AALS Desperate as Bubble Bursts, Seeks to Halt New Accreditation Standards

If there's one thing that's true when gravy trains end and organizations start shedding people, it's that the everyone suddenly will go to great lengths to explain how important they are.

Hence, a grossly overstated letter by the AALS to Hulett "Bucky" Askew regarding some proposed changes to the ABA's accreditation standards. Props to Paul Caron at TaxProfBlog for hosting it and pointing it out. I'm not going to reprint it all here, but I definitely encourage my readers to check it out for some light chuckles and some sterling examples of "begging the question" or "assuming the conclusion" logical fallacies.

For example, the letter characterizes the SRC's proposal as a "thought experiment" that may undermine the present legal education system. But one must ask: where is the proof justifying the structure of the current legal education system? Is it merely enough that we've done a thing a particular way for decades? I think not.

But that doesn't stop AALS from trying to justify its members' jobs.

Wow, where do I start? Probably by stating the obvious: this is bullshit. There is absolutely no empirical proof that the "scholarship and public service" allegedly carried out by full-time faculty "give [their teaching] an authority" that adjunct teachers cannot. None, nor is the valid reason to assume this. After all, if I have a choice between one professor who actually represents real people in the local federal court and another who hasn't seen a courtroom in 20 years, who is going to have more "authority" behind his teaching? Hint: it ain't the guy who writes journal articles on esoteric theory.

Honest to goodness, law is a professional school designed to teach professional skills. What student ever values someone more because they write an unread article or do public service? And why are adjuncts somehow foreclosed from such things? Many practitioners write more relevant articles than full-tenure professors, anyway, and there's no reason to believe a law professor is any more committed to public service than a non-professor.

"[O]nly full-time career faculty can be expected..." reeks of baseless elitism. To buy into this rhetoric, one would have to assume that there's something truly different about full-time faculty. The entire letter seems to assume this without any empirical proof and relying on dubious conclusions (e.g., that American legal education is "high quality") and outright misstatements (e.g., law is not a "fundamentally public profession").

The point of an American legal education is to train competent lawyers. There is no evidence, nor is there any logical reason to believe, that that goal necessarily requires a full-time tenured faculty. And they do demand their tenure, see p. 5: "[Full-time faculty] remind students of the clients who encounter law and the students' ethical obligations as lawyers, and they facilliate the process of learning about law, lawyers, and the meaning of justice." Again, this can't be done by part-time non-tenured faculty?

There are a variety of other sub-issues (like distance learning and the LSAT), but the gist is that the professors feel threatened by the contemplated changes:

Ah, yes, bureaucratic stalling. Of course, if there were any real discussion of "first principles," the law professors would lose, and badly. Law school is not a scientific academy or a liberal arts college; it is a professional school designed to train people who can actually walk into court and argue and file items on behalf of a client. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a process requires a robust full-time faculty of academics indistinguishable from their liberal arts peers aside from paycheck and the type of elitist condescension on display.

The real factor that "make[s] reform desirable" is that law professors don't actually teach students how to be lawyers. That's a "first principle." To hell with social justice and the "valuable" aspects of legal education if the law schools can't even do that.

Cost, of course, is another factor making broad reforms desirable. This system clearly is not sustainable, and professors that make $200k a year make a very sane target for cuts. But the AALS has a defense for this: it isn't the professors making double their value that increase costs, it's the students and the rascally people in the admissions department:

Translation: before cutting full-time staff, cut career services or scholarships!

Because basically what we have here is a ten-page letter full of fear and bold statements that is absolutely devoid of any substantive proof of what it's claiming. Full-time professors are supposedly just "better" than other options, more ethical, more service-oriented, and more apt to gain expertise (than, you know, the actual people filing claims in court). Most generic students, I suspect, wouldn't be able to tell a full-time tenured faculty member from a part-time adjunct.

All this is is raw, naked self-preservation wrapped in a coat of hollow rhetoric and baseless assumptions about how great legal education has been in the last few decades. I don't necessarily support all the standards changes, but I think they're a move in the right direction and the AALS' attempt to derail them in "let's do a study" hell is shameless and militates against any finding that organizations like the AALS exist for any "public service."

They're clearly not, or else this letter would look radically different.