Mark Thoma Will Never Appear on the Today Show

Economist Mark Thoma writes, “If the distribution of income is distorted by monopoly power, political power, and other market failures (e.g. taking advantage of informational asymmetries to sell questionable assets to unsuspecting customers who are reassured by triple A ratings, and so on), then taxing away some of the money and redistributing it to where [...]

The Nearsightedness of Career Services

William A. Chamberlain, “Law Schools are Adapting to the Shifting Job Market,” in the National Law Journal I think the best response to Northwestern dean Bill Chamberlain’s piece is some good old press beating. “In 2011, law schools came under fire for charging excessive tuition, strapping graduates with unmanageable debt and for allegedly publishing incomplete [...]

NPR Asks If Law Schools ‘Cook Their Employment Numbers’

Larry Abramson, “Do Law Schools Cook Their Employment Numbers?” National Public Radio Much of the piece is a rehash of law schools luring students in with juked employment numbers. To that extent, it tells us nothing new. Moreover, the problem I’m having with these types of pieces that characterize the problem as graduates vs. law [...]

Two Worlds, Side by Side: ABA Journal & Letter from Law School

I received a letter from my law school subtly informing me that my name would be placed on “the permanent donor wall located near the entrance” if I gave a gift or commitment of $5,000. The same day, the ABA Journal published Bill Henderson’s article titled, “The Law School Bubble: How Long Will It Last [...]

The Law School Problem Is Vertical, Not Horizontal as Most Law Professors Believe

I take [the LawScam critique] to be that legal education is hoodwinking prospective law students into law school and conspiring to produce an oversupply of lawyers that face diminished job prospects and crippling debt loads. –Usha Rodrigues (Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia), “ScamLaw: The Master’s Forum,” The Conglomerate So, if I’m right, then [...]

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 [...]

Wait, Did Cooley Expose Itself to Liability with Its “Report One”?

One thing I forgot to mention in my post about Cooley’s “Report One: National Employment” and then I’m off to the Mets/Brewers game. Recall Cooley closed with this: In sum, the data shows that the blogs and media segment have it almost completely wrong. Unbiased national data from the past ten years establishes that the [...]

Cooley Embarrasses the Legal Profession with Its “Report One: National Employment”

The purpose of Report One is to insert the nation’s most authoritative employment data into the public dialogue about the national legal employment picture. Since the onset of the recession and during the slow recovery, this public dialogue has been dominated by bloggers and a small element within the media. According to their posts and [...]

A Reading List for the “Conversation about Employment in the Law and Legal Occupations”

Expressing relief at not being named in Cooley’s lawsuit against four John Doe bloggers, BIDER’s Angel includes the e-mail by Cooley’s president, Don LeDuc, to his students assuaging their possible concerns that their law degrees may not be very marketable. He writes: The entire conversation about employment in the law and legal occupations is almost [...]

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 [...]