Brian Leiter (Chicago), Four Changes to the Status Quo in Legal Education That Might Be Worth Something:
Some changes are obvious and we've been remarking on them for years (e.g., better oversight of employment reporting by schools), and some are beyond the power of law schools to affect (e.g., federally guaranteed student loans, which insure a market for even non-marketable law degrees). But here are ones law schools could affect, and are at least worth considering, though there are serious obstacles (and objections) to each:
1. Higher education in America includes research universities and teaching colleges (the latter placing less emphasis on research); law schools need the same division of labor, so that we have some law schools that are Harvard and Chicago, and some law schools that are Oberlin and Reed. …
2. Judge Posner suggested some time ago that law school be shortened to two years, with a third year optional depending on a student's career goals. Those who want to be tax lawyers could do what is, in effect, the LLM in tax in the third year; those who want to be legal scholars could devote the third year either to cultivating scholarly skills or teaching skills, depending on their academic goals (per #1); those who haven't secured permanent employment after two years could use the third (at some appropriately reduced cost) in externships designed to enhance marketability, with some supervision from academic or clinical faculty; and so on. …
3. Cut the number of law reviews by 75%, and turn the remaining ones over to faculty supervision, with students still working on them, but no longer vested with editorial control. This would immediately eliminate a huge amount of worthless scholarship. …
4. Finally, and no doubt most controversially, law schools need real tenure standards and real post-tenure review. Real tenure standards means law schools should deny tenure two or three times as often as they presently do, and on the basis of a genuine qualitative review of scholarship. Post-tenure review–say, once every ten years–should operate within the current tenure framework, which means termination only for good cause. But far too many faculty appear to satisfy the "good cause" standard, but get a free pass because law schools, and universities generally, are too reluctant, or too lazy, to follow the proper procedures for establishing "good cause". Surely one rather good reason for student anger about the high cost of law school is that it is obvious to them that some faculty don't actually do their jobs. … Unsurprisingly, alleged "legal education reformers" … never discuss the need for law schools to review, sanction and possibly fire tenured faculty who don't do their job, and for obvious reasons. But if law faculty are hired to teach and write, and if some don't teach well and don't write, there should be consequences. Tenure was never meant to protect dereliction of duties, and it endangers the institution of tenure, and the integrity of academic institutions, when it does. It also, of course, raises the costs of running a law school if some portion of your faculty don't really do the job (and especially when they are the more senior and expensive faculty, as typically happens).
