Yesterday I, and most likely every other member of the Wyoming State Bar, received a letter from the current interim dean of the College of Law, whom I hope becomes the permanent dean. Having met her, she's an impressive individual. Part of her impressive nature is that she's very honest, and will directly answer a question, and honestly. She noted that her young attorney assistant probably cringes over what her answers are to certain questions.
The letter was soliciting donations for scholarships at the
UW's College of Law and it mentioned some interesting facts and figures. One of the most impressive, which I was already somewhat aware of, is that law school applications nationwide have fallen 50% over the last few years. Her figures noted a recent high of 100,000 applications to the nation's law schools and that it's now under 50,000. The New York Times indicated back in January that it was more like 30,000, although that's three months ago so perhaps its changed.
This is causing a lot of consternation at law schools, including our states, but perhaps we ought to take a step back and consider a couple of things about this. In other words, this might not be a bad thing for anyone, actually.
There were plenty of warnings that this was going to occur and prescient observers of the law noted that we were reaching this point some time ago. Truth be known, the era that law schools and the law have been living in was a freakish anomaly to start with. For most of our modern history law hasn't been dominated by big multi state law firms with hundreds of lawyers, and for most of it it hasn't been a path to riches either. The recent history, say 1970 to the current era, was a bit of a bizarre period in our greater economic history which saw the rise and fall of a lot of "entrepreneurial" activities and the attempt to convert the practice of law sort of into one. That recruited a lot of people to the practice of law, but that this would fall off should have been inevitable.
Not so inevitable, however, that most state bars have failed to catch up with it, and failed to appreciate it. They worry, along with the law schools, but their focus is basically without important aim. They've also failed to appreciate that while the giant multi state firms are still with us, in the Internet age they're significantly endangered.
Also with the Internet has come an era when, in spite of what people may want to believe, the average citizen of the globe is much more educated on everything than he once was, and that includes legal matters. It isn't the case that everyone now has the training that lawyers have, but a lot more people know a lot more stuff than they used to. This makes lawyers less of a needed commodity.
So, what happened is that the ranks of the law were swelled by an economic anomaly that occurred in the 1970 to about 2000 time frame which is now over, and likely over for good. At the same time, developments in technology have made the need for lawyers smaller. In other words, there's been an oversupply of lawyers graduating into practice every year, and now there's an overpopulation of us.
Law schools have, unfortunately, worked to make this worse as they've generally backed (although as I know the
UW law school had no direct role in it) the
UBE which makes a license, and hence a degree, "portable". Our new interim dean was frank that she would have supported it, even though she understands why many practitioners do not support this change, as it makes the degree more attractive. That's the same view that almost all law academics take, as they believe that aids them in recruiting students, as a student who is recruited to, say, Wyoming can come here knowing that his degree will let him practice, say, in his native Colorado while still keeping his options open.
Of course, what that also means, for younger lawyers, and indeed even for older ones, is that the population of practicing lawyers in Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana, all
UBE states, has effectively swelled to include not only the combined population of lawyers from those states, but of the much more densely populated Colorado as well. I'd guess there's more lawyers in Denver alone than in all of Wyoming, but now we're more or less in competition with them. As a result, our incomes will go down, and so will theirs, making everyone's ability to keep on keeping on somewhat impaired.
A disaster right?
Well. . . . somewhat, but perhaps there's something else we should consider.
Law schools don't exist for their own sake, but to serve the career aims of their students and the needs of the general public. The public is telling the legal community that they have enough lawyers. That's not a tragedy, that's a good thing, really.
And perhaps it's not that glum for students. According to the ABA, when its not crying in its double latte over the sad tragic fate of gigantic East Coast white shoe firms, the practice of law has been suffering from lawyers abandoning the practice at record numbers, and has been since before this started. Also, according to the ABA and various state bars, lawyers are suffering from an internal existential crisis like never before, and one that sets them apart from nearly every other career. There's been a lot of hand wringing about it, but pretty much nobody has been able to come up with any better ideas about this than to suggest that lawyers stop and smell the roses, or perhaps add to their burdens by taking on cases for free (pro bono).
Maybe part of that overall set of problems is partially explained by the practice recruiting a lot of entrants who actually had not actual interest in the work to start with. A 50% decline in applications would suggest that an awful lot of potential recruits were fairly easily dissuaded and went on to something else (it'd be interesting to know what). If that's right, it would probably mean the remaining 50% are pretty darned dedicated and know what they want to do, and that's good for everyone.
And if that's the case, maybe the time has come simply to cut back in law school classes.
The dean's letter indicates that
UW actually hasn't suffered from a decline in applications, and that theirs have gone up. That should be a bit of a relief, but their worried anyone. I'm not too surprised, however. With declining enrollment students can be choosier in where they apply, and its a good school. So far, people who graduate form it are, I think, largely finding employment within a year or so (although I haven't studied that, so don't take my word for it). The dean also noticed the role of scholarships in keeping that number up, however.
But what if law schools nationwide simply cut back on the number of students they were taking in, and hence graduates they were putting out. Why not?
Historically,
UW graduates about 60 to 80 students per year. It's done this for a very, very long time, even though the population of the state has increased over time. A population increase, of course, would seemingly translate into an increased local need for lawyers, but it's also been the case since about 1991 that a very large number of graduates are going elsewhere, some years well over half. That pretty strongly suggests that the school is graduating way in excess of the state's requirements, and knows it. Indeed, the emphasis on Wyoming's law has declined over the past two decades.
So what if
UW, for example, was to cut the graduation target number down to 40 students, or even 30? Sounds extreme, to be sure, but if a person looks at the graduating classes of the 40s and 50s, they're smaller than that. Critics would note, and correctly, that perhaps a modern law school can't economically graduate classes that small as it would mean the infrastructure and academic body would be too small to support the education. That may well be correct, but at the same time, perhaps its time to consider that the Internet (that thing again) may mean that the old brick and mortar, wood pulp and cardboard, requirements that seem to exist might be a bit obsolete. Perhaps this is completely in error, but it might be worth looking at.
In the greater sense, nationally, some law schools just need to go, and that's all there is to it. The bottom couple of tiers could simply disappear with no harm done to the nation at large and frankly no injury done to the real lives of those who would have applied there. Some of those schools are going to die anyhow, and frankly, they deserve to.
I suppose it might also be time for law schools to make good on a canard that they've shoveled out for decades that a law degree can be "used for a lot of things". No, it cannot, for the most part. But law schools still claim this. They can make it true, however, by doing what Harvard did years and years ago and creating a law school degree that's tacked onto a second course of study. Indeed, as its generally the case that in most Common Law countries the study of law is not a graduate course of study, but a baccalaureate course, perhaps its time to consider making this mandatory.
That could be done in one of two ways. One way would be to simply take the approach of other Common Law nations and not require an undergraduate degree to study law. A four year course of study would work just as well, for most students, if they were required to study more than law, maybe. Or maybe not. But if done in that fashion, the prospective lawyer could be required to take a real minor (not "pre law" or some such thing). Something like business, or the sciences, or engineering. These degrees might actually be transferable to something else, at least at first, if the student couldn't find employment or decided to abandon law.
My own undergraduate degree is in
Geology, and I know quite a few other lawyers, oddly enough, who have the same undergraduate degree. And I've known a few who had engineering degrees, one who is a doctor of chemistry, and so on. Some worked in their fields, or others such as banking or journalism, so I don't want to be overly critical here. There is more diversity that a person might suppose, but in some cases there flat out isn't, and those people are then in a bad spot when they start out, if they need to take a fork in the road. In spite of what their profs may have said, in most spots they're not very interested in hiring a JD with a background in pre law to work at a non law job.
Another way to approach this, however, and one which interests me a bit more is to provide the opportunity for the students to add to their degrees in the Harvard like fashion, and apparently
UW is working on doing that. In that way, a graduate could come out of school like Mitt Romeny with a JD and a MBA, for example. In this part of the country, the same ought to be looked at in terms of something combined with the energy industries.
But let's not stop there. The Dean's letter urges action, in the form of donations for scholarships, to the law school. But maybe the solution isn't to encourage students to keep applying to law school. Frankly, enticing those into such a dicey situation as we presently have seems like a poor idea, for the most part, and perhaps we're just better off letting the free market dictate who goes and who doesn't, although I can think of a single exception were I would like to see more done (that being in regard to enrolled Tribal members from the Wind River Reservation, which I think is under served by the law, and where an increased population of native lawyers, I think, would be a very good thing).
But, in not stopping there, perhaps its time for State Bars, rather than hand wringing, to acknowledge their part in this and to address it.
One way they could address it would be to dump the UBE and even the Multi State Bar exams. Have real, state, exams, and don't grant reciprocity to out of state lawyers. While I have nothing against them personally, anyone practicing law in Wyoming knows that in litigation a person is nearly as likely to run into a Colorado lawyer as a Wyoming one. Some are Wyoming expatriates, and others just opportunistic, but if we didn't grant other states reciprocity, and there's no good reason at all that we should, the same work would go to people who make their homes here. The long term impact of that would be to boost the practice in rural regions and smaller state, and to somewhat hurt it in big urban areas, which are hurting anyhow. Yes, that's very provincial, but it's not unreasonably so in that arguing that a lawyer should actually be a member of the bar where he is routinely practicing seems like a rather good idea.
Another concept, even though the impact would be relatively minor, would be to reverse the recent trend of pretending that jurist can serve in their extremely advanced old age. There have been efforts in Wyoming to eliminate the retirement age for state judges, for example, and there is no retirement age for Federal judges as it is.
Recently a Circuit Court judge retired here and, in his remarks, noted that he felt it was important to retire when a person still had all their faculties. I fully agree. To this end, perhaps we should take a page from the history of the U.S. military.
At one time, the military had no retirement age, and as a result the services kept a lot of men who reached a state of infirmity. Sometime after the Spanish American War, the service began to address this and put in a retirement requirement at age 65. Later it was lowered to 60. It's 60 now, with some exceptions. The service also, as noted in our
earlier thread about retirementt, has gone from a 30 years of service requirement to a 20 years of service requirement, for early retirement. This serves to make the thing green line, younger and physically fit, than it would if a long period of retirement and no age cap was present. Indeed, I'm sure there'd be Army officers in their 70s and 80s if there was no such requirement. An 80 year old Army officer would have learned his trade 60 years ago, or more or less at the time of the Korean War, when World War Two weapons were still the norm.
Well, and 80 year old judge learned his trade at the same time, before much of the modern law came into being and before all of the modern research tools existed. Why not acknowledge that. We could create a Federal retirement cap at age 65, and do the same for state judges. That would serve the interest of the public, and frankly it'd open up a few positions, and open them up more frequently, as well.
We might wish to consider the same for lawyers who work for the government, although I'd generally note that they do take advantage of retirement, and recently they've tended to have the last laugh about that in regards to private lawyers who often seem to be unable to do so.
Not that all of this, or any of it, will stem the tide of declining enrollment. But maybe that's just the tide going back out, and we shouldn't worry much about it. Some schools will go out with that tide, but perhaps that's an effect of the cause we can do little about.
