No Tier: Alternative Models of Legal Education

In talking about these issues, we keep circling back to reducing tuition (and resulting law school debt) as the best way to re-align the costs and benefits of a JD degree. One of the most common proposed solutions as to how to do this involves getting rid of ABA accreditation regulations.  Deregulating legal education would allow law schools to:

• use non-tenure track and adjunct faculty to teach
• have professors teach more and do scholarship less
• virtualize law school

Whenever  reformist ideas get aired, there is concomitant hand wringing about our entrenched professoriate, student loan complex, and the ABA’s slow-moving deliberative processes. Dean Chemerinsky is absolutely correct to express doubt as to whether or not law schools will change.

I want to point out that outside of the mainstream ABA/U.S. News system, lower cost legal education alternatives do exist.  Some schools that have chosen to forego ABA accreditation and have convinced a few states to allow their graduates to practice law.  There’s Kaplan’s Concord Law School, which offers a virtualized JD.  The Nashville School of Law, a survivor of the historical night law school movement, is dedicated to providing a low-cost legal education to working students.  We recently learned of a new opportunity law school opening in Indio, California.  What these schools have in common is that they are cheap. A JD from the Nashville School of Law costs $21,168.  Tuition at the new Indio law school is set at $12,000 a year.  A JD from Concord Law School is more expensive, but at $40,000, it is still cheaper than one-year’s tuition at many ABA accredited schools. These schools follow a teaching model where mostly adjunct instructors teach substantive law and skills but do not get paid to write law review articles.  

There is a caveat in imagining legal education without ABA regulation.  A hands-off deregulatory approach will increase reliance on adjunct or contingent faculty with much lower pay scales and job security. The higher-ranked law schools will likely retain a scholarly focus. In these contexts, traditional doctrinal scholars might remain relatively unscathed.  But faculty who already occupy a precarious position in the U.S. News model – clinical, skills, and legal writing faculty – will likely get the short end of the stick.  Deregulation may also open up the floodgates for ugly large-scale proprietary models, along the lines of the University of Phoenix.

The point here is that the incentive to change might come from the outside.   If states begin responding to demands that lawyers from non-ABA law schools be allowed to practice law, then this could side step the ABA’s longstanding role in defining American legal education.  

-- Lucille A. Jewel, Assoc. Prof., Atlanta's John Marshall Law School 

 

 

Comments

[Desert Rat]

Indio, California. Not Indio Springs. Indio is outside of Palm Springs, CA.

[Jon]

The problem with this is that it doesn't deal with the massive oversupply of JDs relative to the entry-level job markets. What kind of job prospects will these lawyers have from unaccredited schools with no reputation? Will they be able to find jobs in a profession that places a high value on a school's reputation and ranking as a metric for how intelligent it's graduates are? Let's be real here, employers do not hire recent graduates for their ability to practice law, number of clients, or their knowledge of the law. They hire them because they think they are a smart cookie based on their law school ranking and grades. Then they teach them these skills on the job.

We need fewer law schools and fewer law students being educated at lower cost, not more law students.

[Roman]

Such a school would have been hell for me. I was beaetn for having a tremor ... encouraging more violence would have been too much to take.All that needs to be done is to remove the worst of the educational fads, remove the misandry (preferably at the point of a Police Officer's gun) and encourage knowledge itself (as opposed to simply passing tests & assignments).

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