I would write the letter for the student not only because I think that it is the ethical thing to do but because I think refusing to write such letters would be counterproductive. A student who feels "trapped" at PLS is not going to be motivated to be a productive member of the school or to be generous towards the school when they become an alumnus. In the interests of disclosure, I should note that I have a niece who is a first year law student at 25 law school. She made the deans list first semester and she wants to transfer to another top law school in order to be in the city that she plans to practice in and to be closer to her boyfriend/fiance. I would hope that the professors at her current school would not hinder her ability to transfer schools by refusing to write recommendations for her.

I commented briefly on the other thread about the antitrust implications of "doing the right thing" with Tulane students, i.e., concerted refusals to deal with them in the transfer market. The antitrust laws do apply to the market for students, see United States v. Brown Univ., 5 F.3d 658, but exactly how they apply in any given case is unclear. I think the schools would bear a heavy burden in justifying agreements to limit transfers, especially since, as you mention, it would lead to lower scholarship offers to talented students.

As for the fairness of PLS and State U. conspiring to limit the mobility of students, how would the professor feel if State U. agreed to stop poaching professors from PLS? I bet she would find that unacceptable. Yet, the professor is perfectly willing to impose a similar burden on her students. It's typical of law professors who are all for improving the quality of law schools so long as someone else foots the bill.

As a student who transferred after being in the same scenario, and who reaped the career benefits of that transfer (4th tier private, with scholarship, to 1st tier public, no scholarship) I feel very strongly about this situation. Any professor who would refuse to write the recommendation letter on principle has no business in the teaching profession or having any contact with students. A teacher has an obligation to advise and assist students, and consider their best interests when giving any form of advice or taking any action (outside of grading, etc.) that effects their future. Further, I simply can't imagine what a horrible person you would have to be to refuse to write that letter...

Christine,

This topic raises so many issues, it could easily be made into an article. Here are my thoughts, in brief.

Our current system of legal education is rife with exploitation. Law schools at the very top shrink their entering class to jack up entering statistics; in turn, they expand transfer students class filled with students who pay full tuition. The vast majority of merit aid is used to drive up entering credential and diversity statistics, which are often based on first-year admissions. The transfer students essentially cross subsidize this system. This topic is covered empirically by Andy Morriss and I in our Market for High LSAT Students article.

Virtually every law school has an admission policy that seeks to maximize law school prestige. High LSAT/UGPA for first year students, diversity, stellar work experience, or willingness to pay full tuition after the second year all work to benefit the law school.

Graduating from a Top 15 law school opens doors. Every law professor understands this fact. As I result, I think it is immoral to act as a obstacle (or to refuse to cooperate) to such a transfer, though I realize that morality-based argument are not very fashionable.

Of course, the tranfer game has a clear starting point: Top 15 law schools. This corrupt practice has no educational benefit for the law school population as a whole--only an instrumental gain for the law schools.

Andy Morriss and I argue that the ABA and USNWR can correct this system by tracking the net inflows of transfer students and penalizing schools with large disparities between entering classes (say 180) and graduating classes (210). Transfers should be used to balance out attrition, not USNWR gaming.

Prof. Henderson:

Wouldn't your system have perverse results? Under the current regime, schools have an incentive to leave transfer spots open for students who outperform their GPA/LSAT profile. Given that the GPA/LSAT is a relatively poor predictor of law school performance, this would seem like a good thing. However, under your penalty scheme, schools will simply fill up their entering classes with high LSAT students, leaving no room for students with excellent legal abilities but low standardized test scores.

I would like to concur with the point about the retention market. The best way for law schools to retain talented students is to offer them rewards for staying--in the form of second- and third-year scholarships. But most schools don't do that, at least not extensively. This is in direct contrast to the way many undergraduate universities and colleges operate, where scholarships awarded to current students on the basis of performance are common, and often don't have to be applied for.

Law students, in contrast, often have to fight for any merit aid they might deserve after the first year, because what scholarship monies are available are tied up with students who had high LSAT and undergraduate numbers and got scholarships on that basis.

Unfortunately, many law students transfer because of policies like this. "I didn't get any money from PLS," they say, "but now I've outperformed my index score, so I might as well move to a higher prestige school (State U. or another, highly ranked private school), where my education will be worth more, and thus worth the debt."

Until law schools focus more on retention than on recruitment, I don't see how faculty can refuse to facilitate transfers by students who are simply trying to leverage their grades to allieviate their debt.

These are really thoughtful comments, and I can't claim to offer much sophistication to them, but note that an active transfer market does even out mistakes in the entry level process, which turn on GPA and LSAT, but which may not perfectly select for great law students. Why shouldn't the wrongly overlooked benefit from the same good JDs as the luckily admitted? My sense about top 10 school - no data, and I certainly don't know about my home institution - is that transfers do better in the second and third year than the average.

So that's a cost to Bill Henderson's recommendation, which is, net, probably a good idea.

I only have 2 points, neither of which have to do with ethics

1. I can't imagine any duty exists here, of course.

2. A school that was hostile to would-be departing students will quickly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage for incoming students. After all, all else equal, which school would you go to - the one that allows well-performing students upward mobility, or the one that shackles them to their initial school? Word gets out, especially with this Internet thing.

I agree with David Zaring: these are thoughtful comments. I really like it when students engage on these issues. They show some really creative thinking.

Let me use David's point to answer PK's criticism of my attrition-only educational policy.

1. The "mistakes in the entry level process" is a misnomer. Very few law schools, especially at the top of the hierarchy, are looking for the best students who will contribute the most the learning environment and alumni network of the law school. They are looking for students with high numbers who will actually enroll at the law school at a cost-effective price (i.e., tuition after merit aid). In various publications footnoted in my LSAT with Andy Morriss, Dean admit this. And this is why Top Schools have gained 1.69 LSAT points between 1993 and 2004, with a corresponding lost in the bottom half.

2. In the early literature on the LSAT, the deans and test developers stated that LSAT's chief virtue was its ability to identify candidates who would otherwise flunk out under the "sink or swim" admission policy utilized by most law school (the "Wigmore plan"). Indeed, the attrition rates were much higher in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. By predicting this ex ante, the test saved lots of candidates a wasted year. But with the flood of applicants in the post-war years, you can find many commentators who readily admit that there are more qualified candidates than entry level seats; the LSAT merely ranked them. During the 1960s, only a handful of schools placed more weight on the LSAT and undergraduate grades and letters of recommendation. Obviously, we have completely flipped this emphasis in the last 40 years.

3. In this environment, I would argue that a "soft" admissions policy is the best. In an ideal world, which is not the world we live in, admissions officers would look for a very modest admissions index cut score and thereafter look for indices of creativity, leadership, moral courage, interpersonal skills, and social and political diversity and engagement. If we are going to have competition for students, for godsakes lets broaden the basis of competition. Focusing only on the LSAT and UGPA rewards a very narrow range of skills. I think that is bad.

4. The number of transfer admits has clearly gone up on the USNWR era, and it has nothing to do with correcting admission mistakes. Unfortunately, there is a cost incurred by most transfer students; they report greater social isolation at their new schools because first-year cliches have already been formed. See Second Annual Report of the Survey of Law School Student Engagement (empirical evidence on this point). If it was all about the better JD credentials, then Harvard could increase social wealth by cutting its 550 class by 100 and adding 125 transfers the next year.

5. There is nothing sinister about the current system. It is product of USNWR and a collective action problem. Microeconomics 301.

Prof. Henderson:

I am very sympathetic to your view that the law schools should be trying to broaden the factors they examine in the admissions process, but I still think your scheme would make things worse rather than better.

First, I do not think the ABA could justify putting restrictions on the student transfer market under the antitrust laws (I looked briefly at the paper you mentioned in your first post and did not see any discussion of this issue, but I might have missed it). Perhaps you could convince the USNWR to change their rankings scheme, but I'm not sure it is wise for them to do that. USNWR produces a consumer guide. If students are transferring to a school, that is a plus in the eyes of consumers because it shows that that school is producing something valuable. If USNWR assigns a negative value to increasing numbers of transfers, they'd be lying to their customers, not especially good business practice in my view.

Second, if I understand your argument correctly, you're claiming that the law schools have increased the number of transfers they take to improve their UNSWR ranking rather than to correct admissions mistakes and that's bad. I don't think that conclusion necessarily follows because such policies could have the effect of correcting mistakes, which would be a good thing, even if that effect was unintended.

Third, your point about transfers incurring costs as a result of transferring is certainly true, but what does it show? If anything, it underscores the importance of allowing transfers because transfers are willing to absorb those costs for the opportunity to transfer.

Finally, there seems to be an easier way for lower ranked schools to deal with a tranfer problem: make their scholarship offers refundable upon transfer to another school. If a student gets a $30,000 scholarship for 1L year, they have to pay that money back upon transferring.