The governance of law schools, although not a secret, is poorly-understood and seldom discussed. This lack of transparency empowers—or at least emboldens—some of the behind-the-scenes influencers to take unreasonable positions and to pursue self-interested goals that are contrary to the ostensible objective of training students to be effective and ethical lawyers. The result is a dysfunctional legal academy.
In my initial installment on this topic, I briefly discussed the role of the American Bar Association (ABA) in regulating legal education (through its Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar), and in this post I'd like to further develop this critique. However, I don't want to suggest that the ABA exerts exclusivecontrol, or constitutes the only problem. As explained in detail by Walter Olson in his 2011 book Schools for Misrule, and Professor Brian Tamanaha in his 2012 book Failing Law Schools, many different forces play a role in determining how law schools operate: faculty, administrators, alumni, the legal culture, donors, accrediting organizations, the marketplace for law graduates (which affects the applicant pool), peer pressure, compilers of rankings, and, in the case of publicly-funded schools, the state legislatures. And perhaps others.
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