Super Lawyers
William C. Altreuter
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Tuesday, February 19, 2013

I think I am going to start collecting useless law schools. Last week we took on four out of the five law schools in Alabama. This week Paul Camos has a piece up at Salon which brings to our attention a consortium of four law schools that sponsor a summer program at which Chief Justice John Roberts teaches: South Texas College of Law, in Houston; William Mitchell College of Law, in St Paul; California Western School of Law in San Diego; and New England Law, in Boston. None of these are affiliated with any university. The only one I'd heard of before was New England, a well-known safety school for people who want to be in Boston. When New England is the classy school on any list that list has problems.

As Professor Campos puts it:
The course Roberts  teaches is offered through a consortium of four law schools that, whatever the justification they may have once had for existing, have devolved into brazen diploma mills.  The four schools offer summer study programs that are essentially student-loan funded vacations for their students, who, if they were going to law schools worth attending, would be working for potential future long-term legal employers in the summer, rather than traipsing around Europe and adding to their enormous debt loads.
I'll be blunter: the day that John Roberts hires a clerk from any of those schools will be a frosty one one for sinners. I'll go further: to my certain knowledge there is not a shortage of either lawyers or law schools in Houston, San Diego, St. Paul or Boston. If any one of these schools are on your list of places to apply you would be so much better off doing anything other than practicing law that it is nearly a crime that they are willing to take your money. I would propose blowing them up, but the buildings might be useful.


| Comments:
New England was for a long time a perfectly respectable regional school, where (for example) police officers would pick up law degrees to become assistant district attorneys. Unfortunately, it has within the last 10 years moved to a high-priced, basically-open-admission model.
 
One of the things I'm finding as I look into this issue is that there are a number of law schools that were once institutions that were valuable. New England, which was one of the first law schools to admit women, is one such. Conditions in our glamor profession have changed, and it seems that there are not many schools that are prepared to acknowledge that they would better serve by folding.
 

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