Following up on yesterday's post, WSJ Op-Ed: First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Law Schools:
- Dan Rodriguez (Dean, Northwestern), Wall Street Journal Post on “Killing all the Law Schools”: A Reply:
[T]he linchpin claim that widescale adoption of the European model is a panacea for high legal fees and limited access to legal work by middle and sub-middle class is not well supported in the op-ed.
But let’s take the McMangas claim on face value for the moment. What would this reform do to legal education generally? Not much good, from my perspective. The legal profession is becoming considerably more, rather than less, complex over time. Appeals to, as they write, the “ancient common law” is rather quaint. There is, to be sure, a core and a canon which every well-trained lawyer should have exposure to, and two years may do the trick. But there is much beyond this core, as lawyers grappling with a technologically sophisticated, globally interdependent, socially and economically diverse legal and business world well appreciate. Lawyers tell us in the academy that we are not doing enough to get our students ready to practice. They insist on greater skills training, more clinical experience, more integrated law/business curricula, and opportunities within the post-graduate structure to gain on-the-job practical experience through internships and externships. And what McMangas has on offer is tossing that aside to be replaced with two years worth of presumably in-class exposure to the “ancient common law” and a few additional goodies. Leave aside the self-interest of the professiorate. That’s not what lawyers tell us that they need.
Markets are a dynamic discovery process. We do not pretend to know the optimal mix of educational institutions for the provision of legal education. But we do not believe that we should regulate their characteristics any more than is necessary to produce public goods. In this context we see the goods as important but limited to two: (1) providing assurance that lawyers are competent, given the asymmetries of information between lawyers and consumers, and (2) providing legal knowledge to be a resource to citizens when discussing legal and public policy. We do not believe the dean has made a case that accredited colleges cannot provide these goods for some lawyers, particularly if followed by year’s apprenticeship. The market would certainly provide feedback in the terms of the bar passage rates and employability.
Another premise of our article is that there are varying levels of human capital that are necessary for different legal tasks. It may well be that almost all lawyers at top law firms will continue to have J.Ds. Similarly, almost all principals at Goldman Sachs have MBAs and many have Phds. Yet other businesses across the country benefit from employees with only undergraduate degrees in business. The same is likely true of law. Everyone agrees that the most underserved groups are the poor and middle class. Their usual needs, while often too complex for non-lawyer handling, generally do not require the same level of human capital as securitization deals or complex litigation. Thus, even if some law requires the kind of specialized knowledge that only graduate school can provide, other law does not. Moreover, lawyers can work under the supervision of those with specialized training or call on those with such training as needed. Thus, one disagreement we have with the dean is his suggestion that law is moving in any one direction. Law is multifarious, and methods for producing lawyers should be multifarious as well.
