Legal Commentary

Staggering year-to-year price increases fueled by easy access to credit (partly as a result of government subsidization), followed by a resounding crash ... does this describe the legal academy's not-too-distant future, as well as the housing industry's immediate past?

I deliberately phrase this post as a question, because I have no particularly strong (and certainly no particularly informed) sense of this, but I'm wondering whether other people have thoughts about (1) whether legal education is (over?)due for some sort of "market correction," and if so (2) what form it might take, and (3) whether that would, on the whole, be a bad thing.

It's no secret that increases in law-school tuition, and tuition for secondary education generally have outpaced overall inflation for some time. Is this sustainable? Here are a couple of questions or considerations (others are welcome to note additional ones):

• The usual story I hear about law schools and the business cycle is that legal education is countercyclical, at least in one regard: applications tend to go up when the economy heads south. But though a bad economy lowers the opportunity cost of going to school, you still have to pay the, um, cost cost of going to school, and maybe that will get harder now. Will the recent tightening of credit extend to law-school loans? It seems likely that government loan programs will continue, but access to private loans may become more difficult. If this happens, it might threaten the ongoing ability of law schools to increase their tuition at the rates they have done so in the past.
• Will the downturn affect the "law sector" of the economy, thereby also affecting legal education? As Brian Tamanaha and Bill Henderson (and others) have pointed out, job prospects for many law-school graduates were less than stellar even before the recent economic difficulties. Will prospective law students increasingly conclude that the costs of the degree are not worth the benefits?

If it seems likely that there will be some sort of impact on the legal academy, then what form(s) might it take?

• Will all, or most, law schools be affected in roughly similar fashion, or will there be starkly different effects on public v. private; or based on geography; or "top tier" v. "lower tier" (whatever those terms are thought to mean); or relatively rich v. poor schools (might correlate with previous category); or independent schools v. those affiliated with a larger university; or other factors?
• Alfred Brophy at Faculty Lounge has advanced the likelihood of reduced hiring and increased teaching loads for those who remain, and perhaps a broader shift away from a focus on scholarship and toward teaching. (He raised these issues even before the economy collapsed.) Other possible "supply side" effects: heightened (or otherwise changed) tenure standards and/or less tenure-track hiring; reduced salaries/raises/benefits; increased use of adjuncts; larger class sizes, including more "distance" learning. Which of these seem most plausible? Other possibilities?

Finally, perhaps most provocatively, if there's a contraction of some form in the legal-education market, might that be a good thing? Should government student-loan support promote, say, graduate engineering education rather than legal education? Are we producing too many lawyers? Should more students realize that the odds do not favor their obtaining high-paying employment after law school?

Few if any of these questions/issues are new, of course, but I'm curious to hear what people think.