Gordon: You say, "One thing we have not seen law schools attempt, as far as I know, is imposing a work experience requirement on new admits."
My alma mater, NU Law (in Chicago) has not imposed a requirement for prior work experience. It has, however, made such experience an admissions criterion. From the NUSL web site: "We base our admissions decisions on more than just test scores. Long-term, our goal is that all entering students will have at least two years of postcollege work experience - another factor that helps us determine their motivation and ability to thrive in law school and beyond." The page containing the quotation, with a bar graph showing the yearly rise in admits with work experience, is here.

I remember at U. of Houston, someone proposed having a 2-year work requirement for incoming students, like business schools do. I asked if we were going to have the same requirement for incoming law professors.

I think your point about work experience has limited merit. I went straight through college and lawschool, was the editor in chief of the law review and finished in the top 3 in my class. The reason for this: the economy was horrible. Even though I went to a top college, I could not land a respecticable job in the industry I desired. My options were to take a secretarial job, i.e. become a paralegal, or spin the dice and become a lawyer.

If law schools overly value work experience then those students who become eligble to attend law school during a recession are disproporionately injured. Conversely, those who worked during the economic boom and then decided to goto law school during the recession are disproportionately benefited. It was much easier for them to land a top-flight job, pad their resume, with "hot" failed companies with name recognition, i.e. Pets.com. If schools take into account work experience, undoubtedly they will categorize which experience is "better."

This doesn't even address the problem of law applicants who were not privileged enough to go to Ivy-league caliber schools. Students from privilege, which are disproportionately represented at top-flight schools, will gain an additional edge, exploiting their schools network to land top jobs.

Do these privileged students really need any additional advantage? Many of these students already get the advantage of attending test prep classes, hiring private tutors, not having work in the months before the LSAT, etc.

The result: privileged students, who were lucky enough to work during an economic boom, have an easier time getting into law school. They look amazing on paper, even though their instrinsic intellegence and ability is severely lacking

There are so many critiques to be leveled at the Comment by Anonymous, but I'll mention only one:

Are B-schools the bastions of privilege that Anonymous thinks law schools will become?

B-schools are bastions of privelege, at least at the top programs. Many b-school students have previous experience at i-banks, high-end consulting companies, hedge funds, etc. Those jobs are increasingly reserved for students from ivy-caliber schools, whose student body is disproportionately populated by privileged students

Please level more critiques. Attack this point: if law schools emphasize work experience, how will they internally weigh that metric when deciding whether to admit a student?

Will it just be: does this applicant have work experience? T or F? Maybe at first, but as the applicant pool adjusts to the new requirement, how then will the admissions office then make decisions (all else being equal)?

My guess is that would have to guess that this metric would be weighed based on prestige.

Let me go back to Gordon's original post, which I largely agree with. We'd like to think that our comparative advantage is offering intellectual training, and not technical experience, which students can surely acquire after law school. OTOH, I think the world has changed a lot since Gordon and I graduated from law school.

I'll speak to the law firm sector, which is where I've had a little experience. My sense is that the pressure on young lawyers to specialize these days is enormous. Firms are much more profit driven today than even a decade ago, I think. This means that young lawyers may not have the luxury of knowing only how to "think like a lawyer" in the abstract by the time they graduate from law school. Firms don't like to write off associate time. Instead, firms seem more and more to care about whether law grads can "hit the ground running."

Now, the quality/rank/prestige/(fill in your own hierarchical criteria) of the school clearly matters. Firms probably don't worry very much about whether an NYU grad can figure out how to practice law. For lower ranked schools in competitive markets, though, the experience for graduates may be very different.

Higher ranked schools can still afford to train their students to be law firm partners (or academics!), confident that they'll be able to master the skills required for being an associate on their own. As one moves away from the prestige schools in a given legal market, though, it seems to me that schools will need to train their students to be associates. Otherwise, they might never get a chance to be a partner.

B-schools are bastions of privilege, at least at the top programs. Many b-school students have previous experience at i-banks, high-end consulting companies, hedge funds, etc. Those jobs are increasingly reserved for students from ivy-caliber schools, whose student body is disproportionately populated by privileged students.

This comment rings true to me. It squares with my own knowledge of top B-schools, which is second-hand but not insignificant.

Top law schools, while no great shakes on the economic diversity front, seem more so than top business schools.

I have always thought that law schools were more schools of opportunity than medical schools because the LSAT is an aptitude test, not a knowledge test, like the MCAT. Doing well on the LSAT does not necessarily hinge on the quality of your high school education or your college education. I would suspect that doing well on the MCAT does. Perhaps doing well on the GMAT does as well, which explains the lack of economic diversity at top B-schools.