Law Prof's Ideal, Affordable Law School Not Possible in Reality, Chemerinsky Says
Photo of Rachel M. Zahorsky
by Marc Hauser.
“If you are not going to law school … what is your alternative path?” asks Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “And in purely economic terms, is it better than law school? … It’s not just monetary … There are all sorts of exciting things you can do with a law degree.”
Asked about his own economic terms, the highly paid constitutional scholar says, “I wouldn’t have come at half the price. No one is going to take a 50 percent pay cut, no matter how beautiful Orange County is, and no matter how wonderful it is to be part of a new school.”
The two quotes may seem at odds—the ideal of a career bringing more than financial gain, the reality of getting the paycheck now. But they represent the two thorny sides of the debate of law school and its value.
One can hardly blame Chemerinsky for protecting his own. He had a posh teaching gig at Duke University School of Law and a family with four children to support. Still, his blunt statement represents the stark reality to the idealistic aims of law professor Brian Z. Tamanaha, author of Failing Law Schools, which calls for an innovative, top-quality, public-service-minded and affordable (i,.e. less than $20,000 a year) institution as the ideal 21st-century law school.
Tamanaha chastised Chemerinsky for failing to sell a vision of affordable excellence. Chemerinsky challenges Tamanaha’s budget skills.
“I don’t know a way in which we possibly could have done what we are doing at the kind of amount [he] was discussing,” Chemerinsky said in an ABA Journal interview in response to a National Law Journal op-ed on the issue.
UCI Law graduated its first class in May, and it will be until February before law schools report their figures on how many were hired to practice law. But that first class paid none of the expected $45,000 to $55,000 yearly tuition that this fall’s class will face.
“If we had followed Tamanaha’s advice, we would not have faculty remotely of this quality and then never could have attracted students of this caliber. We surely would have been a fourth-tier law school,” Chemerinsky wrote in the National Law Journal column.
And he’s more optimistic of the long-term job prospects of UCI Law grads compared to their lower-ranked counterparts. As long as firms and judges—arguably the only true power players of legal education reform—continue to demand graduates from the top echelon of U.S. News & World Report and other traditional rankings, UCI Law’s model is sustainable. And, the schools (and salaries) at the top are safe from significant change.
As for the possibility of less expensive legal training, what Tamanaha calls for as a new paradigm, Chemerinsky sees as low cost law schools with “a lot of students, small faculty, a lot of adjuncts … Not a law school I want to be associated with.”
“[Tamanaha] looks at the value of a law degree in too much of monetary concerns,” Chemerinsky told me. But it’s the monetary concerns that concern me, observers of the law school bubble and the young people considering entry into the legal profession.
How idealistic young lawyers will balance the altruistic desire to practice law and the financial cost to get there is not answered in the debate so far. And if the unarguably brilliant leaders of the legal academy can’t envision a solution better than the high-cost elite institution and low-price trade school, what hope is there for a champion of an affordable, high-quality legal education?
See also:
ABAJournal.com: ‘Failing Law Schools’ Author Challenges Law Schools to Make Dramatic Changes
ABA Journal: The Pedigree Problem: Are Law School Ties Choking the Profession
ABA Journal: The Law School Bubble: How Long Will It Last if Law Grads Can’t Pay Bills?
Balkinization: Why UC Irvine Went Wrong: Chasing Prestige at the Expense of Public Service
