Take The Classroom Back

Newberry College in Columbia, South Carolina, will offer a major in social media.

The college, for its part, explains that this is one of the first interdisciplinary social media majors. It says it blends graphic design, communications, business, marketing, psychology, and statistics, and that social media is such a vital part of marketing and other business habits that it'll be a valuable qualification with a likely career path ahead of it. One way students will learn mobile marketing, the college says (via Fox 57), is by designing QR codes, "those little black and white scanners you use with your smartphone." Apparently this is the "hot new way" to do marketing with mobile phones.
So...last time we looked, the QR code was frowned upon by almost everyone, everywhere (though it does linger in the U.S.). And surely one worry is that by the time students graduate in 2017, with the course starting in 2013, the rocket-speed development of social media itself will have outpaced their education.

No, this isn't from the Onion, but from educators who are trying to become relevant in a young person's world by getting ahead of the curve, even though there is neither a chance of success nor a need to turn culture into coursework, and cater to the interests of children.

What teenager wouldn't be enticed by a major in Facebook with a minor in Pinterest?  Of course, if they offered this a decade ago, the major would have been Netscape and they would be working the counter at Dairy Queen today, if they were lucky.

What type of educator panders to youth culture in this way?  All types, actually.

Having taken lawprofs to task for the inexcusable failure rate on the bar exam, it's worthwhile to consider what has gone terribly wrong in the classroom. It's not that lawprofs aren't smart enough to adequately educate law students, though their interest in pedagogy as compared to indulgent scholarship is in question. But, from what I know of law professors in general, they want to teach students well, even if it's not their primary focus.

So if it isn't their capability to teach or knowledge of the law, then what? 

My surmise is that a core problem is that lawprofs have allowed the inmates to take over the asylum. Law students today have a very different perspective of their relative worth. They believe their opinions are important. Stemming from an excess of unwarranted self-esteem and entitlement, borne of years of coddling, they view themselves as peers of their professors.

They have questions, and demand not only prompt answers, but answers that validate them. The will not tolerate the Socratic Method, as it belittles them and reflects a lack of respect.  There are no longer wrong answers in law school, but just answers not as right as they could have been. And when a student disagrees, asserting that his answer is every bit as good as the one the professor "suggests," they have no qualms about informing the professor of her error.

What does not happen anymore is a professor informing a law student that they are wrong. Dead, completely wrong. Totally wrong. There is no Kingsfield to hand Hart a dime.  Any lawprof foolish enough to do so would learn that he was "condescending and disrespectful." 

And why, an old lawyer wonders, would any lawprof care what a law student thought of him? The dark side of empiricism, evaluations. I asked a lawprof for whom I have enormous respect what drives lawprofs to give a damn about evaluations. This is what I was told:

Deans probably give popular teachers a bit more money in salary, although it's hard to know for sure and varies Dean to Dean. Bad teaching evals can make a lateral move less likely and tenure harder, too, although that's probably only if the evaluations are really bad.   But I suspect the real reason professors care is that everyone wants to be popular, and to feel like their work is valued.  And for professors, evaluations are like their grades, and professors tend to be Type A people who are competitive and want to get high grades.

This is a shocking and deeply disturbing explanation.  A law professor cannot, by definition, be "condescending" to a law student. There is a reason why one is the teacher and the other the student. The teacher possesses superior knowledge. The student is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with the teacher's knowledge.  At least that was the old concept, before they needed the permission and approval of students to teach them.

Plus, law students tend to be a pretty nice people, and it's natural to want the nice people you work with to like you back.

Law professors do not "work with" law students. They teach law students. Or at least they used to, and many of us thought that was still the job. 

Even though practicing lawyers may not know what happens in the classroom these days, we can see the attitude on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc., where law students are so bold as to school us on the law. One of my favorite examples was on Twitter, where a law student would twit her opinions on the law to me, which were ignorant and juvenile, and I told her so and explained why.  She was outraged that I didn't respect her views, at my snide, arrogant and condescending attitude.

I responded that the fact that I acknowledged her existence at all was a demonstration of respect far beyond what she deserved. In what universe does a law student get to demand the attention of an experienced lawyer?  In her universe, I was told. In her universe, she was entitled to demand my attention and respect, and my failure to comply with her demands, and in the manner she demanded, made me unworthy.

Dear Lawprofs:  Take back your classroom.  These are not your peers, your colleagues. Perhaps one day they will be, but not now. When you seek their approval, you forfeit your authority to teach them.  If they are wrong, someone must tell them they are wrong. If they lack the capacity to become a lawyer, someone must give them a dime and tell them to call their mother. 

But they won't like you?  Too bad. Your job is not to be liked, but to teach blobs of clay to become lawyers. You do not need any more permission than the fact they sit in your classroom.  They disagree with what you say? Too bad. They are students. They know nothing. That's why they're there.  Their feelings will be hurt if you don't apologize for anything less than glowing validation of their every thought, and they will take it out on you in their evaluations?

That's why they pay you the big bucks.

The expectation of students is that you will honor and respect them, no matter what.  They can be wrong, yet you will find something positive to say because they cannot handle the slightest hint of criticism. They are fragile. They are delicate. They are special.  And since you want them to like you, you pander to their demands. 

As the bar exam results prove, this hasn't helped them to meet the minimal level of competency to become a lawyer. As unemployment rates prove, they are about to learn what real disappointment means. And as their skill in the representation of clients proves, real life will not be nearly as kind to their fragile self-esteem as you were.

You have done them no favors. You have not done your job. Perhaps they are now your dearest pals, but they didn't need a friend. They needed a teacher.

As I pay attention to what lawprofs say and do, I also pay attention to what law students and new lawyers say and do. Some are remarkably astute. Some are mind-bogglingly misguided. They hate me for telling them when they are wrong. They call me snide, arrogant and condescending. And I don't give a damn. They are not my peers, but children in dire need of guidance that no one else is willing to give them. 

Of course, they won't listen to me. I don't coddle them and rub their little tummies. So as long as you concern yourselves more with sweet words on their evaluations, law students will continue to emerge from your classrooms incapable of the rigors of law and unsafe for clients. But who cares, as long as they like you. 

This is the pedagogy you've created and perpetuated. If you have any balls at all, take back your classroom and teach your students well.  Hurt their feelings whenever their feelings need to be hurt. That may be the most important lesson you can ever teach them.  And stop caring more about your validation than what these ignorant, entitled misfits will do to clients some day.

Cross posted at Simple Justice.

National Jurist's 25 most influential people in legal education

The National Jurist has named its 25 finalists for the title of the most influential person in legal education. I am honored and humbled to have been named as a finalist.

These are the finalists, in alphabetical order:

• Catherine Carpenter, Professor, Southwestern Law School
• Paul Campos, Professor, University of Colorado Law School
• Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, University of California Irvine School of Law
• Jim Chen
• Hiram Chodosh, Dean, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law
• The Faculty of Washington and Lee School of Law
• Bryant Garth, Dean Emeritus and Professor, Southwestern Law School
• John Garvey, Professor, University of New Hampshire School of Law
• Claudio Grossman, Dean, American University Washington College of Law
• Phoebe Haddon, Dean, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
• William Henderson, Professor, Indiana University Maurer School of Law – Bloomington
• Kevin Johnson, Dean, University of California Davis School of Law
• David Levi, Dean, Duke University School of Law
• Lizabeth Moody, Professor and Dean Emeritus, Stetson University College of Law
• Jerry Organ, Professor, University of St. Thomas School of Law — Minneapolis
• John O'Brien, Dean, New England Law Boston
• Sophie Sparrow, Professor, University of New Hampshire School of Law
• Richard Sander, Professor, University of California at Los Angeles School of Law
• Brian Tamanaha, Professor, Washington University School of Law
• William Treanor, Dean and Executive VP, Georgetown University Law Center
• Kyle McEntee, Co-founder, Law School Transparency
• Blake Morant, Dean, Wake Forest University School of Law
• Patricia White, Dean, University of Miami School of Law
• Philip Weiser, Dean, University of Colorado Law School
• Frank H. Wu, Chancellor & Dean, University of California, Hastings College of the Law

Update: Paul Caron of the Tax Law Prof Blog has provided coverage of this list. For me, the honor of being named to this list closes a circle that began when the National Jurist quoted me in an article on change in legal education — like its glacial equivalent, slow to progress but inexorable and epochal in its eventual effect. I do hope to live long enough to see the triumph of reform over reaction.

Say sayonara to "Spidey sense"

A CBS News profile of Nate Silver, author of 538.

Not that we should expect law professors, a group whose political sensitivities vastly exceed its collective quantitative talent, to have taken close note, but the 2012 election staged "a pitched battle between two self-assured rivals: those who relied on an unscientific mixture of experience, anecdotal details and 'Spidey sense,'and those who stuck to cold, hard numbers." Quite unsurprisingly, the quants won.

In MoneyLaw terms, the lesson for legal education should be obvious. Law as a purely instinctive enterprise is giving way — in many respects, it has already given way — to law as a branch of engineering and the quantitative arts. This forum will have many future occasions to demonstrate exactly why this is true. For now, sit back and just enjoy the show.

Money Law Question?

I can provide a reason for why it is appropriate to ask this of moneylaw readers but let's just assume I have and get right to the question.

Many schools have increased their number of transfer students. We all know why. Typically when they enter their slates are clean as far a GPA and their final GPA and class rank will be based on the last two years.

At many schools there is a lower curve in the first year than in selected second year courses. For example, small sections and seminars may have a higher curve -- 3.6 as opposed to 3.2.  For all practical purposes this means the average curve in upper level coures is higher than the first year curve. The outcome is that transfer students are ranked and recieve  honors based on a higher curve than non transfer students who are saddled with their first semester grades that are on average lower than upper level grades.

The perception is that transfer students then have an advantage as far a class rank, honor, GAP, etc.

I am asking if  your school or any school you know of has reacted to this by normalizing grades or creating two rankings or eliminating the dual curve or at all? Thanks.

ARM-twisting "A Degree of Practical Wisdom": A one-year readjustment of legal education's debt-based stress test

Roughly a year ago, I posted what was then the preliminary version of A Degree of Practical Wisdom: The Ratio of Educational Debt to Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates’ Economic Viability, 38 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 1185 (2012) (available online at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1967266 or http://bit.ly/DegreePracticalWisdom). After a year of summarizing and presenting A Degree of Practical Wisdom before multiple audiences and subjecting its model to the test of actual, real-world applications, I have decided to propose some modifications in my model. Think of it as the annual ARM-twisting that accompanies any adjustable-rate mortgage.

A Degree of Practical Wisdom argued that law schools should subject themselves to one form of stress-testing: measuring the ratio of their students’ educational debt to those students’ post-graduation incomes. My original analysis used mortgage lending policies, as developed by private lenders and by the Federal Home Administration, to identify three ratios of monthly debt service to monthly gross income:

1. Marginal: 0.12
2. Adequate: 0.08
3. Good: 0.04

On the assumption that the most affordable loan terms allow law school graduates to amortize their loans at 6 percent interest over 25 years, the foregoing versions of the “educational back-end ratio” correspond to the following ratios of (law school) educational debt to (gross) annual income:

1. Good: 0.5
2. Adequate: 1.0
3. Marginal: 1.5

In the year since I first posted A Degree of Practical Wisdom and invited commentary on it, I have had the benefit of "field testing." Drawing upon efforts of my own and by others to apply my stress tests, I now propose a modest readjustment of my approach for assessing recent law school graduates' economic viability. I will restate ratios of debt to income as their reciprocals — as ratios of income to debt — in order to focus attention on the different salary outcomes achieved by recent law school graduates. I will also relax the stringency of my original stress tests. It turns out that almost no law school graduates begin with an annual income double their level of law school debt. A 2:1 ratio of annual gross income to law school debt is the reciprocal of the “good” 0.5 ratio of debt to income. I will readjust this highest level of economic attainment to a ratio of 3:2. I will also rename the three levels of economic attainment:

1. Excellent: A 3:2 ratio of annual gross income to total law school debt
2. Healthy: A 1:1 ratio
3. Viable: A 2:3 ratio

Multiplying by 1.5 (or 3:2) closes the gap between the viable and healthy levels, or the healthy and excellent levels. Relative to my original level of "good" economic performance, the new "excellent" category actually reflects a slightly higher debt burden. The reciprocal of an "excellent" 3:2 ratio of annual income to total debt means that the ratio of law school debt to annual income is 2:3. The corresponding ratio of law school debt service to gross annual income is approximately 5.33 percent.

The new ratios sacrifice some of my original model's elegance for real-world utility in a legal services market where very, very few entrants can expect to win an annual salary whose face value is double their level of law school debt. Then again, the 1.5 (or 3:2) ratio that describes the transition between each of the new categories — from viable to healthy and again from healthy to excellent — has an elegance all of its own. A 1.5 ratio is reasonably close to (1 + √5)/2 (approximately 1.618) or φ, the celebrated golden ratio of Pythagorean mathematics. In an age when grades and tuition rates have inflated faster than salaries and the gross domestic product, we may take solace in the legal academy's own version of the "Aurea mediocritas."

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Editor's note: For the images in this post, I tip my hat to Scottish artist Judith I. Bridgland.

Big law firm suicide

In The better angels of our profession, I sorted law professors into three camps according to their reaction to recession and industry-wide restructuring in the legal profession. Because the revolution in legal education and law practice has not abated, I believe that the time has come to perform a little triage.

One deeply cynical camp refuses to change business as usual. To comfort themselves, members of this camp have their sinecures and the self-satisfaction drawn from academic achievements as irrelevant as they are ancient. At their worst, this camp's partisans gleefully trash critics who have been insightful and courageous enough to identify serious flaws in law schools and law firms. Once upon a time, I took umbrage at people this petty and this selfish. With age comes wisdom — These days I just remind myself: "[It] [d]oesn't mean that much to me / To mean that much to you." Live and learn; live and let live. All it took to rediscover the the right motivation was to remember this bit of sound advice: we should strive "to make a positive difference in the world, not to win popularity contests among people we don't respect."

I will therefore devote the bulk of my efforts to persuading a second group: that "less angry cohort [that] fervently wants to believe that tough times in the legal profession are merely cyclical." Their wish appears to be this: "Wait a year or two or five, . . . and things will be back to the way they always were."

More than just a river in Egypt.

No, they won't. We have ever stronger reason to believe that the legal profession and the academy that feeds it have both undergone permanent, structural change. Adapt or die.

This, at any rate, is my position. This view, I believe, commands a meaningful fraction among lawyers, judges, and law professors. The latest evidence of permanent, structural change comes via Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith, Esq., with a further hat tip to Debra Cassens Weiss. MacEwen points to the prevalence of economically suicidal, cut-rate fees among law firms as evidence of "excess capacity" and "enormous pricing pressure just to cover fixed costs." Those firms have the thinnest of margins for error: "A law firm cannot really lose money for even one year and remain viable . . . because that’s what they pay their partners with."

I speak with greatest urgency to fellow legal academics and to law firm partners who fit the life stage that David Bowie once described as "[t]oo old to lose it, too young to choose it." It's sad to watch these law firms, some at the pinnacle of the profession, cannibalize themselves and their employees. The clock waits so patiently on their song. They walk past a café, but they don't eat when they've lived too long. Oh no no no: We may be witnessing big law firm suicide.

Cranes and skyhooks

In his latest contribution to MoneyLaw, Jeff Harrison minces no words in expressing disdain for legal skyhooks:

Monroe Freedman describes some writing about legal ethics as comparable to engineers writing about sky hooks. . . . In short, it is completely irrelevant to anyone but about 10 people who are genuinely intrigued or building resumes. His comments could be applied to all areas [of legal scholarship].

Jeff's rightful condemnation of skyhooks reminds me of Daniel C. Dennett's 1995 masterpiece on the philosophy of science, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Dennett says this of skyhooks: ""Skyhooks would be wonderful things to have, great for lifting unwieldy objects out of difficult circumstances, and speeding up all sorts of construction projects." Id. at 74. Alas, skyhooks not only don't exist; they can't ever exist.

An unhealthy reliance on skyhooks is fatal to any scientific enterprise. That includes law. Dennett's prescription for biology is one that we lawyers would be well served to embrace. For every skyhook on which we have wagered our professional lives, we must strive to build a genuine crane. In biology, that means finding molecular building blocks for every process. Nothing quite that concrete drives legal science. But we would be remiss if we did not seek, in every act of pedagogy and scholarship, (1) to affirmatively propel the enterprise of subjecting human behavior to the governance of rules, (2) by means of a crane real enough to be falsified by empirical tools at the hands of an independent and politically honest broker. In law as in any other scientific discipline, skyhooks have no place. We're too busy building things to accommodate such idle indulgences.

Sky Hook -- One or Two Words?

That actually may be the title of an 80 page law review article with 300 footnotes.  That article has not been written but, if it were, it might be more interesting than most of what is published.

It has been some time since I wrote to complain about the surplus of law review articles. I've forgotten what it came to when I multiplied it all out but, lets see: 200 law schools, 2 reviews per schools, 4 issues per year, 5  articles per issue. I think that is 8000 per year. Five articles per issue is probably high but not when you throw in student notes and comments.

That seems like way too many to be of any use especially if you agree with my friend who said to me: "Jeff, what are we doing? Law schools are not good professional schools, they are not really graduate schools, and the vast majority of teachers are not scholars." I would have put the last part of that a bit differently. I'd say, whether they are or could be scholars, they do not do that much scholarship. By that I mean something other than a brief for one side of an issue or another.

So, 8000 articles but it gets worse. In a recent article, Monroe Freedman describes some writing about legal ethics as comparable to engineers writing about sky hooks. Plus, they write about the implications of sky hooks for air traffic. In short, it is completely irrelevant to anyone but about 10 people who are genuinely intrigued or building resumes. His comments could be applied to all areas.  In fact, the most skyhooky article I have ever seen was about the efficient breach and recently published by the Virginia Law Review.  I think these articles are mainly written by privileged people who would be happier in other departments but the money and jobs are not there. While not  privileged, I do not exclude myself. I can spend hours wondering about the efficient breach when I actually do not think it exists and, if it did, we would not know it. But it still spins around in my head (but perhaps not in print since my own offering is still looking for a home).

Oh no, it gets even worse than worse. What we do to the people we hire? We tell them to add to the total or they will lose their jobs. In short, they are required to make a bad situation worse in order to get a life time job making it worse still.

And thanks to the pandering to U.S.N & W.R. it gets even  . . . .  worse. If your school is like mine, it is all about numbers. Three articles of almost any quality are better than one very fine article. I would be hesitant to tell a new hire to write one very fine article and expect to get promoted. Like teaching, flash has replaced substance as the standard.

So, is there a point at which this crashes and burns or has it already and what we have now is the debris?

Scholarships at Risk: The Mathematics of Merit Stipulations in Law School Financial Aid

I have posted the following article to my SSRN page —

Jim Chen, Scholarships at Risk: The Mathematics of Merit Stipulations in Law School Financial Aid, available for download at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2133018 or http://bit.ly/MeritStipulations:

Many law schools in the United States condition financial aid grants on the recipients’ maintenance of a certain grade point average. These merit stipulations require students to meet or exceed minimum academic standards in order to keep all or part of their financial aid. Law students should take merit stipulations into account when they decide whether to accept an offer of admission paired with a conditional grant of financial aid. By all accounts, they do not. Law schools should transparently disclose the likely effect of merit stipulations on their financial aid awards. By all accounts, law schools do no such thing. Absent external coercion, they are unlikely to change their current practices. In the absence of industry-wide standards counseling full disclosure of financial aid practices, this article will try to equip law school applicants with the mathematical tools to assess the real impact of merit stipulations on their financial well being.

This article first presents very simple models for discounting financial aid awards for the risk of failure to uphold a merit stipulation. It outlines a simple methodology for calculating the expected value of a financial aid award subject to a merit stipulation. The article also evaluates one extraordinary circumstance in which a law school has implicitly revealed its break-even point — the amount of aid that the school would award if it did not impose any merit stipulations.

Building upon those foundations, this article performs a comprehensive analysis of law school grades and merit stipulations as artifacts of the standard normal distribution. It performs three distinct tasks. This article defines standard scores and explains how law school grading is based on the relationship between the standard score of each student’s raw score and the mean and standard deviation of of the distribution as a whole. This article then describes the risk of failure to satisfy a merit stipulation in terms of the normal distribution’s cumulative distribution function. For those instances in which the risk of failure to satisfy a particular school’s merit stipulation is known, this article demonstrates how to use the inverse cumulative distribution function to estimate the mean and standard deviation of a school’s grade distribution. As a bonus, this final exercise provides an introduction to value-at-risk analysis, a leading tool for assessing risk in global capital markets.

Update: Paul Caron has kindly highlighted this article in the TaxProf Blog. Above the Law, JD Journal, Law School Expert, the Legal Skills Profs Blog, and the Clinton Law Firm Blog have also provided coverage.

Punt baby punt

The shocking conclusion to the 1972 Iron Bowl (Auburn 17, Alabama 16), better known by the name, Punt Bama Punt.

Readers who have patiently stayed with this forum through the years know that MoneyLaw loves sports metaphors. And why ever not? How many people do you know who not only can decipher the market participant exception to the dormant commerce clause but also can explain why the play action pass is the mirror image of the draw play?

In law as in football, punting is the most cowardly play. Gregg Easterbrook, who numbers among those colossal figures who stride both law and football (albeit by proxy through his judicially renowned brother), has long derided preposterous punts. Yet coaches call punts all the time. Unless the ball is inside the opponents' 30 or the game situation absolutely compels a different play, punting is football's default fourth down option.

The shocking — and totally bold — no-kicks-needed conclusion to the 2007 Fiesta Bowl: Boise State 36, Oklahoma 35.

We know why. Punting happens precisely because leaders coaches are cowards. They would rather lose meekly than boldly give their teams a chance to win. It's an obvious manifestation of prospect theory. Losing hurts worse than winning feels good. This is especially true when everyone blames the coach for a botched quick-out on fourth-and-6, but no one credits the coach if the play opens the door to an epic comeback. But they should. It takes real guts to call a hook-and-ladder, a halfback pass, and a Statute of Liberty on consecutive fail-and-lose plays.

To the rescue comes this item in America's newspaper of record. As a season of new academic beginnings and renewed gridiron combat looms before us, I commend it to MoneyLaw's readership. Enjoy.

Read the rest of this post . . . .

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From Adam Himmelsbach, Punting Less Can Be Rewarding, but Coaches Aren’t Risking Jobs on It, New York Times, August 19, 2012:

Although some statistics show there are often better options on fourth down, teams continue to punt, punt and then punt some more. But what if they did not? What if the punt was punted?

Last week, San Diego State Coach Rocky Long said he might consider going for first downs when his team faced fourth downs past midfield this year. His intentions rekindled a debate about the value of the punt, a play some think is a product of coaches’ conservatism and resistance to change.

“Coaches tend to be risk averse,” said Dr. Ben Alamar, a professor of sports management at Menlo College in Atherton, Calif., who has studied N.F.L. statistics. “People are typically uncomfortable moving away from the norms.”

David Romer, a professor of political economy at the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper in 2005 on the statistics of punting that has become the gospel for the antipunting faction. Romer, who analyzed data from N.F.L. games from 1998 to 2004, determined, among other things, that teams should not punt when facing fourth-and-4 yards or less, regardless of field position.

“Of course, there are times when punting is a good idea, . . . just not nearly as many as football coaches seem to think.”

Brian Burke, the publisher of advancednflstats.com, said teams should go for a first down when they faced fourth-and-1, or when it was fourth down from the opponent’s 35 to 40. Burke also said that he believed that teams should try to score a touchdown when facing fourth-and-goal from the 6 or closer, assuming a last-second field goal is not called for.

“If everyone agrees out of fear or ignorance to sort of play ultraconservative, nobody really has an advantage,” Burke said. “There’s no development, no evolution. Coaches have strategies that are generations behind where the sport really is. It’s going to take someone to stick their neck out.”

Coaches are hesitant to take the plunge because a string of failed fourth-down attempts could leave them vulnerable to criticism and affect their job security more than a conservative menu of punts ever could.

“From different eras, there was a mind-set that playing the field-possession game is a good thing, because it turned the ball to the other team 40 yards away and allows them to make a mistake,” the former Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer said. “Coaches, by nature, are a little bit defensive in their thinking.”

According to Dr. Curt Lox, a professor of kinesiology and sports psychology at Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, the candidates best in position to experiment with a punt-free strategy are those who are so established and successful that they are almost immune to criticism of their strategy, or those who are unknown underdogs with nothing to lose.

Kevin Kelley, the head coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Ark., fit the second description when he was hired in 2003. That year, he came across a grainy VHS tape of a professor espousing the potential virtues of a punt-free lifestyle. Kelley was intrigued and has since become perhaps the most unorthodox coach in the nation.

His high school team does onside kicks after almost every score. It does not use a punt returner, because Kelley believes fumbles and penalties occur more often than strong returns. And it does not punt. Last season, the Bruins went 14-0 and won the Class 4A state title.

“It was easy to convince the players, because they grow up playing PlayStation and Madden and they don’t punt in those games, so they don’t want to punt in real games,” Kelley said. “The fans were a different story.”

When Kelley unveiled his aggressive offense, his tactics were questioned by Pulaski administrators and school board members. Once, when Pulaski defied its own logic and punted, it received a standing ovation from the home crowd.

“I remember turning around and saying, ‘You’re the only people in the history of football that stand and cheer for a punt,’ ” Kelley said. . . .

Kelley’s offense thrives because the possibilities are endless. Third-and-7 is not necessarily a passing down, and third-and-inches is not necessarily a running down.

“And God help the defense on first-and-10,” Kelley said, “because we can literally do anything.”

In recent years, Kelley has consulted with college and N.F.L. teams. He said one offensive coordinator for a team in the Big 12 Conference was enthralled by the idea of never punting, but the head coach was spooked by the risks. Then the offensive coordinator became a head coach, and he got cold feet, too.

Kelley has shared his philosophy with two A.F.C. coaches whose hesitancy outweighed their curiosity.

“These coaches are making millions of dollars, and if they lose close games doing it the traditional way, they’ll probably keep their jobs,” Kelley said.

Video bonus: Another shocking — and totally bold — no-kicks-needed conclusion, the Little Giants play that gave Michigan State a 34-31 overtime victory over Notre Dame in 2010.

Just enjoy the show

For nearly six years, MoneyLaw has asked us to pause in law's pleasures and count its many fears. The All-Star Break is the annual eye of the storm in the ecclesiastical calendar of the Church of Baseball. These moments provide the perfect occasion for reflection and introspection.

From the beginning, MoneyLaw has drawn its literary inspiration from Moneyball. In 2011, after at least one major false start, the big screen finally provided a home for Michael Lewis's bestselling profile of Billy Beane and his pursuit of the art of winning an unfair game.

The movie version of Moneyball is a distinct and worthy work in its own right. Among its subplots, the movie highlights the quiet heroism of Scott Hatteberg, the washed-up catcher that Billy Beane rescued, reclaimed, and repackaged as a first baseman who could run up pitch counts, draw walks, and bash long balls. Hatteberg ultimately brought more honor to the Oakland uniform than the likes of Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, and Jose Canseco.

Perhaps the movie's most pleasant surprise was its musical Leitmotif, a catchy tune by Lenka. Those of us who admire Billy Beane know, in some cases far too personally and far too painfully, how hard it can be to win the last game of the season. For that group — for all of us who are just a little bit caught in the middle, for whom life is a maze and love is a riddle — a break in the action represents our best chance to let it go and just enjoy the show:

The Linda Hypothetical and Testing

Most readers are familiar with the Kahneman and Tversky  classic Linda hypothetical which involves this fact pattern and the follow-up question: "Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”

Which alternative is more probable?
 (1) Linda is a bank teller.
 (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Most people choose (2) over one although it is illogical to do so since it includes (1) and involves a joint and, thus, lower probability.

I've never been a believer in the Linda hypothetical. First, I am not sure it tells us as much about logic as it does interpretation. Having listed feminist as a possibility in choice (2), "not a feminist" may be inferred to be included in (1). If so,both are examples of joint probability. I am also not sure if many people know what "more probable" means. Suppose one reads that as "best" answer meaning the one that captures Linda in a more precise fashion. Finally, how about telling subjects this is a test on logic?  In short, is the test a valid test of reasoning?

For law professors, especially those using multiple choice machine graded exams the same questions are relevant.  There are many reasons for choosing a wrong answer and sometimes the answers reveal more about the teaching and testing than the students. On the typical essay exam or multiple choice with explanation test  the teacher can assess the quality of the question by examining why people missed it. Flaws in the questions are revealed. On a machine graded exam the process of "testing the test" needs to happen before the test is used. I wonder how many machine graders either copy the questions from another source and assume the questions are pretested or actually do test the questions by having a sample of students answer the questions and then debrief those giving the wrong answer. I am betting not many. Ironically, when the of issue machine graded testing comes up many of the defenses are also illogical.

The Guilded Age

From The Guilded Age (a.k.a. The End of the American Lawyer's Guilded Age), my contribution to the The Online Library of Law and Liberty:

In our time, the free movement of labor, capital, and information has created a global economy that moves by the gigahertz. In this economic milieu, education is worth what its purchaser can earn with it. . . . Legal education is what enables students to earn a living in life, and nothing more pretentious.

My commentary appears alongside two responses:

• Walter Olson, The Self-Sustaining Guild: American Lawyers Will Still Own the Future


• Brian Tamanaha, Legal Education at the Intersection of Two Guilds

Accuracy of Model of the 2013 USN&WR Law School Rankings

As in every year since 2005, I’ve again built a model of the U.S. News & World Report ("USN&WR") law school rankings. This latest effort generated a record-high r-squared coefficient: .998673. More about what that means—and more about the one law school that doesn’t fit—below. First, here’s a snapshot comparison of the scores of the most recent (USN&WR calls them “2013”) law school rankings and the model:



As that graphical comparison indicates, the model replicated USN&WR’s scores very closely. Indeed, the chart arguably overstates the differences between the two sets of scores because it shows precise scores for the model but scores rounded to the nearest one for USN&WR.

As I mentioned above, comparing the two data sets generates an r-squared coefficient of .998673. That comes very close to an r-squared of 1, which would show perfect correlation between the two sets of scores. Plainly, the model tracks the USN&WR law school rankings very closely.

In most cases, rounding to the nearest one, the model generated the same scores as those published by USN&WR. In four cases, the scores varied by 1 point. That’s not enough of a difference to fuss over, given that small variations inevitably arise from comparing the generated scores with the published, rounded ones. Consider, for instance, that USN&WR might have generated a score of 87.444 for the University of Virginia School of Law and published it as “87.” The model calculates Virginia’s score in the 2013 rankings as 88.009. The rounded and calculated scores differ by 1.009. But if we could compare the original USN&WR score with the model’s score would get difference of only .565 points. I won’t worry over so small a difference.

You know what does worry me, though? Look at the far right side of the chart above. That red “V” marks the 4.48 difference between the 34 points USN&WR gave to the University of Idaho School of Law and the score that the model generated. Idaho showed a similar anomaly in last year’s model, though then it was not alone. This year, only Idaho does much better in the published rankings than in the model.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and MoneyLaw.]

Failing law schools

I am proud to have provided a jacket blurb for Brian Z. Tamanaha's eagerly awaited book, Failing Law Schools (U. Chicago Press, 2012):

Legal education is a broken, failed, even corrupt enterprise. It exalts and enriches law professors at the expense of lawyers, the legal profession, and most of all the students whose tuition dollars finance the entire scheme. With hard numbers and piercing insights, Brian Z. Tamanaha tells the disturbing, scandalous truth. His book is essential reading for anyone who is even contemplating law school, much less committing to a career in law teaching. With any luck, his book will inspire law professors and law school deans who have no other career options to subject themselves to the deepest levels of ethical introspection, the better to lead legal education back into the service of its true stakeholders.

I am also pleased to provide a short URL for this book: http://amzn.to/FailingLawSchools.

U.S. News & World Report Improves Transparency of Law School Rankings

Huzzah for U.S. News and World Report! The most recent edition of its law school rankings includes the median LSAT and GPA of each school’s entering class. Finally. I have long argued that USN&WR should publish all of the data that it uses in its rankings. How else can the rest of us (read: rankings geeks) understand how—and, indeed, whether—the rankings work? Though USN&WR remains short of that ideal, disclosing median LSATs and GPAs represents a major step towards making the rankings more transparent and, thus, trustworthy.

USN&WR started the trend towards transparency last year, when it began publishing the “volume and volume equivalents” measures that it uses in its law school rankings. That input counts for only .75% of a school’s score, however. Median LSATs and GPAs together count for 22.5% of a school’s score, in contrast, making their disclosure by USN&WR all the more helpful.

There remain only two categories of data that USN&WR still uses in its law school rankings but does not disclose: overhead expenditures/student (worth 9.75% of a school’s score in the rankings) and financial aid expenditures/student (worth 1.5%). It isn’t evident why USN&WR declines to publish those inputs, too, though perhaps the financial nature of the data raises special concerns. If USN&WR cannot bring itself to publish overhead expenditures/student and financial aid expenditures/student, however, it should abandon those measures. They serve as poor proxies for the quality of a school’s legal education and if we cannot double-check the figures we cannot trust their accuracy.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and MoneyLaw.]

The right families

I look behind my ears for the green
Even my sweat smells clean
Glare off the white hurts my eyes
Gotta get out of bed get a hammer and a nail
Learn how to use my hands, not just my head
I think myself into jail
Now I know a refuge never grows
From a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose
Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.

— Indigo Girls, Hammer and a Nail, Nomads Indians Saints (2000)

I grew up in the deep South. I have spent most of my adult life in exile as a stranger in the strange land called Academia. Though the deep South and Academia generally distrust each other, the two places do have some things in common. Chief among those shared traits is the belief that coming from the "right family" counts for something. After six years of publishing MoneyLaw, I'll readily concede that most of my readers will never understand the South and really don't want to understand it. That's a lost cause. But I do suspect that many readers of this blog know a "right family" when they see one. "Proffspring." Children of professors or politicians — hellfire, children of a professor and a politician — collecting another generation of Ivy or near-Ivy degrees. By and large, this is the bourgeois background that dominates acadème. They don't call it the ivory tower for nothing.

For weeks I've been looking for an excuse to post a link to the PBS quiz, White, educated, and wealthy? Congratulations, you live in a bubble. The quiz is quite illuminating. It illustrates the basic premise of Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010: The United States, especially but not just its majority white population, is pulling apart like cells undergoing meiosis. The wealthier and (yes) whiter you are, the less likely you are to encounter anyone who deviates from your background. MoneyLaw veteran Jeff Harrison calls it class bias. Really, there's a simpler term for it. Business as usual in academia.

I scored 32 out of 100 points on that PBS quiz. Humble was I ere I saw Harvard: any points I scored were traceable to my upbringing in a comfortable but decidedly modest, working-class immigrant family. That score, PBS told me, is typical of a first-generation professional from a fair to middlin' working-class background. I strongly suspect that most scores in American legal academia would be much, much more sequestered.

I had occasion this week to speak to the hiring partner of a large law firm in a medium-sized American city (not Louisville). He reported an observation that bears repeating. This partner and his counterparts around the country have compared notes on all of the top-ten-percent students and law review editors their firms have hired. The factor that most accurately predicts success? Whether at least one parent worked with her or his hands. Seriously, get out of bed and grab a hammer and a nail.

Come to think of it, as the child of parents whose first jobs in this country were busing tables at Atlanta's old Stouffer Hotel and packing doughnuts at the Krispy Kreme on Ponce de Leon Avenue, I can definitely lay claim to a distinction that has dogged me my whole life, first as a child in and of the deep South, and later as a vagabond in Academia. I really do come from one of the "right families." Indeed, the very best.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. And thanks, Dad, for marrying her.

Opportunity costs

Editor's note: This column is adapted from the February 2012 edition of Louisville Bar Briefs.

Opportunity is knocking. What will you pay to open the door?

In previous columns, I have given basic information about law school admissions. I have also shown prospective students how to evaluate law school debt as a crucial first step in determining their return on educational investment. Those columns have culminated in an article, "A Degree of Practical Wisdom: The Ratio of Educational Debt to Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates’ Economic Viability," that will soon appear in the William Mitchell Law Review. I now wish to push the conversation deeper into the economic subtleties of what students can realistically expect to pay for law school — and what they can realistically expect to gain in exchange.

Read the rest of this post . . . .At the risk of overestimating my own literary powers, I deliberately intended the title of this column, "Opportunity Costs," to convey multiple layers of meaning. As a noun phrase, opportunity costs refer to a basic principle in economics. To an economist, every action, every choice must be assessed according to what the consumer has elected to forgo. Today's legal profession reflects every bit of the strain that grips the broader economy. It almost certainly is undergoing deeper structural changes that will affect lawyers' earnings for years to come. In that light, every prospective law student bears the responsibility to mind the particulars of economics as the dismal science. Going to law school commits you to a three-year wait on full-time earnings. Those three years will not be spent developing skills, honing expertise, or cultivating connections in some other field. All educational debt is nondischargeable, and there are no refunds on tuition, fees, books, or supplies.

Do understand. All of us in legal education fervently hope for bountiful season after bountiful season of law school applicants. I simply want to emphasize that students' eventual experience, during school and after graduation, will depend deeply on their expectations before matriculation. If you are contemplating law school but will go only if you hit a certain prestige level, you probably should not apply. If you are applying solely to please someone else — a parent, a spouse, a faceless figure named "Bourgeois Society" whispering at your back — you emphatically should stop the application process and devote your energy instead to mustering the courage to say "no." If you can imagine something you truly would rather do than to be a lawyer, then by all means spend those thousand days chasing another dream. Disappointment is the nearest friend of unrealistic expectations. Misunderstanding the enterprise of legal education and the eventual practice of law will undermine your success. Conversely, arming yourself now with research and deep introspection, long before you get your first tuition bill, represents a down payment on satisfaction and an actual, quantifiable livelihood.

I now reach a second level at which I want this column's title to be understood. Approach the phrase opportunity costs as a complete sentence, with a one-word subject and a one-word, one-verb predicate. Let me repeat my opening paragraph: "Opportunity is knocking. What will you pay to open the door?" Law school as opportunity demands that you open the door. Most economists would describe legal education as an experience good. Its quality and its value to you as the consumer become fully apparent only after you commit. Indeed, those very experts on consumer behavior might well describe law school as a credence good. You can't tell whether going was worth the while till long after you've left, and perhaps not even then. Even after you decide to attend and have spent four, five, six semesters on doctrinal details and practical experiences in a clinic, an externship, and a public service placement, validation of return on investment awaits the first job offer. There is a deep temptation to treat legal education as a search good, as though the culmination of each student's best efforts to engage classmates and professors during school can be distilled into single-dimension scalar measures of an extended experience — all in advance of the first three years of a lifelong professional commitment.

Let me be clear. No. No third party, let alone one that has put no skin of its own in the game, can realistically evaluate each student's educational experience or the broader market's eventual reaction to each student's accomplishments during school. That is not how it works. Global capitalism teems with products whose price, quality, and value are immediately apparent and readily enable sophisticated purchasers to make rational decisions to buy, sell, hedge, or sit out. West Texas crude. Durum wheat. But not education. Nor, for that matter, legal services.

This brings me to the final set of subtleties that I hoped to convey by naming this column, "Opportunity Costs." Focus on that word, opportunity. I will make a few observations about how law school graduates make money. As a teacher of law who has always taken pride in his own knowledge of economics and taken pains to share that knowledge with students, I can't resist one teaching more lesson in economics. And as a producer of legal scholarship informed by economics, I want to set out my own agenda — I want to lay down an intellectual marker — for future work on this subject.

In one of the chapters of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb recalls his own days at the Wharton School of Business and how one classmate urged him to pursue only those careers that were "scalable." So began the tale of how Taleb, one of the true geniuses of our time, threw his talents into trading securities as opposed to pursuing some craft whose payout hinged on his own efforts. Whereas a single bet on the capital markets — shorting collateralized mortgage obligations, going all in on European sovereign debt on the assumption that the European Central Bank and German politicians would never permit default — can move or destroy staggering amounts of wealth with no meaningful difference in effort, almost everyone else, even in an information-based economy, earns a paycheck based on some multiple of hours expended.

Again, I will mince no words. In the terms that Taleb has described, the overwhelming majority of livelihoods in law more closely resemble those of barbers, butchers, and bakers. Government attorneys, in-house counsel, and a very significant number of lawyers in highly leveraged, multiple-partner firms derive their compensation on a basis that lends itself to accurate calculation on an hourly basis. Lawyers working on any variant of the contingency fee model, far from achieving escape velocity from nonscalable work, bear the extra burden of assessing the likelihood of getting paid by a particular client for a particular case. Only the narrow tier of equity partners have a stream of income that remotely resembles those of Taleb's "scalable" professionals. This is no different from medicine. Most physicians belong in exactly the same category. Revenue depends on patients seen and treated. The overwhelming majority of cardiologists draw their pay from the number of hearts cured. A tiny, lucky fraction might win a product patent for a stent or a process patent for a revolutionary surgical procedure. But even in medical specialties, runaway profit on some sort of nonscalable business model is a spectacularly rare exception. Human optimism emboldens us to hope for outsized gains. Human wisdom counsels us to work for realistic goals.

More sophisticated economic analysis of the potential payout from legal education demands, at a minimum, a human capital asset pricing model akin to modern portfolio theory's basic tool for pricing companies and investments. For an introduction to modern portfolio theory through an application of its principles to a set of legal problems, I invite you to download "Modern Disaster Theory: Evaluating Disaster Law as a Portfolio of Legal Tools," which I will soon publish in the Emory International Law Review. The tradeoff between legal education's costs — from opportunity cost in the most traditional sense to the best available projections of educational debt service — and the economic gain from a law degree boils down, as does virtually every other question of professional training, to calculations based on probabilities, variances, and correlations. Like capital markets, though, truly accurate answers must also account for a host of unpredicted contingencies (what Taleb calls "Black Swans"), to say absolutely nothing of unruly emotional and behavioral factors that wreak havoc on the most quantitatively elegant economic models.

All of that, as economics textbooks and instructors like to say, is an exercise to be left for the reader. In this instance, for the writer as well. For now, I return to a very modest twist on my original question. The law school opportunity knocks. What are you, prospective student, willing to pay to open the door?

The better angels of our profession

Adapted from the December 2011 issue of Louisville Bar Briefs and from The Cardinal Lawyer

With his series of articles on legal education, David Segal of the New York Times has left a deep impression. From the beginning of calendar year 2011, Segal has repeatedly criticized some aspects of contemporary legal education. In an age when lawyer salaries have not kept pace with ballooning law school costs and student debts, he has questioned the economic rationality of attending law school. He has accused some law schools of offering financial aid packages that are tied to maintenance of seemingly attainable grade point averages, which then evaporate in the face of tough grading curves and expose scholarship recipients to second- and third-year bills for full tuition. He has challenged universities to prove that they are not running law schools as cash cows for cross-subsidizing lower-revenue units on campus.

But nothing else in David Segal's portfolio has caught the legal academy's attention like his November 20, 2011, article called "After Law School, Associates Learn to Be Lawyers." This excerpt provides the flavor of the article as a whole:

[T]he three people taking notes are not students. They are associates at a law firm called Drinker Biddle & Reath, hired to handle corporate transactions. And they have each spent three years and as much as $150,000 for a legal degree.

What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”

In other words, "Everything I needed to know about law, I didn't learn in law school."

Read the rest of this post . . . .To cap things off, the Times published a staff editorial immediately after Segal's article on the contrast between law firms' expectations and law schools' priorities. "Legal Education Reform" called upon American law schools to adopt sweeping reforms, including wholesale reconsideration of its emphasis on legal reasoning, especially as demonstrated in appellate cases.

Law professors across the country have reacted rather strongly to the New York Times' series, particularly Segal's article on law faculty hiring and the staff editorial demanding law school reform. Those reactions have fallen into three broad categories. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross would be proud: Faced with this challenge to their dignity and their raison d'être, law professors collectively have covered nearly the entire emotional range of the grieving process. Some have reacted with denial and anger. Others actively try to bargain with other branches of the legal profession. Still others, albeit with some measure of depression, have done their best to accept appropriate criticism and to begin framing some form of meaningful, constructive response.

Let me begin with the angry deniers. For my part, I do not believe that law professors and law schools do themselves any favors, in an age of indebted students, unemployed law school graduates, and laid-off lawyers, to trash these criticisms as a "hatchet job" or (better yet) a "bile pile." It takes a deep measure of cynicism — petty selfishness, really — to characterize the Times as being motivated by their writers and editors' failure to get relatives into law school or past the bar exam. A second, less angry cohort of law professors fervently wants to believe that tough times in the legal profession are merely cyclical. Wait a year or two or five, so the wishing goes, and things will be back to the way they always were.

Count me in the third camp. The criticisms are real. They sting. All of us, from law schools and law students to lawyers and law firms, have to do something. Things could, things should be better.

There is, to be sure, much to criticize in the work of Segal and his Times colleagues. "After Law School, Associates Learn to Be Lawyers" makes serious factual errors. Segal mischaracterizes the content of law school courses on criminal law and criminal procedure. He represents as legal scholarship an article appearing in a philosophy journal. The Times as a whole seems to belittle the value of analytical legal reasoning and, correspondingly, to elevate certain formalities of legal practice (such as filing a certificate of merger). But to take issue with these minutiae, let alone to tee off in anger or resentment, is to pay no heed to the realities of modern legal practice. The business of delivering traditional legal services has lost much of its value. Along with the conventional lawyering model, the value of a generalist legal education has also plummeted. At once opportunistic and enterprising, all sorts of competitors — foreign lawyers, nonlegal professionals, actual lawyers who understand the urgencies of a mobile, technologically volatile age — are upsetting longstanding expectations about beginning salaries and the up-or-out partnership track. Cost-conscious clients distrust the billable hour. They are even more hostile to the idea of subsidizing the training of rookie lawyers who haven't learned all they needed during 90 credits of formal law school coursework.

As serendipity would have it, the entire episode coincided with my discovery of psychologist Steven Pinker's latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. There is a single gem of wisdom in Pinker's book that seems particularly pertinent to this controversy. Pinker reports, on the basis of deep knowledge about human pyschology, that people systematically overestimate their own grievances and underestimate the pain borne by others. This bias transcends the notion that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. It's the regrettable tendency that we all have: believing that our grass alone is brown, and it's the fault of all our neighbors.

Demonizing the opposition is the root of all violence. And violence takes many forms. The ancient and modern societies of Pinker's book wage war. If only they took prisoners, rather than enslaving their enemies or slaying them outright. Lawyers, including those who teach law more often than they practice it, too often excel in inflicting emotional wounds for no apparent purpose except to assuage their own sense of hurt. When it comes to genuine reform of legal education and the profession it serves, casting Segal and the New York Times onto the "bile pile" of academic amusement and aggrandizement accomplishes absolutely nothing.

The hard truth is that law schools could stand to act more like law firms, paying closer heed to what lawyers actually do for a living. Law firms could stand to to act more like law schools, absorbing the cost and the responsibility of training their new recruits instead of expecting law professors to know skills best perfected far from the classroom. Law students would be well served to take a hard, financially sophisticated look at the out-of-pocket and opportunity costs of legal education, to say nothing of the strictly pecuniary returns on their investments in personal capital. The Socratic method and the parsing of written appellate opinions have a firm place in law school. But law schools and bar examiners and hiring partners should all work together to reconsider why and how we teach certain things. Sheer age and force of habit are terrible excuses for doing anything, much less forcing aspiring members of our profession to endure a three-year ordeal. The relative cheapness of traditional lecturing explains why it's more prevalent than hand-to-hand clinical teaching, but cost alone sheds at best incomplete light on the value of practical as well as intellectual training in law school. And no one, inside or outside the academy, has ever found the perfect way to convey subtle skills that arise over the course of a lifetime of professional activities and interpersonal relationships.

We have to start somewhere. Perhaps we can begin by admitting that everyone is in pain. Law students are in debt. Law schools face budget cuts. Law firms are enduring layoffs and lower per-partner payouts. For once, we might acknowledge that all of us have grievances, that our own complaints may be no more pressing than those of our companions. Fingers we have been too quick to point might yet touch what Abraham Lincoln called the mystic chords of memory — strings that can be struck only by the better angels of our profession.

Update: This item has been reprinted by Law School Transparency.

The ratio of educational debt to income as a measure of law graduates’ viability

I offer the following publicly available summary of my fuller paper, A Degree of Practical Wisdom: The Ratio of Educational Debt to Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates’ Economic Viability, which can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/DegreePracticalWisdom and has been discussed in this forum. I will be discussing this paper during my contribution to the deans' forum in the annual program of the Section on Socio-Economics at the 2012 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in Washington, D.C.

This table defines marginal, adequate, and good levels of educational debt, relative to monthly or annual income, based on loans amortized over 25 years at a fixed rate of 6 percent:

Financial viability	EBER (educational back-end ratio) = monthly debt service / monthly gross income	EDAI = total debt / annual income
Good	0.04	0.5
Adequate	0.08	1.0
Marginal	0.12	1.5

The simplest measure of whether a student can afford law school is to project the ratio of future annual income to total law school debt. The most conservative assumption is that law school debt will equal three times tuition. I presume that students enter school with no other debt. I further presume that students can fund the cost of living without further borrowing. On those assumptions, the ratio of annual income to educational debt is simply the reciprocal of ratio of educational debt to annual income, with loan principal defined as annual tuition times three:

Ratio of annual salary to law school debt = annual salary / (annual tuition * 3)

Applying my definitions of good, adequate, and marginal financial viability to this ratio generates three very simple rules of thumb. To offer good financial viability, defined as a ratio of education debt to annual income no greater than 0.5, post-law school salary must exceed annual tuition by 6 to 1. Adequate financial viability is realized when annual salary reaches three years of tuition. A marginal level of financial viability requires a salary that is equal to two years’ tuition:

Tuition	Salary needed for good viability	Salary needed for adequate viability	Salary needed for marginal viability
$16,000	$96,000	$48,000	$32,000
$32,000	$192,000	$96,000	$64,000
$48,000	$288,000	$144,000	$96,000