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.

Eric Holder Takes the Bullcrap Express to Montana

From The Missoulian:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder suggested that students at University of Montana's School of Law opt for careers in public service, urging them to consider "what we owe to our community, to our country and our fellow citizens."

"Today I call on each of you to choose action, to choose compassion," Holder said Wednesday.

What a load of schlocky crap.

First of all, although I've heard this weary refrain spouted from God knows how many self-righteous judges and professors, I've never once heard any sound justification for it beyond assuming the conclusion (i.e., that lawyers just "owe" non-attorneys and should bless them with public service).

Second, paid public service jobs are in incredibly high demand. Government and public service organizations turn away people who really want to work in public service all the time, so there's really no reason to "call" on people to work there, unless, of course, he expects people to work for free.

The legal profession "owes" absolutely nothing to the community, or the country, or our fellow citizens. In fact, many attorneys wouldn't be able to represent their clients well if they felt any kind of debt to society. Because law school is not a public service training ground. It is a professional service training ground. If you happen to represent the government, then your interests coincide. If you represent BP or a health insurance company, they probably do not.

But why do people like Holder (and, unfortunately, the people who run bar associations) continually think that lawyers should, as a normative value, give away their service for nothing? Why do lawyers owe more of a duty to the pubic than doctors, dentists, plumbers, grocers, farmers, auto repairmen, electricians, or any one else with specialized knowledge? Lawyers are no better suited for non-judge/AG public service than successful businessmen. Why are they especially "called?" Because the elites just decided that we collectively have this duty that they don't have the time to do themselves? Because it gives a feeling of elitism to be able to give your service away for free while 1/3 of your recent professional entrants have no work? Because elite lawyers want to believe - falsely - that they control access to justice?

I'm lost as to why people like Holder find it even remotely appropriate to tell trainees with 50k+ in debt and no jobs lined up that they have a duty to give back what they don't even yet (and may never) have, especially when it's to their collective economic disadvantage.

But that wasn't all for Holder.

Holder's talk marked the kickoff of the law school's centennial year, and he used it to highlight another anniversary, the swearing-in a half-century ago of Robert F. Kennedy as U.S. attorney general at the age of 35.

"I have been thinking a great deal about that moment and the extraordinary years of ballot drives, freedom rides, free schools and civil rights breakthroughs that soon followed it," he said.

Such activism, he said, "may be America's oldest - and perhaps finest - tradition. Since our nation's earliest days, young people - and, specifically, young lawyers - have been using their knowledge and training to stand up for justice."

Um...yeah. Okay, first of all, Robert Kennedy didn't have much to do with anything that actually happened in the 60s. Top-down civil rights initiatives, yes. Cuban Missile Crisis - yes, he more or less handled that. A great politician? Absolutely, but it's nothing more than mythmaking to give him credit for "the extraordinary years . . . that soon followed." Brown v. Board and Cooper v. Aaron were already done years before Kennedy was in the national spotlight. The foundations of the civil rights movements were in the 50s. And considering the politics of the time, I can't see an alternative Nixon administration and/or other A.G. doing a damn thing differently regarding the freedom riders or the other developments in the early 60s. And all of that would have happened with or without "young lawyers" who aren't particularly trained "to stand up for justice." (Who, except a vapid tool, has to be "trained" to stand up for justice, if that's their calling?)

It's such a blatantly egocentric view, i.e., "the guy in my shoes was a huge part of that," the implication being that Holder is something much more than he is.

But not everyone was trained to be so skeptical to see Holder's words as such blatant bullcrap.

First-year law student Dustin Leftridge of Missoula said he found Holder's message "incredibly inspirational."

"A call to service by the attorney general" dovetailed perfectly with his own idea of success in the legal profession, Leftridge said. "It's much more than somebody with a flashy Corvette and a nice suit."

Good God. I don't even know what to say.