In the six years since the Great Recession began, Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego seemed poised to become the first ABA-accredited law school to fail. For anyone paying attention to employment trends in the legal sector, the passage of six years without a law school closing somewhere is itself remarkable. It also says much about market dysfunction in legal education.
In his Nov. 5 column in The New York Times, University of California-Berkeley law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon has a different view. Solomon argues that recent enrollment declines prove that a functioning market has corrected itself: “The bottom is almost here for law schools. This is how economics works: Markets tend to overshoot on the way up, and down.”
