Wall Street Journal Law Blog, The Incredible Shrinking Law School? It’s the Vision of Two NY Deans:

A current school of thought about legal education in the U.S. goes like this:

Despite being in the business of education, law schools are entrepreneurial — some might say “greedy” — institutions. They boost their tuitions, grovel their way up rankings, inflate their statistics to attract more applicants, and stuff their classrooms with as many students as they can possibly fit in the doors.

But two New York law schools are doing what they can to distance themselves from this notion. The deans of the Albany Law School and the Touro Law Center say they plan to reduce admissions this fall, yielding to the fact that the job market for newly pressed JDs continues to be rather lousy. Click here for the story from the National Law Journal.

The drop won’t be significant at either school. Both plan to admit 10 fewer students. Still, the cuts represent an unprecedented acknowledgment among law deans that the product they’re churning out isn’t as highly valued now as it was, say, 5 years ago.

Update:

• David Lat (Above the Law), A Trend in the Making: Shrinking Law Schools?
• John Yoo (UC-Berkeley), The Economics of Law School Admissions