Legal education, with its ever heftier tuition, is getting a hard critical look from those in the know these days, and here’s a couple of them who don’t like what they see at all.
In this piece, Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute describes how trendy ideologies, such as feminism, “critical legal studies” or globalization have displaced traditional legal subjects such as property or torts, leaving law school graduates unprepared for their bar exams and actual legal practice.
Over at Minding the Campus, Charlotte Allen examines the growing controversy over allegations that law schools, even some in the top-tier, have been fudging job-placement statistics with respect to their recent graduates, many of whom end up stuck with debts of 100K or more.
As Bader has argued previously, it may be past time to think about abandoning the current iron-clad requirement that all candidates for the bar exam must first obtain a law degree. All of that steep tuition, only to find out that your “legal education” hasn’t prepared you anyway? As he concludes, there’s got to be another way, and I have to think that a lot recent law graduates would agree.
