A Bunch of Law Schools Are About to Close

There is a huge over supply of attorneys and with the huge down turn in the legal industry during the Great Recession, it's getting harder and harder for newly minted attorneys to find jobs to repay the massive debt they have incurred, often going to bottom tier law schools - why does Liberty University's law school immediately spring to mind? - and leaving them in severe financial straits.  Fortunately, younger folks seem to be waking up to the reality that law is perhaps not the best occupation.  The downside (depending on one's view) is that a number of law schools are facing closure.  A piece in Slate looks at the situation.  Here are some highlights:

In the world of law schools, every day is sort of like Black Friday.  OK, slight exaggeration. But with applications in free fall, schools are locked in a brutal competition to attract students who might theoretically one day be qualified to sit for a bar exam. And that, the New York Times reports today, has meant slashing tuition and dolling out discounts. At Northwestern University School of Law, one of the top ranked institutions in the country, “74 percent of first-year students this academic year received financial aid, compared with only 30 percent in 2009,” the paper notes. The University of Iowa, University of Arizona, and Penn State University have cut their prices. J.D.s are on sale!

It seems fairly obvious that some law schools are going to have to close in the not too distant future. Between the fall of 2010 and fall of 2013, enrollments dropped 24 percent. This year’s crop of new students should be even smaller. And while schools are doing everything in their power to pare back expenses and prop up their head counts, it seems like someone is going to fall victim to a collapsing demand. “I don’t get how the math adds up for the number of schools and the number of students,” Northwestern Dean Daniel Rodriguez, told the Times. That’s because it probably won’t.

This has been a subject of fearful discussion in the legal academy for a while. Already, Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley School of Law, a notorious diploma mill, has been forced to close its Ann Arbor campus due to sagging enrollment. But, as University of St. Thomas School of Law professor Jerry Organ writes, the history of another graduate school bust suggests bottom-tier schools might not be the only ones affected.

Many institutions opened law schools precisely because they were supposed to be cash cows and won’t be particularly psyched to suddenly start subsidizing them. Meanwhile, qualified applicants are now harder to find for schools with some semblance of standards, because the biggest application declines have occurred among students who scored in the middle-to-high range on the LSAT.

There are plenty of lousy lawyers out there and many of the younger ones - perhaps out of financial necessity - seem inclined to engage in less than ethical conduct.