A reader picks up on the economic elements of the scam:
What everyone fails to mention – including the "libertarian" professors at Volokh – is how much this "law school scam" is supported by guaranteed federal student loans. I graduated this May from Duke Law and it wasn't uncommon to find friends who took federal loans at rates over 6.8% for greater than $125k. At the top schools, like Duke, students must line up work by graduation or they will probably never work for a big firm. Instead, the best they can hope for is to find jobs where they make between 30-60k working in state government or some small local law firm. At graduation, 30-40% of my class was jobless. Law schools aren't producing graduates who can find jobs but students have nearly unlimited access to federal student loans to cover the full cost of attendance. Law schools don't care. The only way a system this costly and inefficient survives is because of federal student loans.
Another writes:
There is an old saying among law students – "first year they scare you to death, second year they work you to death, third year they bore you to death."
I have long been of the belief that a law degree could be a one year program, because all you really learn in law school is how to "think" like a lawyer – identifying issues, analyzing them in the context of existing statutes, regulations and/or case law, and coming to a conclusion on how those issues should be resolved (or, if representing a client, how you can best argue on behalf of your client). In the first year, you learn those skills as applied to civil procedure, property law, torts, etc., and then you fill up your remaining years using those exact same analytical tools in different areas of the law – family law, intellectual property law, tax law, or whatever suits your fancy.
What is interesting, however, is that anything you have actually learned about the current state of the law in any of those areas becomes completely irrelevant the second you put down your pencil on the last day of the bar exam, because when you enter the practice of law, you will only need to know the state of the law in whatever narrow area you happen to practice in, and that is changing every day.
The Dish 