Sunday, February 17, 2013

The End of Low Tier Law "Schools"

The end is near.

Hopefully this will mean less desperate (and crappy lawyers) taking on and launching frivolous cases to pay back their student loans.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Doubt it. One of the central memes of the left is the idea that education is directly tied to outcomes. If things ate bad, education is always a solution. Not making the government less of a burden, not removing resource sucks like welfare for illegals, not culling the more pointless examples of regulation, not going to town with a tomahawk on the financial services industry. Education.

Brendan said...

I agree. To me, we would do well to eliminate at the very least the bottom 50% of the existing US law schools -- they're just not necessary. I'd personally go even further and only leave the top 25% left. We don't need more lawyers than that and if we restrict it that way we end up with better lawyers than we have because very few people would be able to become lawyers.

Anonymous said...

I'd like to see a reversion to the time when it was possible to become a lawyer purely by articling, i.e. by a pure apprentice system. This would reduce the number of lawyers and judges who are leftist freakazoids.

Anonymous said...

The do this because it's a quick buck. What does it take to have a law school? A few lecture halls, a library, and administration. Cheap to assemble, and profits from the enrollment are handsome for the school.

Meanwhile, the STEM courses take a lot of money to train, especially if they give practical training to the students. All those labs, supplies, and the like are quite expensive.

Unknown said...

Speaking of law school, my sister is going to stay in Georgia and go to a school in Atlanta, so she's probably not going to end up in as much debt as I thought, but I still think there are too many lawyers and not enough people doing economically productive stuff in America.

Combine that with lower taxes, a much more passive Federal Reserve policy (no more targeting inflation, QE1 to stabilize prices and nothing more), getting the cronies out of government and less pork barrel spending and we could have a much more vibrant economy, although ultimately, I would like to see some type of free market banking system at work, even if it ended up being a fractional reserve system.

Mike Shanklin posted this excellent David Friedman video that I think you'd like where he sorts of explains how a free market fractional reserve banking system would work and even gets into explaining some of the differences between the Austrian and Chicago Schools of economic thought. To be honest, I'm probably am somewhere in between, but I don't like getting caught up in arbitrary labels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDK-hLOqZZk

Offshore Legal said...

"Hi, this is Chip from legal support."

Aeoli Pera said...

"Hi Chip, I fell on my ass in my own driveway and I want money for it."

"I'll need a moment to get my supervisor."

Blinding Buddha said...

looks like the economy is little by little becoming tighter. Those colleges you see pop up everywhere are slowly bleeding to death because the money will slowly begin to flow more slowly. Besides we already have too many lawyers running around that the market has become saturated.
Lawyers come a dime a dozen so if the colleges that provide law degrees do not go under the thousands of lawyers entering the field will make getting a law job extremely difficult and not as profitable as before.
Too much of a good thing is not good for anyone.

Dance...dance to the radio said...

I am looking forward to the day when online education supplants many of the brick and mortar institutions.
I hope it happens in the six years before my kids graduate high school.

Rumbear said...

I could sue ya for that comment...but I won't. Professional courtesy.

Tubby Tew said...

So the school has a high rate of grads defaulting and brags about the low loan balance that grads have to pay off. Obviously too many are getting a free ride with gubmint money and they are even too incompetent to pay back the modest debt they incur.

Ryan said...

All law schools are a rip off, especially the lousy ones. This is a good thing. One thing I'd like to clarify, though.

It takes an especially dumb lawyer to think they can pay off a student loan by taking a frivilous claim on contingency. Contingency means the lawywer pays the upfront costs and only gets their investment recouped if they win. This provides a very powerful incentive to only take on cases that have merit.

See, for example: http://imgur.com/3bNqUn5

That guy would only have resorted to placing an add in the newspaper because every malpractice lawyer he approached with his case rejected him.

In the Frigid North said...

Anon 10:34 - law faculties are significantly more expensive than ordinary professors, since they theoretically could go get well-compensated private sector jobs (although they'd never want something so demanding and practical; most now are unsullied by law firm experience, going from clerkship to fellowship to professorship).

Also, if you ever doubt the uselessness of the modern law prof, remember this - the journals are student run. Law students (especially Law Reviewers) being prestige-obsessed they tend to care more about the name on the piece than the content within, leading to sclerotic and incestuous scholarship.