Chinese Law School(s) Revisited

Law.com has a nice update on the continued attempt by the Peking University School of Transnational Law to gain accreditation. The entry basically boils down to a back-and-forth between sense and nonsense. For example, this makes sense:

"This proposal makes absolutely no sense, unless we just want to implode the legal field in the United States and get our unemployment rate in the double digits for decades to come."

This, however, makes no sense:

With barely 50 students set to graduate in its first class in 2012, compared to the more than 4,000 foreign lawyers who take the New York bar each year, STL could have little impact on the U.S. job market, even if it sent that class en masse to America.

It's clear that this isn't a story about this one extra-national school gaining accreditation; it's about setting a precedent whereby the ABA will accredit extra-national schools, which would lead to a plethora of institutions popping up in India, China, Brazil, Eastern Europe, you name it, all in the name of selling American legal educations to rising economic players on the cheap.

And it completely ignores that the sole reason for a school like this seeking accreditation is so that it's graduates can sit for the bar exam in U.S. jurisdictions.

Furthermore, the willful ignorance by Dean Jeffrey Lehman is alarming:

But if the ABA is ultimately swayed by arguments about the bad U.S. job market for lawyers, Lehman thinks that the organization should be forthright about it.

"Then the ABA should announce they aren't accrediting any more law schools anywhere because there are too many lawyers," he says.

Right, because there's no difference between a Chinese law school and an American law school...

Contrary to what these capitalist blockhead superheroes want to claim, the purpose of an American law school is to train lawyers to work in the American legal system. It is not to ensure that people in foreign countries are learning western values or any other nonsense. There is no logical reason that training for American lawyers should be done in China, and there are valid reasons to prohibit such activity even if it offers economic benefits for the chosen few who run the system. On the plus side, however, this may be the one issue where American law professors are (or should be) on the same side as the jaded students. If legal training is exported, the gravy train and the six-figure salaries vanish.

If the ABA accredits this operation while maintaining its entry barriers that prohibit domestic innovation (e.g., online-intensive law schools, insistence on a tenured faculty, etc.), we'll truly know that the organization has no interest in actually serving the interests of American law.