Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers, as Willie Nelson might have sung. At least if the mamas want their children to have jobs when they graduate and not just a huge debt. Many law schools have apparently not been scrupulous in keeping their student bodies at a level commensurate with the possibilities of employment, because there was and is so much money to be made from churning out more degrees.
And, it seems, by selling them as support for sexual equality. A friend, a lawyer who observes the world of law schools with some concern, sends the link to an article on gender dynamics of law graduate overproduction from a website called Inside the Law School Scam. Which reports that:
More than 100% of the growth in JD enrollment at ABA law schools over the past 40 years is accounted for by the increasing number of women going to law school. There were 55,063 more JD students at ABA law schools in 2011 than 1971. 59,665 more women were enrolled as JD students in ABA law schools in 2011 than in 1971, while 4,632 fewer men were enrolled as JD students in ABA law schools in 2011 than in 1971.
Clearly, the fact that law schools have produced an enormous oversupply of people with law degrees over the course of the last generation has an extremely significant gender component. These statistics raise all sorts of questions, and in particular this one: To what extent has legal academia’s over-expansion depended on the exploitation of the career aspirations of women in particular? Note that there’s all sorts of evidence that egalitarian gender practices in regard to law school admissions have had a remarkably muted effect in regard to making law less of a male-dominated profession (For example, 35 years after women started going to law school in numbers not much smaller than men, 85% of the partners and 95% of the managing partners at large law firms are men).
Have law schools managed to expand far beyond the actual economic demand for law degrees in large part because of an always unstated and usually unconscious assumption that comparatively large numbers of women law graduates would drop out of the profession within a few years of graduation? One of the very few longitudinal studies of law graduate career paths suggests strongly this is the case. This study of the University of Virginia Law School class of 1990 found that while, 17 years after graduation, 98.7% of the men who responded to the survey were working full-time, approximately 63% of the women respondents who had had at least one child were not practicing law full-time. (By contrast, there was literally no correlation between the number of children a man had had and the likelihood that he would be employed full-time).
The article and the site in general suggests that law schools are operated with a good deal of cynicism, which is not encouraging.
November 27th, 2012 | 11:40 am
I find it hard to believe that Admissions officers were sitting around thinking about what percent of women would drop out of the workforce when they were reviewing applications.
What is it that lead all of these women to apply to law school in the first place, when statistics clearly showed that many if not most of them would not stay in the profession full time? That’s the more interesting question to me. I think that part of the answer is that there isn’t a very good way to balance the aspirations and goals of very smart and capable women who also want a family life. Should such women be discouraged from going to law school? How?
November 27th, 2012 | 1:11 pm
Certainly the profession of an advocate in Scotland (barrister in England and Wales) has always been seen as rather like becoming an actor or a musician or a professional sports player. A small number achieve very high earnings indeed, while most either do not make a living at all, or only a very poor one.
Solicitors brief advocates they think will win cases and part of their professional expertise is to know form and pick winners.
November 27th, 2012 | 4:29 pm
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to see in 2012 that the admission of women to law schools over the last few decades, combined with the cratered economy of the last 4 years, and the general rigors of the legal profession would easily support the argument that the law schools are “scamming” women.
But as a woman lawyer — married with a child — who continues to practice law, I look at the issue as one that’s much more about women lawyers trying to find the right balance in a profession that can be incredibly demanding, particularly in the private sector.
There are wonderful books that address this topic more broadly (a few by Sylvia Ann Hewlett come to mind) and a recent article published in the Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter is deeply insightful.
But I think the bottom line is that, regardless of the profession, women who desire both a family and a career will, at some point or another, feel internal pressure to choose. There are simply not enough hours in a day to be both the wife/mother and the lawyer/professional that we aspire to be. So one of the roles will be cut — perhaps temporarily or perhaps permanently.
The research that emerges from the UVA Law School study suggests — and personal experience bears this out — that most women choose family over career, at least while their children are young. To my mind, this fact does not warrant a condemnation of law schools admissions departments. It merely reflects the personal inclinations of many women, including me.
What is troubling about law school admissions is that they’ve generally continued to admit the same number of students — both male and female — over the last 4 years as they did prior to the recession. The schools are well aware that there are simply not enough jobs in the private or public sectors to support the numbers of students they will graduate. Yet they’ve accepted students and taken federal loans that have placed students in significant debt, knowing all the while that only a small percentage of students will actually be able to support themselves — much less repay the loans — by working in the legal profession.
November 28th, 2012 | 9:59 am
As much as I regard the legal profession with a good degree of suspicion, I don’t think it is at all clear that they should be regulating matriculation to conform with some expected demand-in deed, if at all possible, it would be a form of market control and require collusion, that if practiced among some industry, would raise antitrust concerns.
What we should be asking is whether or not law schools are at all necessary. The idea that “the law” is wholly separate and insular body of knowledge that requires a specialized education is questionable.
It seems that law schools exist for three distinctreasons that don’t necessarily comport with society’s best interest.
First, it is a barrier to entry.
Second, it’s product may be more homogeneous thought than insightful thought and that isolation seems to produce graduates who hold a belief that their legal education makes them experts on law, government, etc and entitled, by virtue of graduation to assert primacy in such matters over the rest of the citizenry-in short, there’s a parasitical aspect to the practice of law.
Third,it may be a form of autoselection among people motivated to enact, interpret and enforce law, through the force of lengthy prose-what could be thought of as logomachy.
Few people today realize that until the late 19th century, the education of an attorney was principally through “reading the law”, i.e., apprenticeship.
Worse, while all law schools might be equal, some are clearly more equal than others. I wonder if it is a good thing that the vast majority of federal lawyers, legislators and judges are from a relative few schools. The old saw is that the law is what the judge says it is-it’s not like engineering, where persuasion has no bearing on the structural integrity of a bridge.
In short, I wonder if law schools produce ideological conformity only. Will john Roberts be confused with John Marshall?
November 28th, 2012 | 1:20 pm
In Scotland, until the beginning of the 18th century, aspiring advocates usually studied law at one of the continental universities, Leyden, in the Netherlands being especially popular.
The Town Council of Edinburgh established three Chairs, Civil Law, Universal History, and Scots Law, paid for from the Beer Tax.
“Scots law was generally covered in 50 lectures and taught in English. Civil Law was taught in two courses: the first, on Justinian’s Institutes, was also covered in 50 lectures, but was given twice in each academic year; the second, on Justinian’s Digest, lasted for around 100 lectures, both courses being taught in Latin.
Memorisation of what the students were taught was the ideal; it was thought to bring and to demonstrate understanding. To promote memorisation, professors would hold “examinations” or oral quizzes to test the students’ knowledge. The inculcation of a standard knowledge was the aim. This conformed with educational ideal and practices common in the age, though some, such as Kames, found it inexpressibly dull: “Law, like geography, is taught as if it were a collection of facts merely: the memory is employed to the full, rarely the judgment.”
November 28th, 2012 | 6:54 pm
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