Association of American Law Schools joins California in Boycotting Texas: Silly Prigs

The Association of American Law Schools recently announced that it is boycotting Texas and moving its 2018 conference on clinical legal education from Austin to Chicago. Why? The AALS is displeased with a couple of statutes passed recently by the Texas Legislature.

I have a few comments to make about the AALS's fatuous tantrum against Texas.  First, AALS's action is a gratuitous insult to a state with a long history of progressive government and tolerance. As I said in an earlier blog, Texas is the nation's second largest economy; and its population is booming because the state offers jobs, relatively inexpensive housing, and decent public schools. It has one of the finest state universities in the United States, and it is sheltering literally millions of immigrants from all over the world.

It was Texas, after all, that accepted a quarter of a million refugees from South Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.  Houston alone absorbed 150,000 Katrina victims; and the city did it with a smile and a howdy.

Illinois, on the other hand, where the AALS is moving its clinical legal education conference, is  a basket case.According to the Chicago Tribune, Illinois has lost more population than any other state for the last three years in a row.

Illinois' financial affairs are in shambles; its property taxes are outrageously high, and the state has billions of dollars in pension obligations that it will never repay. In short, Illinois is looking  less and less like a state and more and more like a banana republic. 

And Chicago, where the AALS's 2018 CLE conference will take place, is one of the most dangerous cities in America--more than 2,000 shooting victims this year and almost 400 murders! And the year's still young.

Second, the AALS has joined a pernicious trend that the state of California has made fashionable. California now bans state-funded travel to eight American states--including Texas. Where will this end? Is America going to collapse into a loose affiliation of warring political entities like the Italian city states of medieval Europe?

Finally, AALS's condescending attitude toward Texas seems singularly inappropriate in light of the shameful way American law schools have behaved over the last 20 years. Year after year, the law schools have brazenly raised their tuition rates even while the market for new lawyers has collapsed.  The law schools have drastically lowered admissions criteria in order to keep their enrollments up, and some law schools have standards so  low that half their students are in danger of failing the state bar exam.

American law school graduates now hit the job market with an average debt load of $140,000; and a significant percentage of the ones who graduate from bottom-tier law schools fail the bar.

In fact, Southern Illinois University's law school, in the state where the AALS will squat for its 2018 legal education conference, is near the bottom of the barrel.  According to Law School Transparency, LSAT scores for SIU's 2014 cohort are so low that 25 percent of the graduates from that cohort are at EXTREME RISK of failing the bar.  Cost to attend SIU Law School: $145,000.  USI's 2015 bar pass rate: about 70 percent.

Do you think the AALS nabobs will be talking about their own moral crisis at their conference in Chicago? Not bloody likely. 

So here's some friendly advice to all you self-righteous prigs who enjoy thumbing your noses at the Lone Star State. Be nice to the Texans, because when the national economy collapses--and it will collapse--it will be Texas that rises most quickly from the rubble; and you might be looking for a job in the state you now despise.

And after we sack Pisa let's boycott Texas.

 References

Elyssa Cherney and Elvia Malagon. Nearing 400, homicides in Chicago continue to outpace last year. Chicago Tribune, July 24, 2017.

 Marwa Eltagouri. Illinois loses more residents in 2016 than any other state. Chicago Tribune, December 21, 2016.

Richard Fossey. California bans state-funded travel to Texas: Frankly, my dear, Texans don't give a damn. Condemned to Debt, June 27, 2017.

Nick Roli. Law School Group Ditches Texas Conference. Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2017.

Does South Dakota need a law school? Probably not.

Among Alaska's many admirable distinctions is the fact that the state does not have a public law school. Alaskans apparently decided that the United States has enough law schools (203) and that Alaskans who want to become lawyers can enroll in a law school out of state.

But every other state has at least one law school, including the states of North Dakota and South Dakota.  Unfortunately, neither state has been particularly good at attracting high-quality students. According to a recently report prepared by Law School Transparency, 25 percent of the students admitted to the 2014 class of students at both states' law schools were so low as to put them at "extreme risk" of failing the bar exam.

Wouldn't it make sense for North Dakota and South Dakota to close their law schools and send their best students to study at an out-of-state law school like Alaska does?  And wouldn't it make sense for Ohio to close Ohio Northern Law School and for Illinois to close the law school at Southern Illinois University, two law schools with high percentages of students with abysmally low LSAT scores?

And let me raise another question. In the dawning years of the 21st century, do we really need historically black law schools like Texas Southern and the law school at Louisiana's Southern University? Both law schools had 2014 classes with high numbers of students with extremely low LSAT scores.

Texas Southern's law school is just down the street from the University of Houston School of Law, and Southern's law school is just a few miles from LSU's law school. Why are the states of Texas and Louisiana maintaining two public law schools in the same city?

Unfortunately, law schools serve other functions besides training lawyers. Universities want the prestige attached to having a law school along with the high tuition rates they can charge for offering relatively cheap educational experiences. Historically black colleges and universities have a great deal of political clout, and closing a historically black law school would raise a howl of protest.

But our nation's refusal to face the crisis in legal education is going to have catastrophic consequences. Thousands of people are graduating from law school with massive debt and no job, and the quality of our lawyers is deteriorating as law schools lower admission standards to attract students.

As a person who practiced law in Alaska for nine years, I can attest that lack of a law school created no hardship for Alaskans.  During the 1980s, when I was a lawyer in Anchorage, the city had one lawyer for every 200 residents. Somehow, the state muddled along without a law school and seems to have suffered no ill consequences.

And I will end this blog on a somber note.  Seattle University School of Law recently announced plans to open a satellite-branch law-school campus in Anchorage, and the University of Alaska at Anchorage has entered into some kind of partnership with Willamette University College of Law and Washington Univesity School of Law.

Poor Alaska: No law school!

References

Law School Transparency. 2015 State of Legal Education. Accessible at: http://lawschooltransparency.com/reform/projects/investigations/2015/

Seattle University School of Law reaches agreement to house satellie law campus at Alaska Pacific University, June 17, 2014. Accessible at: https://www.alaskapacific.edu/seattle-university-school-of-law-reaches-agreement-to-house-satellite-law-campus-at-alaska-pacific-university/

Anything to make a buck: Many law schools should be closed

Law School Transparency, a public interest organization, issued a report containing some alarming information about law school enrollments. Anyone thinking about going to law school needs to read this report, including the information it contains about individual law schools.

LST reports that law-school enrollments have declined 28 percent since 2010, which has caused a budget crunch for law schools because they are heavily dependent on tuition money to keep their doors open.

As a result of declining law-school applications, many law schools have lowered their admission standards to attract more students, particularly students with low LSAT scores. As LST points out, LSAT scores are the best predictor of whether law graduates will pass or fail their bar exams. Thus, declining LSAT scores for American law students promises to bring a higher failure rate on bar exams.  Obviously, a student who borrows a significant amount of money to attend law school and then fails the bar exam will experience a financial catastrophe because that student cannot practice law.

LST broke down LSAT scores into categories that measure the risk of failing the bar exam, and it identified law schools that are admitting a significant number of students with LSAT scores so low that they run a high risk of failing the bar exam after graduating from law school.

The picture LST paints is not pretty.

In 2010, 30 law schools admitted at least 25 percent of  their students with LSAT scores so low that those students ran a significant risk of failing the bar. By 2014, the number of law schools admitting high-risk students had more than doubled--from 30 to 74 in just four years.

In 2014, 37 schools "admitted classes consisting of at least 50% at risk students . . ." In other words, based on their LSAT scores, at least 50 percent of the students at 37 law schools were at risk of failing the bar exam once they graduated.

LST went on to report:

Every for-profit law school enrolled classes consisting of at least 50% at-risk students. The Infilaw-owned schools [Florida Coastal School of Law, Charlotte School of Law and Arizona Summit Law School] enrolled classes consisting of between 75% and 100% at-risk students. For-profit school graduates have lower bar passage rates, worse job rates, and more debt. For-profit schools also graduate a higher percentage of students with debt and receive more total federal student loans on a per-school basis than public or private schools.

(emphasis added)

"Based on available salary data from serious risk schools," LST observed,  "graduates from these programs cannot service their debts without generous federal hardship programs." Moreover, "[e]ven top earners at the more affordable schools face economic difficulty; the rest range from economic difficulty to catastrophe."

What, in a nutshell, is the LST report telling us? Less prestigious law schools, including the for-profit law schools, have lowered their admission standards in an effort to counteract declining enrollments. On average, tuition at many of these schools is almost as high as the tuition rates at more elite schools, so students who attend many of these lower-tier law schools are borrowing almost as much money as students who take out loans to attend a Harvard or a Stanford.

I have three comments to make about LST's report:

1)  Given the imploding demand for new attorneys, it is utter madness for the government to continue propping up for-profit law schools with federal student-loan money. Many people attending these schools will face a grim financial future when they graduate: poor job prospects and crushing student debts.

2) Based on a review of LST's report, it's not only the for-profits who are admitting students with low LSAT scores. A number or public universities have low admissions standards. According to LST's data, one out of four students at several public law schools have LSAT scores so low that they are at "extreme risk" of failing the bar exam.  These schools include: Southern University, Texas Southern University, Ohio Northern University, University of North Dakota and the University of South Dakota.

3) Law schools that are admitting students with low LSAT scores are not only doing their students a disservice. They are also lowering the overall quality of the nation's legal community. Many of these students will fail the bar, but many marginal ones will pass it. This country doesn't need an oversupply of minimally qualified attorneys.

In short, this state of affairs cannot continue.  Law schools with low admission standards need to be closed, and the students who accumulated massive amounts of debt to attend them should have their loans forgiven.

References

Law School Transparency. 2015 State of Legal Education. Accessible at: http://lawschooltransparency.com/reform/projects/investigations/2015/