Law Schools Under Critical Scrutiny

Glenn Ricketts

Legal education, with its ever heftier tuition, is getting a hard critical look from those in the know these days, and here’s a couple of them who don’t like what they see at all.

In this piece, Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute describes how trendy ideologies, such as feminism, “critical legal studies” or globalization have displaced traditional legal subjects such as property or torts, leaving law school graduates unprepared for their bar exams and actual legal practice.

Over at Minding the Campus, Charlotte Allen examines the growing controversy over allegations that law schools, even some in the top-tier, have been fudging job-placement statistics with respect to their recent graduates, many of whom end up stuck with debts of 100K or more.

As Bader has argued previously, it may be past time to think about abandoning the current iron-clad requirement that all candidates for the bar exam must first obtain a law degree. All of that steep tuition, only to find out that your “legal education” hasn’t prepared you anyway? As he concludes, there’s got to be another way, and I have to think that a lot recent law graduates would agree.

  • Share

Most Commented

January 24, 2024

1.

After Claudine

The idea has caught on that the radical left overplayed its hand in DEI and is now vulnerable to those of us who seek major reforms. This is not, however, the first time that the a......

February 13, 2024

2.

The Great Academic Divorce with China

All signs show that American education is beginning a long and painful divorce with the People’s Republic of China. But will academia go through with it?...

October 31, 2023

3.

University of Washington Violated Non-Discrimination Policy, Internal Report Finds

A faculty hiring committee at the University of Washington “inappropriately considered candidates’ races when determining the order of offers,” provided “disparate op......

Most Read

May 15, 2015

1.

Where Did We Get the Idea That Only White People Can Be Racist?

A look at the double standard that has arisen regarding racism, illustrated recently by the reaction to a black professor's biased comments on Twitter....

October 12, 2010

2.

Ask a Scholar: What is the True Definition of Latino?

What does it mean to be Latino? Are only Latin American people Latino, or does the term apply to anyone whose language derived from Latin?...

July 8, 2011

3.

Ask a Scholar: What Is Structural-Functionalism, Conflict Theory and Symbolic Interactionism?

Professor Jonathan Imber clarifies concepts of sociologocal theory....