Here’s a post at TaxProf blog commenting on a recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education . UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge says that the legal profession is a “mature industry” with a chronic oversupply problem. To fix that, he suggests that the profession “lop off the bottom third of law schools.”
I think we can instead rely on the invisible hand. No dramatic lopping-off of institutions is required.
Back when Herbert Stein was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon, some member of the cabinet was railing on about how some undesirable trend “just couldn’t continue.” Stein broke in to say that if something can’t continue, it will stop by itself. No government action is needed. I think that’s the right way to look at the supersupply of JDs. The allure of having legal credentials to one’s name remains surprisingly strong, but when lots of people spend all the time and money it takes to get them, only to find that the high-pay jobs they had envisioned aren’t there, demand will drop. When it does, there will be downsizing in the number of suppliers. The number of law schools will fall, but I wouldn’t predict that the casualties will only be in “the bottom third.” Some of those schools do a good job of preparing students for a) the state bar exam and b) real legal jobs. They might survive the shakeout.
Then again, law schools on the brink of bankruptcy might get a bailout on the grounds that they’re too important to fail.