The current "law school crisis" poses a number of serious challenges to the legal academy, and how law schools should respond is hotly debated. One common suggestion is that law schools should reform their curriculum to emphasize the development of practical skills through experiential learning, rather than emphasize what is described as the impractical, theory- and doctrine-heavy book learning of the traditional law school curriculum. Employers are said to be more likely to hire those with substantial skills training. This paper provides a simple empirical examination of that basic hypothesis. To summarize the paper's key finding: there is no statistical relationship between law school opportunities for skills training and JD employment outcomes. In contrast, employment outcomes do seem to be strongly related to law school prestige.Orin Kerr discusses the paper here, saying: "I’ll be interested to see how other empirical legal studies scholars respond to the paper, and whether they think its conclusions hold up."
Paul Caron notes the paper here, where a reader observes that some schools cook the numbers by hiring many of their own students so they report them as employed, and Jason responds in the comments.
AND: Instapundit says: "It's Potemkin diplomas all the way down."
ALSO: Here's Elie Mystal at Above the Law:
Nobody should be spending money on a law degree that they wouldn’t have otherwise purchased because of clinical training. You shouldn’t give up anything — like spots in the rankings, or a better scholarship package — because you were “wowed” by the a law school’s clinical offerings. Because there is exists [sic] NO STATISTICAL PROOF that clinical training is actually worth anything.
It might be worth something to somebody someday. Yackee himself engages in some delightful wishcasting about the theoretical value of practical training while in law school:
It is easy to imagine a number of plausible and perhaps even empirically testable hypotheses about the positive consequences of skills training. For example, perhaps students who engage in skills training have a more enjoyable time in law school. Perhaps they enter their first job with more confidence and less stress. Perhaps they obtain better jobs than they otherwise would have obtained. Perhaps they have a meaningful impact on the lives of the legally underserved. Perhaps they are less likely to commit professional malpractice in their first jobs. And so on.Sure, why not? Clinical training might make you a happier, more awesome, do-gooder-er. In related news, sleeping in a bed of tarantulas might one day give me the power to shoot silk out of my dick. I CAN IMAGINE IT! Maybe it will happen for me. But in the meantime, there is no evidence that my hallucinations are real and so I won’t be giving Stan Lee any money.
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Insty has something about law schools poaching other schools' students. Anything to that ? And why ?
"Insty has something about law schools poaching other schools' students. Anything to that ? And why ?"
I assume it's about law schools recruiting transfer students. What's wrong with that?
I think there at least three things going on that warrant further study: First, clinical training at one school is apt to be vastly different than clinical training at another. So, its probably very hard for law firms to assign a value to a student's experiential learning. Until such programs become more or less standardized, prospective employers will have great difficulty evaluating the utility of the skills obtained by participating a particular program. That would cause the "employment value" of such an experience to approach zero.
Second, most of these programs have not been around for long. I suspect few students have had sufficient time to distinguish themselves to the extent necessary for employers to have noticed that students who were in Professor Megabottom's clinic do better than those without the experience.
Lastly, it may be that many clinical programs teach skills that are not valued by prospective employers. In the tax world (where I work), I place little weight on a student's work in a VITA clinic. (VITA volunteers help low income taxpayers prepare their returns.) At most it's a mild plus factor, about the same as volunteering at some other charity. The tax issues facing taxpayers served in a VITA clinic are not the tax issues faced by my clients. So work in such a clinic does little to help a student develop skills necessary for work in a large tax practice. I suspect the same is true with work at many law school clinics. Does drafting wills for the low-income clients of the clinic prepare a young attorney for representing a large corporation in negotiating the purchase of an asset? I doubt it.
The current "law school crisis" poses a number of serious challenges to the legal academy, and how law schools should respond is hotly debated. One common suggestion is that law schools should reform their curriculum
Another suggestion is to close some law schools
I assume it's about law schools recruiting transfer students. What's wrong with that?
There's nothing wrong with it, per se. The perceived problem is a law school turning down a student with a low LSAT score and hinting that the student might be admitted as a transfer student after he or she gets through their first year at a less prestigious school. This is exactly what happened with my nephew. "Your grades aren't' good enough to be admitted to our school. But, if you do well in your first year at X (school known to admit anyone who could fog a mirror), we'd be open to reconsidering admitting you."
I don't object to a school reconsidering someone who has done exceptionally well in their first year. LSAT scores, grades, and essays are imperfect predictors of how someone will do in law school. Occasionally, deserving students should be allowed to transfer to a more prestigious school. I do object to schools trying to game the ratings system by turning away students they believe could do well but whose LSAT score would drag down the school's rating -- when they plan on accepting the student the following year. That practice doesn't feel right.
To summarize the paper's key finding: there is no statistical relationship between law school opportunities for skills training and JD employment outcomes. In contrast, employment outcomes do seem to be strongly related to law school prestige.
"Everybody knows that."
"Well, did you know that . . . "
Was I the only person who thought, because of the indents, that the last paragraph of the Elie Mystal quote was now, again, the words of Prof. Althouse? Because, when I read the phrase
"In related news, sleeping in a bed of tarantulas might one day give me the power to shoot silk out of my dick."
I thought, "wait, Althouse, what?"
I mean, with Bruce Jenner crossing over one way, was the Prof. going over to our team?
Anybody have an idea of the direction of the cause and effect? Do good ratings cause good hiring or does good placement cause good ratings?
I think that my internship (a corporate one) maybe 25 years ago helped me to get a job - my first inhouse gig as a patent attorney. It helped that both companies were in the high tech field, and I had done some licensing there. My MBA helped too. It also looked good on my resume, as I won the corporate internship award that year (I could write like a corporate lawyer partly, at least, due to that MBA).
Still, we really didn't spend that much time, all things considered. Instead of studying for class, the time was spent on projects for the company that we were working for. Probably less work overall, but maybe more importantly, the learning wasn't as condensed. It was maybe an afternoon a week for 3 hours credit, plus several writing projects.
Looking back though, I wish I had also done a litigation internship, or the like. Instead, I found myself several years later standing up in court for the first time, with no real preparation. And, trying a week long jury trial about ten years after graduation, with no real experience (got lucky and won - but made a lot of mistakes). I did find that I did like litigation, but by the time I discovered that, I was too old and well entrenched in my specialty.
So, might GPA, SAT, ACT, college ranking, college GPA, LSAT, law school ranking, and class rank within law schools just be expensive proxies for IQ?
As a soldier retiring after twenty years and planning to go to law school, followed by a solo practice, I think that my "outcomes" may be improved by experiential learning.
Or they could reduce law school to two years and then require a year of clerkship in a law firm as a requirement for admission to the bar. As it happens, after graduating from law school I worked for a year in a small firm while waiting to be drafted. As a result, when I got to The Big Law Firm, I had a much better idea of what law practice was all about than associates who were hired right out of law school.
"So, might GPA, SAT, ACT, college ranking, college GPA, LSAT, law school ranking, and class rank within law schools just be expensive proxies for IQ?"
What do you mean might?
I did clinical practice representing students, in divorce, contract and landlord-tenant cases. But that was because I knew I wouldn't be hired by anyone, not because I would. It worked and I hit the ground running on my own after I graduated.
I would like to see more law students try the bed of tarantulas thing.
Shouldn't the question be "How do we teach the students most effectively?"
I keep waiting for any university to ask that question.
"Empirical" and "law school" cannot belong in the same sentence, or paragraph, or perhaps even the same article.
What a hoot.
Law school clinics can be very helpful application boosters -- I know for a fact that many DA offices like to see a criminal litigation clinic on a student's transcript. If you want to be a prosecutor, and your law school offers a prosecution or criminal defense clinic, you should take the clinic. Ditto for students who want to be public defenders.
But that's for candidates who can definitely get hired *somewhere*. Positions at a DA or PD office are surprisingly competitive, and most successful candidates had another job offer from the private sector. A clinic may increase your odds of getting your dream job, which is valuable. But apparently it's of little use for people who struggle to find any job.
The types of skills that are learned in experiential training are those already being replaced by automated processes and learning algorithms. But, it doesn't matter how often I tell people my analytics engine came out of Harvard, it doesn't carry the same weight.
Large and medium size law firms hire on the basis of three criteria. And they have for at least the last 40 years.
(1) Nepotism (family or big client).
(2) Prestige of law school attended (top 20 plus 1 or 2 locals).
(3) Class rank.
They prefer you learn skills, their way, on the job.
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