their state’s law schools without a bar exam. (6)

And some contradictory stuff:

Small Law Firms Face Challenges Hiring and Retaining Competent Attorneys… (1)

But:

The Committee heard testimony from many recent graduates who were unable to obtain any jobs in the private sector or elsewhere paying more than $40,000-$45,000. That fact makes the academic debate about the effect of debt on graduates’ choice between the public sector and the private sector, see supra note 25, somewhat misleading. There may be no significant difference in salary between the two sectors for the many graduates who are unable to obtain higher-paying jobs in the private sector. In addition, many graduates testified that jobs were so scarce that they would take any available job. (Footnote 38, emphasis added)

Because I really can’t ask for much more from a report like this that recommends restoring bankruptcy protections to student loans, curtailing the federal loan program, and easing licensing requirement, I’m not going to waste too much energy on it. However, if the executive summary is going to read, “Exessive Law School Debt Decreases the Quantity and Quality of Legal Services Available to the Public,” then it helps to make sure it’s arguing for the right policies for persuasive reasons.

Specifically, there are two theories of how debt relates to legal services. (1) The Special Committee says that poor people can afford legal services but lawyers’ debts are raising the lawyer labor costs to the point that it’s impossible for both parties to reach an agreement. (2) People like me say demand for legal services is scant because poor people can’t afford much of anything.

If (1) is right, then we’d see much higher employment rates for graduates with less debt than more, as small firms and clients would be able to pay them. Indeed, Southern Illinois’ and Northern Illinois’ 2011 graduates finished with a disbursed amount of debt below $70,000. Assuming none of this is Grad PLUS loans, we’re talking about a ballpark estimate of $6,250 per year in debt service on $75,000 over 25 years. It’s a lot, but it’s not irreparably impossible to service that on $40,000 in annual income (okay, there’s undergrad debt too, but did most NIU/SIU grads go to expensive private universities too?).

Do we see better employment outcomes for NIU and SIU than high-debt schools? Answer: Sometimes:

I think, though, that we’d expect much higher FT/LT lawyer job rates and much lower unemployment levels for the two public law schools. Instead, they’re no better than Illinois’ mid-range private law schools, and employers appear excited at the prospect of employing Chicago and Northwestern grads, even though they should cost quite a bit more. If theory #1 were true, the “market-failure” debt threshold at these schools would’ve been surpassed many years ago.

This is why I believe the second theory is accurate, for it explains how there can be graduates who would take any job no matter what their debt levels are.

As for IBR:

Many public interest attorneys are unwilling to enroll in IBR because, although it lowers an attorney’s monthly payment, any interest unpaid at that payment level continues to accrue. Moreover, the attorney’s debt will not be forgiven until ten years of service in public interest. Funding for public interest jobs is unstable, and an attorney who does not continue in public interest law may have her accrued interest capitalized, leaving the attorney in a worse position than before. In addition, IBR does not cover private loans, the program may penalize a lawyer for the earnings of the lawyer’s spouse, a lawyer’s credit score may still suffer while on IBR, and many attorneys do not expect funding for IBR to continue in a time of government austerity. In addition, some graduates were not aware of the intricacies of IBR and may not be taking advantage of all the features available to them. (2-3)

It’s implausible that people with high Grad PLUS loan levels are not on IBR. I think the Special Committee should have put more effort in determining how many graduates are in the program to bolster its points.

The ‘Law School Rankings’ Are NOT Influential

…Otherwise more people would be searching for them on Google.

The Google Trends of “LSAT” made the rounds a while ago, so I can’t believe no one thought to give the infamous U.S. News law school rankings the same treatment. (I think “law school rankings” captures their influentiality better than “us news” or its derivatives do.) In November 2012, “law school rankings” was not even a tenth as popular as it was in March 2004. That week was a bit of an outlier, as you can see, but it shouldn’t be too surprising as I believe 2004 was the year after the magazine expanded from 50 to 100 ranked law schools. I guess everyone wanted to see how volatile the new rankings were. If you look at the broad 52-week moving average, “law school rankings” starts at 45.65 in week 1, January 2005, and drops to 12.88 last week, a 72 percent decline.

What’s striking is how law school-related searches bubbled upward at about the time Lehman was collapsing, but to no avail. The decline resumes after the October 2009 LSAT, which you can see here:

Here are the 13-week moving averages, showing how all-encompassing the October LSAT is. You can see the compression between the peaks and the troughs that occurs as the years go on.

And here are some test prep search terms to top things off.

Again, October 2009 was peak law school, even if commentators at the time didn’t believe it.

Generally, Google tells us that the law school terms are 70 percent less popular than they were in the mid-2000s and 45 percent less popular than in October 2009. The indexes’ diminution will continue into next year, so don’t say the rankings are influential: People ain’t buyin’ it—or at least, they ain’t searching for it on Google.

Poor People Being Poor Is Not a Paradox

Ethan Bronner, “To Place Graduates, Law Schools Are Opening Firms,” The New York Times.

So Arizona State University is creating a law firm staffed by 30 graduates to handle cases at discount prices. Supposedly. Bronner writes:

The plan is one of a dozen efforts across the country to address two acute — and seemingly contradictory — problems: heavily indebted law graduates with no clients and a vast number of Americans unable to afford a lawyer.

This paradox, fed by the growth of Internet-based legal research and services, is at the heart of a crisis looming over the legal profession after decades of relentless growth and accumulated wealth. It is evident in the sharp drop in law school applications and the increasing numbers of Americans showing up in court without a lawyer.

There has not been relentless growth and accumulated wealth in the legal profession. Redistributed wealth yes, but that’s also true of American society generally. Otherwise, it’s been stagnant for decades.

Also, there is no paradox in new lawyers being unwilling to serve the poor (“seemingly” indeed). Some experience matters, yes, but being able to afford an office, malpractice insurance, bar and CLE fees, etc. also matter too. It’s a lot easier to get a service-sector job and not worry about such risks.

ASU’s plan to create a self-sufficient firm that serves the poor within five years might not work:

“We charge $50 an hour, and I don’t take any pay,” said Dennis A. Gladwell, who runs a smaller firm at the University of Utah with a staff of five graduates started 16 months ago. “If you are going to charge $125, you are not going to serve an underserved population.” Mr. Gladwell, who retired as a partner from the big firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, also said that despite having asked top local firms to send along cases they considered too small for themselves, none responded.

Ouch.

But more importantly, the school-firm idea, which I’m totally okay with, only works if you agree that lack of training is causing the poor to be underserved—and not poverty. If poverty is the culprit, then the school-firm will do one of two things: (a) “lose” money (higher tuition anyone?) to serve the poor, or (b) not serve the poor at all as Gladwell observes.

The Recession Precedes the Financial Crisis…

…Not the other way around.

It’s when people are unable to repay their debts that the banks start running aground, except when the loans are nondischargeable and either pre-TARPed by the government (guaranteed FFEL loans) or auto-TARPing (direct loans). Then the problem is wholly different: The loan balances simply grow like a cancerous polyp on aggregate consumer credit reports. And this is what’s happening—not that the Fed believes it.

Enter the New York Fed’s recent “Household Debt and Credit Card Report” on student loan debt. In the “Special Section: Student Loan Debt,” it reads:

Higher education is crucial to improving the skill level of American workers, especially in the face of rising skill premiums and a relatively unfavorable labor market for less skilled workers. Due to increasing enrollment and the rising cost of higher education, student loans play an increasingly important role in financing higher education, and student debt is the only kind of household debt that continued to rise through the Great Recession.

…Which I take to mean that the Fed also believes that we can’t possibly create a “favorable labor market for less-skilled workers” and so we must—MUST—educate them via debt.

 

So the delinquency rates are sky-high. Note that these estimates mix federal and private debt.

Let’s create a parallel universe where the loans are dischargeable in chapter 7 and after a chapter 13 repayment plan. What would we see? For one, the debt levels wouldn’t be increasing through the depression:

Student debt is the only kind of household debt that continued to rise through the Great Recession and now has the second largest balance after mortgage debt.

These are not good things. Rising debt without rising growth is very bad.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Fed’s economists don’t speak as boldly about higher-ed-for-all as the report does, but there is a kernel of dread slowly growing from the denial. “The high delinquency rate is very worrisome, said Wilbert van der Klaauw, an economist with the New York Fed, noting that higher education has traditionally produced a sizable financial payoff. ‘We hope the returns to these educational investments are going to be there” as the labor market rebounds, he added.’”

The good news for the Fed—other than the fact that none of its economists will lose their jobs for failing to observe the obvious—is that the student loan bubble can’t destroy the economy, unless private lenders lend out, like, another $4 trillion on top of their mere $150 billion. It is, however, embarrassing for the government to say that its loans are “traditionally” good debt when a third of the youngest debtors are delinquent, and it’s slowing growth because it’s a capitation tax on our supposedly most-productive workers. The shortfall to bondholders can be paid with rich people’s taxes; your living standards won’t be reduced a whit (unless the government really does decide to levy a capitation tax).

The bad news is that the government still doesn’t really care if people are defaulting on the loans.

Illinois Bar President: The J.D. Production Shall Continue!

Don Dodson, “Thies: Law School Debt ‘Unsustainable’ Over Long Term,” The News-Gazette.

At a University of Illinois College of Law event, Illinois State Bar Association president John Thies said:

[O]ver the long term, that kind of debt for legal education [$100,000 + undergrad] is “unsustainable,” given salaries in the profession.

Jobs that pay enough to satisfy the debt payments aren’t forthcoming, he said.

“I don’t see salaries changing,” Thies said. “What’s got to change is cost.”

This much is true, but the rest is confused. Thies does not believe that law school could be cut to two years, but it should be changed to make lawyers “practice-ready.” President Thies also created a task force to study the effects student debt is having on Illinois’ legal services.

For example, small law firms — those with fewer than 10 employees — may not be able to afford people who have to pay off high law school debt.

It’s strange that President Thies needed to convene a task force when the ABA already tells us how many graduates of Illinois law schools are working in small practice environments. For example, as of a year ago, 14.7 percent and 1.7 percent of Illinois’ law schools’ 2011 graduates were working full-time long-term in 2-10-person practices and solo practices, respectively. For 2010 grads, those numbers were 15.7 percent and 2.0 percent, respectively. Most of these practices were probably in Illinois. Given also that law school graduates can go on IBR, it’s questionable that student debt should matter at all for small practitioners looking to hire in a glutted market. It would appear the Illinois State Bar Association is wasting a lot of time researching a non-problem.

One student in the audience reported hearing a story of someone still paying off law school debt from 1993.

Thies said he didn’t doubt that. He said some have described law school debt as “the mortgage for a house I can’t live in” and “the debt I’ll die with.”

Given that 85 percent of U Illinois’ 2011 grads had an average of debt load of $90,000 in principal at graduation, this student is probably not far behind.

One student asked why, if law school costs are so high, aren’t fewer students applying to law school.

Thies said applications to law schools have dropped substantially the last two years.

Do law students even read the news?? Like, the applicant nosedive can drive news cycles autochthonously. It’s pretty frakked up—just not as much as law students who are clueless about it.

[Thies] said the nation “may have too many law schools.” But he dismissed any notion that there are too many lawyers or law students, saying there’s “a tremendous need” for legal services.

When asked what reforms law schools should make, Thies said he didn’t want to pre-empt the task force’s recommendations. But he said arrangements could be made to match law school students with “aging baby-boomers” in private practice so the young lawyers can eventually take over the practice.

He also said law schools could do a better job facilitating internships and externships for students, recognizing that many students can’t afford to serve unpaid.

So we should pack the same number of students into fewer law schools? The correct answer is that we have the exact right number of lawyers the market can bear, but (a) we need poor people to earn more money to afford legal services, and (b) we have too many law school students and graduates nonetheless. I don’t think there are enough aging baby-boomer lawyers in private practice to go around. I’d also like to know who will pay for the interns and externs. Conscripting law schools into finding these kinds of placements hints of Lysenkoist quotas used in the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward.