Remember that you read it here first: In 2015, many law school deans and professors will declare that the law school crisis is over. After five years of hand-wringing, relatively minor curriculum changes at most schools and no improvement whatsoever in the mechanism for funding legal education, the storm has passed. All is well. What a relief.
The building blocks for this house of cards start with first-year law school enrollment that is now below 38,000—a level not seen since the mid-1970s, when there were 53 fewer law schools. The recent drop in the absolute number of future attorneys seems impressive, but without the context of the demand for lawyers, it’s meaningless in assessing proximity to market equilibrium, which remains far away.
