According to The National Jurist (September 2009), there are 10 new schools on the way (pp. 12-13). That doesn’t even count
- the new campus the University of Idaho plans to open in Boise (mentioned in the article), or
- the new public law school (approved earlier this year) the University of North Texas will open in Dallas in Fall 2010.
According to the ABA, there are now 199 provisionally or fully ABA-approved law schools offering JDs. The following chart shows the growth in ABA-approved law schools since 1923, when the ABA began approving law schools.
Twenty years ago (1989), there were 174 ABA schools. That’s 25 more law schools, or a growth of just over 14%. Assuming that all 12 of the law-schools-in-formation make it to at least provisional ABA approval, the United States will have 211 law schools.
How much of this is demand driven? According to the ABA, the number of JDs granted each year peaked in the 1996-1997 academic year, at 41,115, and then dropped for several years to a low of 37,910 (2000-2001). The number of JDs did not recover to at least the 1996-1997 level until 2004-2005 (42, 672 JDs). During that period the number of law schools increased from 180 (1997) to 184 (2001) to 191 (2005). That growth was not driven by demand .
One of the new law schools mentioned in the article is Louisiana College, who cites unmet demand in Louisiana. Here’s the most recent information from the Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools (2010 edition) on the 4 Louisian law schools, as well as Mississippi College (mentioned as the fall-back for would-be lawyers from Louisiana):
- LSU: 499 offers on 1299 applications (38%); medians of 156 (LSAT) & 3.51 (GPA)
- Loyola-NO: 799/1,611 (50%); 152 (LSAT) & 3.33 (GPA)
- Southern: 376/1,114 (34%); 145 (LSAT) & 2.83 (GPA)
- Tulane: 931/2,612 (36%); 162 (LSAT) * 3.59 (GPA)
- Mississippi College: 621/1166 (53%); 150 (LSAT) & 3.22 (GPA)
The Bar-passage data for Mississippi College shows that 13 persons took the Louisiana Bar exam, out of 157 total persons taking a Bar exam for the first time. More Mississippi College graduates from Louisiana might have taken the Bar exam first in Mississippi, but still intend to return to Louisiana.
In the article, Bill Henderson (Indiana, Bloomington) wonders whether there will be enough high-paying jobs to let an ever-increasing number of graduates pay off their college–and law school!–loans.
Gary Rosin
I am not sure if more law schools are needed. I am sure however, that more lawyers need to practice public interest law. There are simply too many low and moderate income people in this country who have no access to legal representation, except Legal Aid for criminal cases. Many of these people are taken advantage of daily by landlords, employers, public officials, hustlers etc. They need help too. Too many law school graduates practice what I call “paper law” at BigLaw; cut and paste draft letters, proof read, document review, copying etc. Sure the money is (oops!, was) good but they are not really practicing law. They are glorified clerks. I certainly did not go to law school to do that. I’d rather do some real work, like standing up for the disaffected, disenfranchised, wrongly-accused etc.
How many of the 25 newly-accredited schools are actually new? Did some of them previously operate without accreditation? When a previously unaccredited school gets the ABA’s approval, the total number of law students doesn’t change. All that changes is the number that would be counted under this methodology.
California and some other states allow graduates of non-ABA schools to take their bar exams; as a result there are quite a few law schools which have not been sanctioned by the ABA. Some of them must aspire to become ABA schools.
Just a few thoughts:
How is the number of JD’s awarded an accurate measure of demand? It’s a measure of the students accepted by existing schools. It doesn’t take into account changing admissions policies (e.g. raising standards for ranking purposes). Couldn’t it be argued that the data you present might actually be a result of existing law schools not meeting the demand? Maybe that decrease in JD’s awarded means that there were other potential law students out there who weren’t admitted.
It also doesn’t take into account regional demand that might not have been accounted for or met by existing schools.
A more accurate measure for demand would probably be LSDAS/LSAT data. That would more accurately tell you the number of people interested in attending law school.
Even if you used the LSDAS data or even if you stayed with the JD data, is a short term blip in demand really what decision makers at potential new law schools are going to base decisions on? Wouldn’t they base their decision on much longer patterns of and projections for demand?
One thing that is missing from this discussion (but seems implicit in many such discussions) is that you are not talking about demand but demand by a certain level of credentialed student. After all, there are plenty of law school applicants every year who do not get into law school. To some extent, the worry over additional law schools is about who is qualified to go to law schools (or put another way, how elite should legal education be), but few people seem to want to say that openly. Additionally, all these new laws schools seem to be filling their seats. Why isn’t that better evidence of what the demand is? It seems like it is, unless you are really talking about students with certain levels of credentials (credentials which may have relevance to law school performance, but may or may not have relevance to lawyering ability).
Another thing that is missing is the ‘so what’ part of the discussion. Let’s say you are right and the demand for law schools has not grown. Why does that mean that existing law schools should fill the need and not face competition from new schools? Maybe UNT-Dallas feels it (future) students and its community would be better served if its (future) students went to school there in Dallas rather than having to go somewhere else.
I think you begin to address that issue at the end of the post when you switch from talking about demand for law schools (as measured by JD’s awarded) and start talking about demand for high paid lawyers. The methods by which students at new schools pay for their legal education (lots of loans) and how well that method matches up with their career prospects is a definite concern.
The ‘so what’ question also brings us back around to the issue of qualifications. One could argue that new schools largely fill their seats by admitting students who would otherwise not have been admitted anywhere while competing with established schools for students on a small to marginal basis.
This is the national picture. But what about local markets? Even if we don’t need another law school in the U.S. as a whole, there might be a lot of areas of the U.S. that could really use a(nother) law school — perhaps including Boise and Dallas. I’m not saying those two areas have particular need, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe this is a case of decisions that makes sense at the local level adding up to a macro-level picture that doesn’t make sense.
Um, wouldn’t the only relevant statistic be the number of lawyers who are practicing? All this number reveals is the number of people who are willing to sign up for guaranteed loans that are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. The number of JDs as evidence of need for lawyers is about useful a measure as counting liar loans as evidence of a healthy real estate market.
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I agree with disaffected. “Demand” should be measured by the number of legal employers able to hire law graduates at a living wage, not the number of applicants to law school.
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