A Labor Day Message

Law professors, where are you? Those working in schools with little in common with Harvard and Yale and who are tired of offering a one-size-fits-all degree that fits nobody except the elite? Those who are listening to hushed conversations in the faculty lounge about declining enrollment, staff cuts, and the struggle to recruit high quality students? Those who feel badly when their students end up unemployed and indebted for decades instead of enjoying the prosperity advertised by the admissions office, and for which you and they have both worked too hard to fail to attain? Those dynamic faculty members who see the simple solutions to the clear problems with legal education today and who wish the old school administration would just listen? Where are the thousands of you who care? Only a mere handful have spoken up.

Practicing lawyers, where are you? Those working in document review mills, wondering what’ll happen when the case settles and the next project might not appear? Those hustling for scraps of business in a shrinking marketplace, where clients are harder to find and the rising cost of malpractice insurance, bar dues and CLE - let alone health insurance and retirement - are becoming harder to justify? Those working hellish hours in large firms, where incivility is hidden behind closed doors and behind a mask of false prestige? Those who realize that that the profession is supersaturated, and who are concerned about the relentless flow of new JDs into a market that cannot support them? Where are the tens of thousands of you who care? A mere fraction have dared speak out.

Current law students, where are you? Those tens of thousands who are paying high tuition at low-ranked schools where you know that you are unlikely to graduate into a successful legal career, not because you’re not capable, but because there are no opportunities? Those who are tired of inefficient teaching from professors who are phoning in their lectures from notes two decades old? Those who are tired of classes in which no practical legal skills are taught? Those who are sick of professors taking expensive foreign sabbaticals, rarely spending more than a few hours each week at the school, and taking advantage of their privileged positions and tenure? Those who are done with the library continuing to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on acquisitions of books that will never be read each year, or law school administrations wasting your money chasing elusive rankings instead of things that matter? Your voices are the quietest, and the most noticeably absent.

You might not think that this is your battle, but it is. By all means, distance yourself from this blog, but don’t distance yourself from the issues. And although this blog might not be the forum for you to express your concerns or propose solutions (although all are welcome), find the avenue that is appropriate for you. Write, speak, discuss debate, investigate, complain, support, and make a change. But whatever it is, do something. There are so many silent voices that if even half chose to do the bare minimum of a few minutes per week, the resulting outcry would be deafening. Blogs like this one and Third Tier Reality are leading the effort only because nobody else has bothered to pick up a pen and take the lead. But we don't own these issues. They're your issues as well as ours.

By making your voices heard, you can dictate the terms of reform and we can all prosper. By staying quiet, you become part of the problem; you’re not distancing yourself from it, but rather drawing yourself closer to the wrong side of history. Your silence implies that more and more new law schools are a good thing, and misguided colleges will continue to waste countless millions on unnecessary new JD programs. Your silence implies that spiraling student debt is good for society and should be allowed to continue unchallenged. Your silence implies that teaching law in a manner unchanged since the days when horses were the means of transportation and when electricity had yet to be commonplace (let alone the Internet!) is a perfectly reasonable way to train legal professionals who work on issues and with tools that simply did not exist back when the curriculum was set in stone. You imply that the problems do not exist, yet you see them every day. Those, and many other problems besides, are allowed to continue because you’re quiet, and will affect you whether you choose to hide in the shadows or not.

You may not like the bluntness of this blog – trust me, I see your point when reading some of the comments. But I have more respect for the voices of support and dissent here than I do for the vast majority who choose to stay silent, pretending that our legal education system is as effective and efficient as it can be or that the profession is as healthy as in days gone by. And I have no respect for those in positions of power who claim that anything but silence is disrespectful or unprofessional, that a student cannot challenge an established professor or practitioner, that anonymity completely discredits valid arguments, or that the debate must be within their rules, using conformity as a means to suppress much-needed reform. I see the growing anger at the status quo as being a direct result of the unwillingness of the current leadership in legal education and the legal profession to even acknowledge that problems exist, let alone discuss and - heaven forbid! - implement reasonable, cheap, and practical solutions. People grow tired of being ignored, and will shout louder and louder and dig deeper and deeper until they are heard – or at least until they wake somebody up from the profession’s collective slumber.

So today, spend a few moments over a hotdog and a beer and think about whether you’re truly happy about your law school, the legal education system as a whole, or the legal profession. Chances are, you can see room for improvement. And tomorrow, when you’re back in the classroom or office, remember that if you don’t participate in the reform, if you don’t join the movement in your own unique manner and with your own unique voice, then you don’t get to complain when you’re not pleased with the results obtained by those who had the courage to speak up, or worse still, if nothing ever changes.