Michael quotes John Coates about the changes that are coming–like paralegals doing closings and writing wills. What’s strange to my ears is that Coates is talking about this as something we’ll see in the future. Hmm. The last residential real estate closing I attended was run by a paralegal. The only lawyer in the room was me and that’s because I was the buyer. A lot of my former students who practice in wills use paralegals to do initial interviews with clients and to draft the wills. And that doesn’t begin to get at the lay people who use Quicken Will Maker–heck, that’s what I use when someone asks me to write a simple will for them! Back in the day when I was at legal aid I used to dealt with a lot of clients in the wake of “do it yourself divorces” prepared by a “typing service.”

Hey man, the days of non-lawyers doing a lot of what we think of as practicing law are upon us.

What’s this mean for legal education? There are continual calls to make it cheaper. There are a lot of options out there in legal education already–what, 180 or so law schools. This market already has a lot of players–including some proprietary schools. So I’d think that some of those schools are doing the best the can to deliver a desirable product at an affordable price. In terms of ABA accredited schools, Jones School of Law, which I think about because they’re my neighbor here in Alabama, charges $12,000 per year; Massachusetts School of Law is just over $13,000 per year. State schools can be a real bargain. North Carolina Central charges something less than $5000 per year for North Carolina residents! And then there’s the on-line alternative. Concord Law School–an on-line school–charges $8900 per year in tuition. So there are some cheaper alternatives already out there.

That leads me to wonder, about the economics of this, though–because we keep hearing people say competition should drive down the cost of law school education. If you’re interested in a providing a serviceable education, just how cheaply could you run a law school? I’m going to pull some numbers together here–sort of fanciful and we can play with these a little. Let’s think about a school of 200 students/class (600 students overall). Those 600 students will take 30 hours each per year, in classes that are each 3 hours long (or 10 classes). Each of those 10 classes will have 60 students in it. So we’d need to 100 classes to teach those students. (Another way of thinking about this is 600 students per year will need 30 credit hours each, for a total of 18,000 credit hours, which would be provided in block of 3 credits each to 60 students.) We’re going to have a teaching, not a writing school, so faculty will teach three three credit classes each semester. (Each faculty member will teach 360 student credit hours per year.) That means we’d need a faculty of seventeen to offer those courses. Let’s think about getting faculty for a relatively small amount of money. Can we hire and retain faculty paying, on average, $80,000/ year? Plus benefits, let’s say each faculty member costs $120,000. Maybe some of this can be done with adjuncts, to keep costs down. That’s just over $2 million dollars for faculty. We still need to have an administration (a dean and associate dean, a registrar, an admissions office, a placement office–would be hard to run a school with fewer than 10 administrators and staff, I’d think) and something in terms of a library and, of course, a facility and all that needs to be maintained. Can we get serviceable facilities and a bare bones administration for $2 million. Can we do this all for a total of $4 million? Maybe–I admit these numbers are rough and maybe it’s possible to get serviceable facilities for less than I’m guessing. A lot depends on location, obviously. The numbers are now becoming a little fanciful. So $4 million divided by 600 students is about $6600 per year per student. That’s a bare-bones operation (no moot court or trial ad teams; no clinic; high student-faculty ratio; minimal library; no cafeteria service; no law review; not much in the way of photocopying; no conferences). But remember we’re trying to do this in a way that minimizes costs and still delivers a serviceable product.

And also remember that’s not a whole lot cheaper than some of our nation’s best (state) law schools charge their students in tuition. (Now the question whether state taxpayers should be subsidizing a law school is an entirely separate issue, on which I have substantial question. ) But right now the issue is: can we offer a serviceable product for much less than we do already? I’m not sure the answer’s yes.

At this point you may be thinking, “wow, this sounds a lot like Alexander Pope–’whatever is, is right.’” I don’t mean to be too much a defender of the present system, but I think when we start thinking about alternatives we ought to try to bring some realism in terms of how difficult it would be to improve on the present system (at least in terms of cost).

Now, Michael suggested some other alternatives, like a two year program or perhaps allowing paralegals to write wills on their own, without supervision from lawyers. Let’s talk about this at some point.

And, just to make Belle’s life easier (because she’s summarizing all this stuff)–let me say a key point of this post is that amidst calls for more law schools, I question whether increased competition by adding schools will significantly decrease the costs of education.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the need to focus on the quality of scholarship, rather than its placement. Here are some interesting data points on this score. Last summer a terrific r.a. (Joseph Sherman) looked at the citations to articles that appeared about fifteen years ago in about a dozen leading law journals. We looked at some of the very most prestigious journals (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago) as well as some of the other elite (Vanderbilt) and some of the other terrific journals (Indiana, Wisconsin, Hastings). The idea was to see how individual articles, rather than journals overall, fared.

Citations to articles varied greatly, even within a journal. Kathleen Sullivan’s legendary Foreword to the Harvard Law Review was the big winner–and lots of articles in elite journals did really well–some of the most-cited articles in journals published outside the most elite journals did better than the less well-cited articles in the most elite journals, like the Harvard Law Review.

Want a graphic illustration of this? Check out the graph below. It plots citations per article in selected law reviews. Each circle is an article.

While articles in the most elite journals receive more citations on average than the less elite (but still highly regarded) other journals studied, some articles in the less elite journals are more heavily cited than many articles in even the most elite journals. We should be wary of judgments about quality based on place of publication. We should, of course, also be wary of judgments about assessing the quality of scholarship based on number of citations and we should, therefore, continue to evaluate scholarship through close reads of it.

Now, I strenuously argue in favor of reading pieces, rather than substituting one biased gauge of quality (citations) for another biased gauge (placement). I’m merely using the citations to raise the point that placement doesn’t bear a perfect correlation to relative quality. That, anyway, is the kind of law school I’d like to see–where hiring committees rally around a candidate by saying, “she wrote a great article!” rather than “she published in UCLA!”

If you’re interested in the short paper (including which articles were the big winners of citations), it’s available here.

Alfred Brophy

The institution I’d like is, well, perhaps pretty close to the ones we already have–something like a mini university, or maybe it’s better analogized to a liberal arts college. Either way, it’s an institution that has people with expertise across a wide spectrum–from hard-core law subjects (obviously) to economics, philosophy, sociology/anthropology, literature, history, and business (accounting) and some other areas like quantitative methods. A law school faculty of thirty people can cover a whole lot of intellectual terrain. And one of the great treats of being a part of a law school community is the opportunity to learn from very smart people who’re expert in neighboring fields, or maybe even fields that are a few miles down the road from my patch.

A virtue of teaching in law schools is that you have the opportunity to interact on a daily basis with people of differing expertise and talents. Although I do not write in criminal law or jurisprudence or economics, I am constantly exposed to the insights from colleagues who do. This must be what it’s like to be on the faculty of a liberal arts college, where there are relatively few (if any) people in your area of expertise but you learn from smart people in other disciplines. It also requires us as faculty to stay current in more areas than you’d typically expect of faculty in a university department. My friends who teach in history departments typically teach something like American history from Revolution through Civil War and some allied courses (like, oh, the old South, Jacksonian America, and the coming of the Civil War). Yet, law faculty will typically teach in several distinct areas. There’s something exciting about keeping up with the latest in equity and civil procedure, as well as trusts and estates, even though it is time consuming. You have the chance to show your students the ways that what we study is connected. Law school education has become what college was in the 1950s and 1960s (and what it still is at elite colleges and universities and maybe the honors programs at a lot of other schools)–a great general education in writing and reasoning.

And so as the students get all the benefits of introductions to the latest in theory and practice, we as faculty get the pleasure of seeing that from our colleagues. I think that makes us better rounded. And while it’s a favorite past-time of law faculty to decry how bad legal scholarship is, it also has a lot of virtues. Often it’s engaged with contemporary problems and often it draws upon many disciplines comes from the fact that it’s produced in law schools rather than arts and sciences departments. Some of my favorite legal academic literature, like Robert Cover’s Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process and Morton Horwitz’ Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, integrate law with other disciplines–history and philosophy in Cover’s case and history and economics in Horwitz’ case. I’m not sure that literature could be produced in a traditional history department–and I think history departments are a lot more open to innovation than a lot of departments. Basically, law schools foster broad and engaged work.

I guess this was driven home to me a few years back when I read the NYU Law School magazine and I thought, wow, this place has a huge and extraordinary faculty, “It’s a mini university!” And in hindsight, I think, maybe not even mini, maybe just university.

Now, how might we encourage more of this? That’s a subject for another day!