Another View: Lock the Law School Doors

NYT ^ | 09/02/09

[TigerLikesRooster]

Another View: Lock the Law School Doors

September 2, 2009, 10:00 am

Dan Slater, a former litigator, argues that there are too many places at too many law schools, especially with the current hiring slump at law firms.

This summer, in the staid world of legal education, where curriculum is uniform and scholars are trained in the art of like-mindedness, one dean hatched a contrary plan.

In a memo to incoming students, Patricia D. White, the dean of University of Miami School of Law, surmised: “Perhaps many of you are looking to law school as a safe harbor in which you can wait out the current economic storm.” She then urged them to “think hard” about their plans and offered incentives for those willing to defer for one year.

“The nature of the legal profession is in great flux,” Dean White observed. “It is very difficult to predict what the employment landscape for young lawyers will be in May 2012 and thereafter.”

[DeltaZulu]

Your complaint reminded me of this song, of which I'm quite fond:
Bumper Squire Jones (Carolan):
...
Ye lawyers so just,
Be the cause what it will,
who so learnedly plead,
How worthy of trust!
You know black from white,
Yet prefer wrong to right,
as you chance to be fee'd;

Leave musty reports,
and forsake the king's courts,
Where dulness and discord
have set up their thrones;
Burn Salkeld and Ventris,
with all your damned entries,
And away with the claret
— "A bumper, Squire Jones!"

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

Open new medical schools and close 1/2 the law schools!

[Just another Joe]

Engineering rules are universal, laws are national.

Meaning that with a modicum of intelligence and a good teacher, what an engineer learns is needed, and valued, anywhere. What a lawyer learns is only good in the nation where he learned it.

[dennisw]

Good post!