89 Ind. L. J. 941 (2014)

Although much attention has been paid to U.S. News & World Report's ranking of U.S. law schools, the hierarchy it describes is a long-standing one rather than a recent innovation. This article examines the impact of such hierarchies for a range of decision making in law school contexts, including the role of hierarchies in promotion, tenure, publication, and admissions; for employers in hiring; and for prospective law students in choosing a law school. This article concludes with suggestions for ways the legal academy can move beyond existing hierarchies, while still addressing issues of pressing concern in the legal education sector. Finally, the article provides a categorization of law schools across time that can serve as a basis for future empirical work on trends in legal education and scholarship.

37 Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 179 (2014)
"(The) lack of diversity in both educational and professional backgrounds has produced what can be called a blindness of the elites. In the context of contemporary American legal academia this blindness has manifested itself as a failure to recognize the gradual but inexorable development of a deeply dysfunctional relationship between the cost of legal education and the long-term investment value of a law degree. In other words, the people who control, through hiring and tenure practices, the core identity of American law schools, replicate the very homogeneity that makes it difficult for law schools as institutions to genuinely understand the plight of many of their graduates."

"According to the report, the financial performance of law firms over the past year reflects several fundamental changes in market dynamics that have become increasingly evident since 2008. These changes include a shift in the buying habits of business clients, a persistent softness in the market for litigation services, the increasing presence of new non-traditional competitors in the legal services sector and a growing market segmentation that is rapidly separating high performing firms from the majority."

62 Buff. L. Rev. 659 (2014)
This essay seeks to situate the challenges facing legal education within the broader context of professional culture — a context that the authors believe has been neglected in the present debates. In a sense, the “market reformers” have been swept up, consciously or not, in a wider movement that elevates markets over other forms of social analysis and therefore asserts and takes for granted what is in fact deeply contested. More specifically, they have pushed to the side the public-serving dimension of the lawyer’s role because it allegedly conflicts with the psychology of classical economic liberalism. The authors’ aim is to restore the concept of the public domain to a discussion now dominated by mere considerations of costs and a belief in the inevitable triumph of a narrowed sense of professional culture.

62 Denv. U. L. Rev. 1 (2014-15)
Some blame the cost of clinical legal education for high law school tuition. They argue that, regardless of the educational and employment benefits to students, clinical legal education, and law clinics in particular, are too expensive to expand or require for all students in a time of decreasing law school enrollments and revenues. This article is an empirical examination of that claim.

88 Ind. L.J. 1021 (2013)
Although many commentators have argued that access to public colleges and universities is vital because they educate about 80% of undergraduates, the same cannot be said for public law schools. Because legal education originally was highly privatized, public law schools are a relatively recent innovation, and they operate alongside a robust cohort of private institutions, some of which are freestanding, proprietary enterprises and some of which are housed at private universities. In fact, according to 2008-09 data collected by the American Bar Association, 41% of all accredited law schools are public, but they enroll only 33% of all law students.Public law schools are on average smaller than private schools and enroll fewer part-time students.

27 Georgetown J. L. Ethics 55 (2014)
Examines some of the hard data available for today’s legal market and develops very basic forecasts and hypotheses about what the future will bring for the U.S. legal profession during the next decades. Projects that recent law school graduates and current and future law students are standing at the threshold of the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country — a legal market which will grow, exist for, and coincide with, their entire professional careers. Estimates over 840,000 new employment opportunities for lawyers between 2010 and 2030 alone. Projects that, statistically, the legal profession market is moving into the direction of close-to-guaranteed legal employment for all law school graduates over the course of the next two decades.

(April 13, 2013, SSRN)
Investigates the economic value of a law degree and finds that given current tuition levels, the median and even 25th percentile annual earnings premiums justify enrollment in law school. For most law school graduates, the net present value of a law degree typically exceeds its cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In March and April 2015, Simkovic guest blogged for Brian Leiter, contributing a series of posts challenging reports about the flagging market for new attorneys. In one post he concludes, "Growth in earnings and employment has been slower in recent years than in the past, to be sure, but that is generally true across the economy. The case for massive structural change in the legal profession eroding the value of a law degree is not well supported by the data."

(Colloquy: Northwestern University Law Review, February 3, 2013)
"Like all institutions, law schools are far from perfect. They must continuously strive to improve, to expend fewer resources in areas with low rates of return, and to focus more resources in areas that can do the most good for their students and for the rest of society. Educational institutions can be slow to move, and we hope Professor Tamanaha’s advocacy will focus greater attention on efficiency and productive use of resources. Constructive reforms, however, must be built on good data, rigorous analysis, and an accurate understanding of the status quo ante. Whatever one’s preference for change, the data is clear: law schools typically provide both law students and the federal government an attractive rate of return on investment."--Conclusion

(New York Times, DealBook, March 31, 2015)
"[I]t is hard to see lawyers going away in the United States economy. Whether or not you like it, their importance is greater now in terms of filling needs for compliance and regulation."

"In the near future, cost will be the biggest driver of change. On the big-corporations-and-big-firms end of the spectrum, Susskind says in-house counsel are being pressured to reduce their legal “spend” by 30–50%. The end result is that few clients will tolerate lawyers who bill time for doing work that does not require a law degree, and the amount of “bespoke” legal work performed by lawyers will shrink as far as possible."

(2012)
Behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly, according to Tamanaha. At the heart of the problem, he argues, are the economic demands and competitive pressures on law schools, driven by competition over U.S. News and World Report ranking. When paired with a lack of regulatory oversight, the work environment of professors, the limited information available to prospective students, and loan-based tuition financing, the result is a system that is fundamentally unsustainable. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues.

(Red Velvet Lawyer, Dec. 5, 2013)
An entry in an ongoing discussion about the likely occurrence of "job equilibrium" for recent law school graduates.