Failing Law Schools: Japan Edition

Editorial, “Law School Enrollment Blues,” in Japan Times

Perhaps the right rate of expansion for law schools was miscalculated.

In Japan, newspapers don’t throw up their hands and blame applicants; they sometimes criticize the government’s goals. That said, I cherish the Japan Times mistakes-were-made passive voice.

Recruitment failed to meet enrollment goals at 63 of Japan’s 73 law schools in 2011. The number of students enrolled was less than half the quota at 35 law schools, compared with only 14 under-filled schools last year.

Twenty law schools had fewer than 10 new students. The Justice Ministry’s plan to increase the number of lawyers in the country, begun in 2004 with the opening of new law schools and the introduction of a new bar exam, needs serious reassessment.

Yeah, most people who have passing knowledge on Japan’s Justice Ministry’s plan know it’s completely failed. I wrote about it last year here, “Quick Link: In Japan, Blame for Widespread Bar Exam Failure Placed on Exam, Not Scores of ‘La Vernes’,” if you’re enamored with the topic. I also bring it up because the ABA provisionally re-accredited California’s University of La Verne, despite its low bar passage rate. I’m not looking into whether it’s improved since 2011 right now, but La Verne has obviously been included in ABA or LSAC data even though it had lost its accreditation.

As for the Japan Times editorial, it veers off course, which is sad because it’s usually a good publication.

Still, the need for more lawyers is evident. Japan has one lawyer for every 4,119 people, compared with one lawyer for every 250 people in the United States. More lawyers are needed, for example, for businesses expanding abroad and for clearing up the aftermath of the Tohoku disaster. In addition, judges, prosecutors and other law professionals are needed to develop Japan’s domestic legal system, both civil and criminal.

In the above link, I searched up and down for evidence that the new law schools were justified on “lawyers per capita” reasons, but I couldn’t find it. The passage here is as good as any. It’s still a bad justification. The U.S. is a common law country, not a civil law one, and there are all kinds of rationalizations/gimmicks for why there’s not more litigation in Japan, ranging from increased reliance on mediation to resolve disputes (at all levels), Japan being a low-litigious society, to requiring plaintiffs to pay large filing fees.

Also, as far as I’m concerned, the 1:250 ratio is not the one I’d use. It’s probably the ABA’s number of lawyers active and resident in the United States, which includes down-to-earth folk like me who ain’t a-practicing. Given the 35-year rate of law degrees, the ratio is 1:231, which at least implies that the number of ABA grads who don’t take or pass a bar exam is fairly low. This appears good. The reality, though is that the ratio of employed lawyers is much lower. Nearly 1:300 for the Current Population Survey and 1:425 by the Occupational Outlook Handbook. This of course means there are more legally educated Americans than lawyer/judge/clerk/government jobs for them. Not a shining comparison to aspire to.

As for the Japan Times excuse of needing lawyers to clean up Tohoku and to “develop” the law, I doubt the attorney shortage will hamper any litigation against the government for radiation discharges that are less than what you get when flying on an airplane.

The editorial rights its footing on blaming the applicant drop on the country’s improved bar exam: only a quarter of test-takers pass it, which means law schools are better off teaching the test in order to stay alive rather than “how the law actually works”—whatever that means.

Japan needs a more realistic exam with questions pertaining to the theory as well as the practice of law. Lawyers, like doctors and teachers, also benefit greatly from an apprentice system that provides hands-on experience.

These are good ideas. A professional licensing system is costly to either consumers of their services, the professionals, or the public if it nationalizes the education system. To the extent that licensing works, easing the costs while improving training is the only solution.

The editorial moans:

Many aspiring students have spent millions of yen, often at both law and cram schools, only to fail the bar exam repeatedly.

Hey, at least they didn’t put six figures of debt into IBR.

Fix Law School Deans

Boston College Law School dean Vincent Rougeau, “Fix Law Schools,” in the Atlantic

As I wait for the 2013 Official Guide, the Atlantic runs a piece by Boston College Law School’s dean, Vincent Rougeau.

Legal education is in crisis. A primary reason is that the jobs and high pay that used to greet new attorneys at large firms are gone, wiped away by innovations such as software that takes seconds to do the document discovery that once occupied junior attorneys for scores of (billable) hours while they learned their profession.

Most law school graduates either choose not to work in Biglaw or never have the choice. Dean Rougeau’s “primary reason” is revisionism. This sets the tone for today’s frolic.

Some newly minted J.D.s have sought poetic justice—by suing their alma maters for inflating postgraduate employment data.

Condescension. The people suing their law schools believe they are seeking actual justice, as in, their law school took their debt dollars knowing full well that they wouldn’t be able to pay it down with the kinds of jobs and salaries they received and deliberately telling them otherwise.

Critics from within and without are rightly calling on law schools to provide transparent employment and salary data, to cut the cost of a legal education by trimming course requirements, and to elevate clinical and practical study over the theoretical. And yet these ideas fall short of the rethinking of legal education that the times demand.

Rethinking as in eliminating law school as a three-year post-baccalaureate exercise altogether? Bold words Dean, bold words.

To begin with, law schools need to do their best to turn away prospective students who are in it for the money. Would-be lawyers have to be taught to see the law not as a path to wealth, but as what it has been historically—a respectable middle-class profession. Too many of our current applicants do not see the law this way—and we need to bring them to clarity, even at the risk of driving them into M.B.A. or engineering programs.

Step one of Dean Rougeau’s vision of “rethinking” legal education is based on a flawed assumption: Demand for legal services is not determined by the character of law school applicants. Purity of heart does not create clients who are willing to pay lawyers for their services no matter how low their rates are. Moreover, Dean Rougeau gives us no reason to believe that lawyers who shave their heads and live in cardboard boxes begging for cases and alms on the courthouse steps will be more effective than those who want to receive a fair income for their labor.

Second, wasn’t the whole point of transparent salary and employment data based on the fact that law schools had this information but were manipulating it to entice people to apply? Also, above the dean wrote that legal education’s crisis was due to the loss of Biglaw jobs, now suddenly it’s in “middle-class profession” law. Third, if Dean Rougeau can read applicants’ minds, why doesn’t he just instruct his admissions departments to reject the selfish greedy ones?

Yet reject applicants Boston College does. So many, in fact, that although it regularly ranks well in U.S. News and World Report, it’s unusually unpopular with its remaining accepted applicants. Between 2004 and 2010, BC accepted an average of 19.5 percent of its full-time applicants, and of them, only one in five matriculated. Compared to other law schools along these criteria, Boston College is “scavenger” whose niche is drawing on the handful of applicants who couldn’t get into Harvard. Its selectivity regarding its applicants—to the point of knowing that only a fraction will ultimately show up in the fall—demonstrates that BC knows full well that its applicants see it as a school that can deliver solid employment contacts, albeit as the worst good law school they could get into. If Dean Rougeau were interested in ensuring those who apply to law school don’t expect anything more than a “middle-class profession” he is welcome to alter his school’s perception to that of a small practice pump’s, by cutting costs and faculty.

Finally, Boston College is also noteworthy for operating in one of the densest law school markets in the country. If Dean Rougeau is so concerned about law school graduates’ welfare, perhaps he should demand that unneeded Massachusetts law schools close. For instance, UMass recently received provisional ABA accreditation. It may be a public law school but perhaps it’s unnecessary?

[L]aw schools need to devise programs for new-lawyer training to replace those that the law firms have stopped underwriting. Here, the legal world should look to that hallmark of medical education—the hospital internship. Like medical interns, law interns would not expect to draw high salaries. Law practices could support such programs, which might replace the third year of law school, dramatically reducing tuition costs while giving graduates a chance to live the profession before determining a career path—perhaps unencumbered by a $100,000 debt.

Or BC could cut tuition and lay off excess faculty. Also, Medicare pays for doctors’ residencies. Who exactly will pay for new lawyer training? Firms and clients? There’s no significant demand for new lawyers as there are swarms of underemployed ones, so that’s out. Law schools won’t pay for it because they’re in the money-making business not lawyer-training charities. That leaves the students? Sure a legal residency might be cheaper than the third year of law school, but supply of better trained lawyers still does not create demand for legal services.

In short, deans interested in fixing law schools should start by fixing their assumptions.

An Editorial about the State of Georgism and Land Value Taxation (because I’m on break)

A little off-topic fun because I’m out of town relaxing.

Dedicated readers might have noticed that in my less law schooly posts, I’ve recently mentioned Henry George and land value taxation (LVT) (examples here and here). This is something that caught my interest sometime late last year, and I’m slowly slogging through George’s 1879 masterwork, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. So popular was this book that supposedly by the end of the 19^th century Henry George was the third most famous person in the United States after Mark Twain and Thomas Edison.

The read is taking me a while because I’m a masochist for reading the original unabridged version, which the famous New York City bookstore, the Strand, didn’t carry. (Big raspberries, but this is why the Internet blesses us with free public domain books.) George is a fun writer, though his 19^th century treatise-ish prose, which demands parsing numerous clauses interjected into simple sentences, a style I discourage people from emulating for the sake of reader’s sanity, a necessary consideration, can make the book a slow read. The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, whose purpose is to promote Georgism and keep Progress and Poverty in print (to the extent it needs to), has an abridged version meant for the modern reader on the go.

Henry George’s argument is quite simple, and largely rehashes the one made by the physiocrats in 18^th century France, their more famous successor Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and a few others: poverty exists because the government’s land title system gives unearned income (due to population growth and technological progress) to land owners. Depressions occur because cheap land cannot be moved to where values are rising, and at some point cheap credit leads to a land bubble and a bust. Essentially, it argues that the “business cycle” is really a “land cycle,” much like the way that centrifugal force (the feeling of being flung outward from a rotating object) is fictitious while centripetal force (the actual force directed toward the center of a rotating object) is not. Taxing land value forces capital to move to more productive activities, creating jobs, raising wages, and inhibiting bubbles. The recent real estate bubble in the U.S. demonstrates that George was proven right once again.

From the Wikipedia: “Note that the burden of the tax is entirely on the landowner, and there is no deadweight loss.”

The question dogging my survey is why I didn’t learn about Georgism until after I had accumulated college degrees, a law degree, and a master’s degree (even my 5^th grade public school social studies class discussed communism). Georgism had its heyday in the Progressive era, but I always learned of that period as one of socialists, labor unions, big strikes, plutocrats, trust busting, and of course, Marxism—nothing about the single-tax movement. I didn’t know that Cleveland mayor Tom Johnson and one of his successors, Newton Baker, were both Georgists, and the former led the city into a period of massive population growth by putting George’s theory into practice, mainly to ensure that the city’s trolley system would only cost 3¢ a ride (that’s 15-20¢ in today’s dollars; imagine that!). Baker was floated as the 1932 Democratic Party nominee until supposedly William Randolph Hearst began to enthusiastically support FDR (Note: San Simeon is the real-life Xanadu from Citizen Kane). Even so, by then, progressives like Louisiana governor Huey Long weren’t really Georgists, but were populists more in favor of taxing wealth generally.

The problem as I see it is that most contemporary economists simply don’t take George seriously since he was more of a journalist rabble-rouser than an academic (dibs on “Henry George: The First Scamblogger” or something like that). Indeed, supposedly the Chicago School of Economics was established solely to refute him. On the other hand, leftist populists see him as one of many progressive reformers during that time period. At least, that’s the impression I got from reading Howard Zinn’s half-page on Henry George in A People’s History of the United States. The other political factors, I think, are a combination of eastern European immigrants bringing Karl Marx (who never separated land from capital) with them to the U.S. and World War I.

Unfortunately, if I’d’ve known of Georgism before 2009 I would’ve been very surprised that his theory hadn’t been rediscovered by liberals. Instead, most mainstream liberal economists—if that’s sensible, but you get the idea—are more interested in reviving John Maynard Keynes, an otherwise conventional academic whose thoughts were largely buried by the stagflation of the 1970s. True, increased government spending would increase GDP and therefore put people to work, but as George would point out, a portion of the benefits would get sucked up into untaxed land values. For example, landowners near the ARC tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York would receive free money from the government for doing nothing.

Instead the only economists I do see writing about George are either sincere Georgists such as Masson Gaffney (who’s been writing about it for decades), Fred Foldvary, and Polly Cleveland (I’m sure there are others); or, for some reason, economists at George Mason University (Tyler Cowan and Bryan Caplan spring to mind) who acknowledge George yet systemically misunderstand his arguments.

This leaves the only nationally read person I know of who writes about land use: Slate‘s Matthew Yglesias, who though wrote a post titled, “Property Taxes Are A Barbarous Relic: Tax The Value of Land Instead,” and even a book The Rent Is Too Damn High, does not write about Henry George, any of the other economists before or after him who favored LVT, or the occasional successes of the single-tax movement. Your Google search may fare better than mine, but I think this omission is tragic because not only does it show a superficial treatment of the topic, but it also leaves LVT’s persuasive force on the table.

In a period of mass unemployment, global warming, and an emerging generation of Americans excluded from prosperity, there’s no better time for the American left to rediscover Henry George, for just as the theory behind tapping land value for public use is sound, so too is tapping George’s memory as a political force for reform similarly sound.

**********

For more information on the topic, here are some links:

• http://www.wealthandwant.com/ – A massive repository on Geogist knowledge
• [I linked above to Mason Gaffney’s Web site, but his “Progress and Poverty study guide” is helpful for those reading George’s treatise. Money quote: “Social class, and the class content of education, are the results of unequal distribution of property. For example, you might learn just as much law at Citrus Belt night school [now California Southern University Law School, non-ABA] as at Stanford Law School, the most expensive one in the USA [this was written in 2000], but the contacts and references aren’t the same.”]
• LVTFan’s Blog
• Systemic Fiscal Reform – A British proposal for shifting taxes onto land
• The Henry George Institute

Free LSAC Ride Is Over

The LSAC’s Current Volume Summary, which everyone kept linking to to show that supposedly the “wrong people” were still applying to law school, is now behind a subscription wall available only to law school admissions staff. Here’s how this year looked as of May 4, 2012. I think the June one was available but I didn’t get to it.

Fortunately, I downloaded all the PDFs going back to the fall 2008 app cycle. Should help in making multi-year comparisons over applicant tea leaves.

I’m out of town right now, so I don’t expect to write much this week.

Tough Choices for Some High-Ranked Law Schools

During the peak of the applications cycle, local newspapers have often run pieces about how their locale’s law schools are faring. Examples I’ve seen are here for Chicago and here for Ohio State, specifically. They frequently include details about how many applications each local law school is receiving, which is somewhat useful, but I always feel like I’m not getting the full picture because the deans the papers interview only know how many people are applying to their own schools and not the characteristics of the total applicant pool. If applicants are sending out more applications than before (they are), the deans won’t be in a position to tell us, so it’s like commenting on the size of a dust cloud without knowing the amount of dust inside it.

These articles also bring with them factual problems. The authors don’t distinguish between applicants and applications when it’s relevant, how many people are applying part-time or full-time (not that the authors’d know but they don’t ask), and even the number of applicants over the last few cycles for comparison. For instance, the Ohio State Lantern piece opens with, “For years there has been a surge of students applying to law school, but the trend has reversed nationwide, and the Ohio State Moritz College of Law is no exception.” This is the “surge” thanks to LSAC data:

I don’t know what the definition of “surge” is in this context, especially since the Lantern doesn’t comment on what happened in the mid-2000s, but the bump in the late 2000s is only slightly ahead of working-age population growth. Oh, and while we’re here, 2011 was bad for law schools, and according to my dotted-line projection, this fall is going to be really bad.

Here’s a line from the Chicago piece:

“Loyola will have about the same number of applicants this year as it did five years ago, said David Yellen, dean of the law school. There was a huge increase in applications during the recession as undergraduates postponed entering the job market and went to graduate school.”

Again, this only tells us how many people are interested in that one school relative to previous years. No one can tell us how many people applied to at least one law school in Illinois, how many were accepted, and how many applied full- or part-time. Instead, we have to turn to back issues of the Official Guide, which means lots and lots of data entry and gumshoe work … Which I managed to pull off but for full-time applicants only: not all law schools have part-time programs, part-timers tend to be in a different, older demographic that law school watchers don’t seem as interested in analyzing, and I don’t have unlimited time and patience to bang the numbers into a spreadsheet. Here’s the full-time data for Illinois, for those who are curious.

All this tells us is that Illinois’ law schools are accepting more of their applicants; the statewide acceptance rate grew from about 25 percent to 30 percent, and some schools, like Southern Illinois, accept more than half of their full-time applicants. Meanwhile the number of people who showed up—the ultimate gauge of law school interest—remained the same throughout at about 2,000. Ideally, we’d know how many people Illinois law schools rejected, but if the most accommodating law school rejects only 300-450 applicants per year on average in this time period, it would seem that the fluctuations in the applicant pool isn’t that remarkable. This makes relying on deans’ knowledge of applications to their own schools a dubious reporting move.

On the regional level, things look different: The late 2000’s “surge,” at least for full-time applicants, is very much localized along the east coast, particularly in the southeast, e.g. North Carolina.

As 2007 was the applications peak, here is the matriculations comparison between 2007 and 2010:

Much of this is due to the fact that since 2004, the southeast gained seven law schools, including Ave Maria, which moved to Florida from Michigan in 2008. That’s 16 percent growth, much greater than elsewhere. By contrast, places like the Great Lakes really haven’t changed a lot, aside from losing Ave Maria. Cooley’s branch campuses are only for part-timers, I think, so they don’t affect the outcome (one more reason to stick with full-timers).

Too bad the press isn’t interviewing Wake Forest’s dean. It’s missed a good show.

This exercise has left me with a complete dataset on full-time law school applications, acceptances, and matriculations from 2004-2010. Nice. Since higher education institutions of all stripes are often judged by their “applicant yield,” the percentage of admitted applicants who matriculated, I wondered how this compared to their acceptance rates. Previously, I’d thought that the correlation would be clear: the more selective the school the higher the applicant yield. This in fact is not the case, and to my surprise, there are a bunch of law schools in the higher echelons that are not very popular with their applicants. These law schools are scavenging applicants that typically apply to law schools with very highest U.S. News rankings. To test this, I took the average acceptance rate since 2004, along with the average yield, and cut them into quintiles. The following law schools are “Golden,” that is, they have are in the lowest quintile of acceptance rates and the highest in applicant yields, in alphabetical order by state:

• Arkansas at Little Rock
• Stanford
• Yale
• Hawaii
• Maryland
• Harvard
• New Mexico
• North Carolina
• North Carolina Central

Not too many surprises there. Here are the “Indie” law schools, ones that are accommodating yet popular among accepted applicants (highest quintile for acceptances, highest for matriculations):

• Faulkner
• Southern Illinois
• Nebraska
• Duquesne
• Pontifical Catholic (Puerto Rico)
• South Dakota
• Liberty
• Regent

Again, few surprises, mostly western state public schools and the last two having a strong Christian bent. Here are the “Marginal” law schools (very accommodating, low yields):

• Phoenix
• Golden Gate
• Florida Coastal
• Miami
• New England
• Western New England
• Thomas M. Cooley
• Charlotte
• Dayton
• Appalachian

I believe Phoenix, Florida Coastal, and Charlotte are for-profit institutions. And finally, our list of scavengers, the group I find interesting:

• Southern California
• American
• George Washington
• Georgetown
• Boston College
• Cornell
• Duke
• Vanderbilt
• George Mason
• William and Mary

Three of these are in D.C., and all of them made the top 50 in U.S. News‘ last two rankings. To give you an idea how ferocious competition is among them for the handful of applicants whose LSAT scores are so high you’d think they could levitate objects with their minds, Chicago barely made it off the list.

Here’s what they look like graphed together, plus the remaining T14 law schools.

The one in the upper left is Yale, the lowermost left, Southern California, the three in the upper right are the Puerto Rican law schools, and in the lower right, Cooley (Phoenix is above it). Although the marginal law schools are the ones that face imminent applicant crisis, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the scavengers. There will be far fewer quality applicants this year, so these law schools will either cut their class sizes (whether they announce it or not) or they’ll have to accept mere-mortal applicants and risk reducing their rankings.