Just a perfect reflection

Guster, Fa Fa



As economic fortunes fall anew and fear runs rampant, legal education is experiencing another season of regret. Recent graduates and even some students have come to regret their decision to attend law school. They're hardly alone.



Regret is nothing more than fermented wisdom, and I am a very wise man. There are moments when I fervently wish I could take my own academic advice, dispensed at greatest length in The Death of the Regulatory Compact: Sunk costs are just that, sunk. Time moves in one direction. So should we.



In this spirit I offer my readership this musical interlude. Its essential message is a familiar one. For those who might prefer T.S. Eliot's formulation over Guster's, I'll happily oblige:

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

Remember always that the detail of the pattern is movement.

Is Villanova Evil or Just Efficient?

This story has been bouncing around for months but, as so often happens, I am the last to know. As I understand it, Villanova, to put it bluntly, lied.



I am wondering just how bad that is. Compare an alternative. A School adopts new and expensive programs because it will help in the rankings game. But for the rankings these programs would not be adopted. It hires its own grads, introduces bar prep courses, admits fewer first year students, increases transfers, and calls everyone a professor. Now it accurately reports its new and more impressive numbers. Putting aside the possibility that the rankings may have induced the school to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, is the second school less corrupt than a false reporting school?



Maybe Villanova just got the result it wanted at a lower cost and with less waste.

Taken for a ride

AM Radio, Taken for a Ride

I can no longer ignore that, for a very large proportion of my students, law school has become something very much like a scam. . . . When people say 'law school is a scam,' what that really means, at the level of actual moral responsibility, is that law professors are scamming their students.

So laments the introductory post to Inside the Law School Scam, a confessional blog by an anonymous "tenured mid-career faculty member at a Tier One school." This fascinating contribution to the burgeoning online literature on the economics of legal education and law school graduates' job prospects is unique because it comes from the inside. In his critique of legal scholarship, this blogger, both tenured and anonymous, confesses that "students at the contemporary law school end up paying enormous amounts of money for something that they aren't getting, and in many cases wouldn't want even if it were being provided to them."



This is prose as potent as it is provocative. Inside the Law School Scam essentially argues that law schools and law professors are taking their students for a ride. I look forward to each installment of this anonymous blogger's saga.

Matasar criticizes the "inordinate scrutiny" given to law schools

In the first segment of a two-part interview responding to David Segal's critique of law school economics, Richard Matasar says that law schools receive "inordinate scrutiny."