Next Law School: ALAKSA!

I can't believe that since I've started this blog (less than two months ago), we've heard about three places that don't need them planning to build law schools: Delaware, Binghamton, and Kaplan U. in Washington D.C. Today we get to add a 4th: Alaska.

Rep. Scott Kawasaki today announced he will introduce legislation to create the UA School of Medicine and the UA School of Law at the two main area campuses in Fairbanks and Anchorage. Kawasaki said that the time to invest in education is now if we are to build the workforce that Alaska will need in the next 20 years. Kawasaki points to the continuing doctor shortages and the costs of healthcare and legal services.
...
"It is time Alaska begins to grow its own doctors and lawyers." Kawasaki said.

I'm sending Rep. Kawasaki an email about this, but unless the state is going to give away legal educations for free (or close to it) to in-state residents, which they likely cannot do, it's a colossally stupid idea.

First, this idea that you need more lawyers in Alaska because "the costs of . . . legal services" is high is absurd. A glut of unemployed JDs has done nothing to lower costs in any other state (see Florida, Illinois, California, New York, etc.), as the high cost of legal services comes from other price pressures rather than the high cost of labor.

Second, this idea that Alaska should be "grow[ing] its own" is laughable. If you live in a neighborhood where you have five neighbors and all of them grow twice as much corn as they need, you should rejoice that you don't have to grow any and get to buy theirs at a competitive price. Your response should not be "I'm going to pay and grow my own!"

This is the dumbest possible reason to start a law school. First of all, the imports are going to continue coming. Some of the more notable firms in Anchorage are multi-city firms with roots in Seattle or Portland, and they will continue to hire the best and brightest they can get. For example, Lane Powell has staffed its Anchorage office with grads from U. of Texas, U. of Chicago, and Duke. That's not going to change. Even if there were an Alaska law school, firms would still have an incentive to continue employing grads from higher-ranked schools; go look at Delaware: do you see Widener grads filling up Morris Nichols? Your most notable attorneys are going to continue to be "imports" for a long time to come.

Second, attorney salaries in Alaska are already dirt cheap (sorry I can't find a better source on this). Attorneys have this way of finding gold before legislators, and if there was a real demand for attorneys in Alaska, countless scores of unemployed Gonzaga, Willamette, Seattle, U. of Oregon, U. of Washington, U. of Idaho, Pacific, Pepperdine, UC-Davis, UC-Hastings, U. of San Francisco, U. of Montana, U. of North Dakota, U. of South Dakota, etc. etc. would have taken the next train to Juneau, just as they did when Las Vegas had some green pastures. They are not doing that.

Because the market demand is already more than met, legal services prices are not going to noticeably come down by purposefully flooding the market with your own homemade fourth-tier J.D.s. Because a hypothetical UA-Law degree would have no value outside Alaska, graduates would have scant few locations to work. Since their salaries would be low, and because of Alaska's location, it would have no prayer of ever moving up in the rankings or drawing in lucrative out-of-state tuition money that many schools find essential to being a viable law school. Perhaps Rep. Kawasaki is looking to North Dakota or Wyoming or Hawaii as models that work, but all of those schools have been around a long time and have substantial local alumni bases.

Given that there's no need for new attorneys, no chance for lowered legal costs, and no possibility that the state can draw in talented people from other states, there's no benefit to building an Alaskan public law school beside the hubris of "growing one's own." On the contrary, there's a substantial amount of risk in building a new public lower-tier school in a contracting field with an oversupply of labor, notably that you're going to piss off countless current Alaskan citizens by saturating their job market even further. Finally, because they can't draw out of state tuition money, lower-tier publics like those in Wyoming and North Dakota are subject to severe restrictions based on available public funding. Alaska, like every state, has tangible budget and deficit issues. This will likely prevent Alaska from ever escaping the fourth tier. Why would the state's "best and brightest" ever risk going there when they could go to Stanford or the U. of Washington (or Yale, for that matter) and come back and get a job with the Anchorage firms without issue? Many schools treat Alaskan residents like in-state residents (see the U. of Arizona for one example) because Alaska doesn't have a law school. Why would you throw away that perk?!?!?

This exact same issue was looked at in 2004, Rep. Kawasaki. The study concluded, among other things, that a law school was not worth it:

• Taken together, all the data indicate that demand for lawyers in Alaska in the past five to 10 years has increased little.
• Most of the ["new"] jobs will likely come from lawyers retiring or leaving the profession.
• The available data are limited, but what we know indicates there wouldn’t be enough Alaskans (or students coming from other states) to meet the minimums needed to sustain a law school....
• the information we gathered indicated that an ABA accredited law school could cost $40 to $50 million to establish and $6 million per year to operate. In a time of budget shortfalls and conflicting state needs, it is difficult to imagine that the legislature would appropriate the money....

Nothing has changed since then except now there are even more unemployed lawyers roaming around the United States, and therefore even less reason for Alaska to flood its own market.

This is an idea so dumb, I'm sure Sarah Palin probably supports it.