The Faculty Lounge:  What Matters Most (in Legal Ed These Days), by Bernard A. Burk (North Carolina):

What I’ve mostly been listening to and thinking about is the swelling
threnody bemoaning — or in some cases celebrating — the impending Demise of
Legal Education As We Know It. …

There are roughly three categories of contumely being heaped on the
legal academy these days. Two of them have received disproportionate
attention, and what’s striking is that they are pretty clearly not
the ones that Matter Most. Those two are arrays of related contentions
(1) that law school fails to prepare students for practice; and (2)
that law school costs too much. …

What Matters Most is that there are today significantly more seats in
accredited American law schools than there are entry-level law jobs for
the emerging graduates. This is obviously neither an original nor a
novel observation; lots of people in addition to me have written about
it. But its fundamental importance has received surprisingly little
attention. …

I’ll have more to say about this in coming months, but this post is
already long enough. The long and the short of it is that What Matters
Most is that there are too many law-school seats and not enough law-grad
jobs. In most markets, what happens when there is an oversupply is
that production and price fall until the market clears. That’s already
happening today. Prospective law students have become aware of the
undersupply of law jobs, and law-school applications are falling
significantly. Many law schools appreciably reduced the size of their
entering classes this fall in response to the falling number of
qualified applicants. Price competition on tuition (right now
predominantly through the tactical use of financial aid) is being
reported. Many schools will shrink, and some will fail.  Many will
experiment with curricular, placement and financial innovations to meet
the demands of the times and attract more and more-qualified
applicants. Critically, all of this will be driven by the applicant
pool’s perceptions about what kinds of value a law degree will furnish
by the time you’re done getting one. And that’s why the oversupply of
law-grad production and the undersupply of entry-level jobs are What
Matters Most right now. The really interesting questions are which
schools are going to be most and most quickly affected by these forces
and how.