Above the Law, To Stop the ABA, Do We Need to Allow Everybody to Start a Law School?:

I’m really enjoying the newfound interest from the New York Times about the state of legal education. Times reporter David Segal seems genuinely interested in recording the growing tragedy of American law schools. …

The Times article profiles the Duncan School of Law, at Lincoln Memorial University. It’s a new law school in Appalachia, just two years old, that is struggling to get ABA accreditation. The Times sets up Duncan as a law school that would like to keep costs low, but can’t because it’s trying to meet the tough ABA standards of accreditation. Blah, blah, blah. …

It takes pages before Segal gets to the most real culprit behind the hefty price tag:

Duncan’s largest single cost is its faculty, which, as with most ABA-accredited law schools, consumes about half its total budget. This is the only expense that [Sydney Beckman — Dean of Duncan Law School] declines to detail, other than to say that he has three adjuncts and 16 full-time professors. Adjuncts are basically part-timers and far less expensive. But the ABA prohibits an adjuncts-only faculty by requiring that full-time faculty teach a major portion of the entire curriculum.

What a surprise! The “low cost” law school is flummoxed by the ridiculously high salaries of law school professors, salaries which the dean refuses to fully explain in an article designed to highlight how the school is struggling to keep costs down.

It’s a story we’ve heard at least 200 other times before. Segal does a lot to try to indirectly blame the high cost of professorial salaries on various rules, written and unwritten, about attaining ABA accreditation, but there’s no way to completely gloss over faculty greed and deans (who are themselves part of legal academia) being all too happy to keep paying into the system that keeps salaries high for all.

I’m telling you, when I’m dean of Above the Law: The Law School, the median faculty salary will match the median salary achievable by graduates of our institution. And there will be a “hard cap” on the top salary. If professors don’t like it, they’ll be free to go into private practice where they claim they’ll be able to make oh so much more.