Gordon --

Normally I view you as a sane voice. Your apparent advocacy of 2-year law school programs, as opposed to the 3-year standard we all know so well, gives me reason to reconsider that assessment.

Law profs have a duty to turn out minimally competent lawyers. The law school professoriate is not meeting this end.

Thanks for the inof. I found your post very helpful.

Jake,

So perhaps we should move to four years of law school? Or five? Surely we could accomplish your assigned task in that much time.

The issue, of course, is whether the time spent in law school might be more usefully spent in practice. The practicing bar has demanded more practice-oriented training, and law schools have changed dramatically over the past several decades in response to that demand. These changes have made legal education more expensive, but still we hear (or read, in the case of your comment) that legal education is failing to accomplish the assigned task.

Hmm. At some point, don't you stop to wonder whether you have given law schools the right assignment?

Some reformers want to turn law school into all practice all the time. (Go read some of the comments over on Taxprof Blog in response to my original post.) But if that's the best model, shouldn't we just go back to apprenticeships and dispense with classroom education altogether?

I don't know whether the two-year law school is the best way to structure professional training, but I like the notion that law schools should focus on what they should do best: classroom instruction. Moreover, the two-year law school may be inevitable. At least I can state with some confidence that the market forces in that direction are growing.

I haven't seen specifics, but it looks like the NU two-year program just squeezes the existing credit hours into two years, rather than three. Gordon, I'm wondering whether you think the two-year program should have the same number of hours as the current three-year model, or whether the ABA and AALS should reduce the number of credit hours in moving to a two-year model.

Gordon, your comment to Jake is a good one, but Matt makes an excellent point -- cramming 3 years into 2 years (and charging the same fare) doesn't address any of the issues you cite. (And the argument you cite by Chemerinsky is just silly -- the legal profession in the United States is a guild. There is no "globalization" pressure because legal services in the U.S. are monopolized by this guild. You want to incorporate in Delaware, register with the SEC, or defend yourself against a class action lawsuit in Texas, you will be hiring a lawyer licensed to practice in at least some state in the United States. And to be a member of the bar in most states, you have to go to an American law school. Where's this international competitive pressure?)

Matt, NW's program is required to have the same number of credits or it cannot be accredited. My applause is aimed at the direction of the move. Also I like the substantive changes they have made to the curriculum (as described in the article: "teach skills such as accounting, teamwork and project management") and the fact that they value work experience in admissions. All of these are good innovations, I believe, and I believe the pressure to reduce credit hours (from students, who are too burdened by debt under the present system, and by globalization) will ultimately lead to that result.

M.D., The competitive pressure comes from elite international transactional practice and it will trickle down from there. It won't happen tomorrow, but I think it will happen sooner than most of us in legal education expect.

The main benefit and attraction of 2 vs 3 years is a 1/3 cost savings. Which given the price of law school versus the average salary of lawyers is a non-trivial consideration.
I have always been upset by how much my law school cost compared to the value I received in education (and my company paid for it).

On the pressure of international competition, legal outsourcing is already happening. Just like call centers, India has a wealth of low-cost, English-fluent people who can be the "back office" of law firms or corporate counsel offices. Sure, you need to hire a Delaware lawyer to appear in Chancery Court, but her briefs don't have to be drafted by local lawyers--only signed by them.

On outsourcing to India, see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1727726,00.html.

Boris's comment is an example of why I think the press around this change has been confusing. It's not as if Northwestern has cut out a year of legal education. It has instead condensed the normal course of study into two years plus the summer before. (So wouldn't this be two-and-a-half years? 2.3 years?) I'm all in favor of experimenting with different ways of approaching the requirements, and many students may find Northwestern's plan to their liking. Plus, the other curricular changes sound like they have a lot of promise. But it's not as if law school has gone from three years to two years. And no, Boris, your tuition will not be cut by 33%.

Gordon states: "I like the notion that law schools should focus on what they should do best: classroom instruction."

If this is truly what law schools excel at, and what the legal employment marketplace prizes, then three years of classroom instruction is better than two, correct?

But market forces are said to run to the contrary. Hmmm. Maybe classroom instruction is not what the market prizes?

Why not just offer a one-year curriculum that focuses on the basics of legal reasoning and how to write? Law schools thus would be like trade schools, and turn out "lawyers" like auto mechanics.

This comparison is illustrative only, and not intended to slight auto mechanics in the least.

Jake,

You need to get your facts straight. Read the Carnegie Report. Teaching analytical skills is the place where law schools excel. I think there is a fair degree of consensus on that point, and to say that legal employers don't value that is simply untrue. It's not that legal employers don't value what law schools do, but rather that they want law schools to do more. So the question is the extent to which law schools should go beyond what they have traditionally done well and teach skills. Carnegie recommends a lot more emphasis on skills, and I am resisting that recommendation.

Though Matt is right about Boris not being able to lower his tuition by one-third under the NW proposal, future Borises would be able to lower their tuition and other costs if law schools reduced the number of required credits for graduation. Of course legal employers want to foist the cost of training off on law schools ... why not? It produces better entry-level attorneys, and if you want to be cynical, you might observe that placing law students deeply into debt serves the interests of large firms, who might otherwise lose talent to lower-paying employers. From the perspective of law students, however, I wonder if that third year of law school would be worth the cost, if it weren't required for accreditation. As my post suggests, I suspect that I know how that market test would come out.

Gordon,

Well stated as always. Whether law students graduate deeply in debt is entirely beside the point. It is not an ironclad tenet that money spent makes a good entry-level lawyer. There are plenty of state-subsidized law schools, and "lower tier" law schools out there that can teach law students the art of persuasive analytical reasoning. Went that route myself.

Which brings us to your second, and very closely related point -- the three year curriculum that is a prerequisite for accreditation, and which inflicts so much financial damage on nascent lawyers. One wishes smart law profs like yourself would assail the ABA's monopoly on accreditation.

As I've stated before, law schools need to craft curricula that serve students who have serious real world experience, and seek to translate that into a career in the law, as well as students who know nothing but their undergraduate education. Transitioning the study of law to a uniform two-year curriculum would be a disservice to the latter class (albeit a boon to the former).

Jake,

While it is a nice thought to try and break up the monopoly on accreditation, the ABA's monopoly is a barrier to entry that favors everyone inside the guild and is specifically aimed to keep everyone else out. The same could be said of bar exams. Such barriers do not usually come down because the only people who can lower those barriers are the very people who receive the most benefit from the barriers.

Your comment that money spent does not make a good entry-level lawyer is true, given that many lower tier private schools cost as much as top tier programs, whose students subsequently (at least in California) don't end up passing the bar. It seems that Gordon's point is that large law firms will always clamor for changes to the program that benefit them, but that law schools should not necessarily "follow the market".

I find that law schools face conflicts of interests on many levels. As an institution, self-preservation is obviously essential, which translates into higher salaries to attract better teachers and raise the school's reputation. Much of this cost (if not all) is placed upon the students, who, as the market shows, are still willing to pay that amount, but to what extent will they continue to pay for the increases? At some point, if you keep raising the cost on customers, they stop coming back and find substitutes. Thus, the law school has an interest in taking care of the customer, who pays for their services. This may translate into new facilities, programs, etc., which further inflates the cost of attendance, discouraging future consumers.

The law schools also face pressure from the law firms, who now want more professional skills taught because it translates into lower training costs for entry level associates hired from the law school. Given that these firms can be large donors to the schools they hire from (especially the alma maters of the partners), this leads to a third conflict of interest.

Somewhere along the line, the regulatory bodies like the ABA and the State Bar Associations also make their own demands on law schools, altruistically for the good of the profession and the students. With all of these competing interests, it's no wonder that law schools are forced to make choices that benefit one party to the detriment of another.

It appears that Northwestern is seeking to benefit those individuals who are seeking to enter the legal field as quickly as possible and who are not daunted by the accelerated pace of an already rigorous program (while also increasing their capacity to admit more students and generate more revenue than traditional 3 yr. programs).

"Elite international transactional practice"? So you're saying that major companies and investment banks will stop paying U.S. lawyers $700 an hour because 3 years in law school is too expensive? When Magic Circle UK firms have bought US firms in recent years, they have ended up paying their American lawyers significantly more than their British counterparts. The three-year law school may be a drag on efficiency, but we're talking about the kind of drag you get from fancy rims on a Pontiac GTO. It's barely noticable.

For what it's worth...

The 2.3 year program at Northwestern may not currently lower anyone's tuition noticeably, but it will have their students back in the work force (and presumably earning full salaries) a full year before their counterparts at other law schools. That is a substantial benefit.

Furthermore, even if the move doesn't lower tuition in the short term, it does subtract 3/4 of a year of cost of living expense from the student loan equation, which is nothing to smirk at.

Cramming 3 years worth of credits into 2.3 is worrisome - even if it does lead to a lower credit accrediation in the future. In the short term I would be concerned with quality of education. A JD program is already rigorous enough in a 3 year setting. Cramming it into 2.3 years sounds like a good way to achieve burnout and far less than optimum retention and overall understanding - not to mention the cramp it might put on developing analytical skills.

Despite that short term concern, I join Gordon in applauding this move by Northwestern, and I hope that others follow suit. While my third year was beneficial regarding learning new areas of law and gaining some practical knowledge in other areas, it did absolutely nothing to improve my analytical skills, and the practical skills I did learn could have just as easily - and frankly perhaps more beneficially - been learned in practice.

Cardozo also has a two-year program that is flourishing.

First, the three-year option is still available. Secondly, people speak as if addressing business and BIG-Law needs and maintaining scholarship purpose are mutually exclusive; they are not.

I believe NWU is a cutting-edge, top-5 caliber law school, and the powers that be know exactly what they are doing. They have honed in on a common complaint in the legal world (and, to a large extent, the business and government worlds, too) and offered a way to address it. Have Harvard, Georgetown or Columbia done that?

NWU's 2yr offering is part of a larger plan that will make it the number one law school in the country. Those of you who believe that this will lead to a trend of assembly line lawyer turnouts are sadly mistaken.

NWU wants to have it all (and it can), the catering to business interests, BIG-Law's dependence, AND the production of old-school legal scholars who land jobs in academia, Exert court and governmental influence, and contribute cutting-edge legal theory and scholarship.

NWU is going for the whole ball of wax! I have never understood why law schools in-general don't interview students; it makes no sense.

And, although most will not admit it, many top schools would love several do-overs once they meet their students in the fall. NWU has no such problem because it know's what it is getting in its admits.

NWU is doing almost everything the right way, and Harvard, Stanford and the rest had better get on board.