Professor Brian Tamanaha, in his provocative new book, Failing Law Schools, argues for a new approach to legal education that involves law schools that are dramatically less expensive. In fact, he singles out for criticism me and the University of California, Irvine School of Law (UCI) for creating an “elite” law school rather than one charging students less than $20,000 a year. Although everyone wants legal education to be less expensive, he proposes a model that is economically impossible without dramatically decreasing the quality of legal education.
Tamanaha makes many important points. He is right that the cost of legal education has gone up tremendously and requires most students to go substantially in debt to pay for it. Of course, this is true of all college and university education; the increased cost of law school is paralleled by a rise in costs for all of higher education. Tamanaha rightly criticizes false claims by law schools and correctly points out that students at bottom-tier law schools may be absorbing more debt than they realistically can expect to pay back.
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