The National Jurist recently released its annual ranking of the 25 most influential people in the legal industry, which includes innovators, intellectuals and controversial figures. Missing from the list, but also worth recognizing, is the growing chorus of legal experts claiming that now is the best time ever to apply to law school because smaller classes mean fewer competitors for scarce jobs.
The most prominent example of such thinking was Slate’s Jordan Weissmann, who wrote two articles on the topic last June. But some law professors also got involved, as reported by The National Law Journal back in April. Obviously these articles arrived too late in the application cycle to influence many people’s decisions for the fall of 2014, but they may have helped perpetuate a trend that’s been playing out among the country’s most prestigious law schools, where applications were on the rise in 2014 even though they were falling everywhere else.
