Stop feeling sorry for law students. For the last few years, we've viewed them as innocent lambs—poor babes who've been snookered into taking on hundreds thousand of dollars of law school debt for a degree of dubious worth.

Well, it turns out that they're a lot savvier than we thought. Rather than lambs, some have morphed into wolves. And who can blame them? They are simply taking advantage of market forces in the legal education marketplace.

With the decline in law school applications, prospective students are now playing schools against each other for scholarship money. And it's not just middling or low-ranking law schools that are caught up in this net. Last month, the dean of Northwestern University Law School, Daniel B. Rodriguez, confessed to the New York Times: “We're in hand-to-hand combat with other schools” for students.