The Chronicle of Higher Education reports
that a team of eight law firms have just “sued a dozen more law schools
across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated
job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates ‘burdened with debt
and with limited job prospects.’ The lawyers . . . said they planned to file 20
to 25 new lawsuits every few months . . . the lawsuits had been filed on behalf
of a total of 51 graduates, and each suit was seeking class-action status. The
targets of the latest round of lawsuits” include “Brooklyn Law School
(N.Y.),” “Chicago-Kent College of Law,” DePaul University College of Law,”
“Golden Gate University School of Law,” “Hofstra Law School,” “University of
San Francisco School of Law,” “Widener University School of Law,” and several
others.
As the Chronicle notes, “Disgruntled law-school graduates who can’t
find jobs are increasingly taking their complaints to court, asserting that the
schools duped them into enrolling with misleading statistics about their
chances of landing well-paying jobs when they get out. Last year similar lawsuits were filed against New York Law
School, Thomas M. Cooley Law School, and Thomas Jefferson School of
Law.”
As I noted earlier, much of what law schools teach
their students is useless drivel, and law schools routinely exaggerate
their students’ job prospects. Accordingly, there is no
reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar
exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal
education is often a rip-off, since the typical law professor has little
real-world experience practicing law, and “knows nothing about being a lawyer.”
But since most states require
people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam, law schools have
been able to increase tuition by nearly 1,000
percent since 1960 in real terms. For its part, the Obama Education
Department has implemented policies that encourage
colleges to jack up tuition and charge students even more, even as college
students are learning less
and less.
No, doofus. Hopefully you were being sarcastic. He is suggesting that law schools should teach the actual practice of law as well as legal theory and history. The law school I went to had professors who actually practiced law as well. We didn’t learn as much as we needed, but it was better than a lot of law students get. The clip is for the famous quote You can’t handle the truth. That was, in my opinion meant for the Marquette professor who seems to think learning the niceties of law practice can wait until after one has shelled out the $150,000 for law school. The professor has probably never seen the inside of a courtroom, had a judge yell at him for not knowing procedure, had a client go to prison because he didn’t know what objection to make or when to make it or how to preserve the record, or had a client lose a lawsuit to a doctor that meant the client would be destitute and dependent upon welfare for the rest of his life because the lawyer didn’t know how to get in or keep out medical records. If he has, he would surely argue for teaching such courtroom tactics in law school, not on the street. Movies can be used for teaching points, but movies are not real life.