Lawyers and Laissez-Faire: Shrinking Law School Class Sizes

What's a law school to do?

Some are responding to the downward trend in the job market by decreasing class sizes.

Though it will take time to see a noticeable shift, perhaps decreasing the supply of students will create, at least theoretically, a position of scarcity, thereby increasing the value of a student in possession of a law degree, and thus balance out the demand for said students.

While the move may seem indirect at best, according to the June 21^st insidehighered.com article, ''Objecting to More Lawyers three law schools'', Touro Law Center and Albany Law School in New York and Creighton University School of Law in Nebraska have all made the decision to reduce their incoming classes over the next couple of years. Creighton is dropping from 155 students in the fall 2010 class to 135 next year. Albany will drop from 250 in the fall 2010 class to 240 the following year, and 230 the next. Administration at Touro is currently looking to reduce the class by 10 students a year for the next three years.

According to the insidehighered.com article, administrators at the law schools point to a number of reasons for the decrease, ''including a structural change in the job market that makes enrolling as many students an irresponsible course of action.'' Ed Birmingham, associate dean for administration and finance at Creighton was quoted as saying: ''It's more than just an immediate problem. This is a long-term trend involving international practice, the outsourcing of work, demands on lawyers to become more efficient, and also we've had a debt issue.''

Also according to the insidehighered.com article, Lawrence Raful, dean of the Touro law center, was quoted as having said in an interview with the New York Law Journal: ''It is the ethical and moral thing to do. I don't think the [job] placement situation is going to turn around for a number of years and I think we are concerned about the ethics of turning out quite so many students in debt when we know that not everyone can get a job to pay off that debt.''

Ethics aside, there are other reasons for colleges to reduce their class sizes: a steady decrease nationwide in applicants, constant pressure to improve rankings, and financial pressures. Additionally, by reducing class sizes, faculty can devote more time and resources to students, thus improving the quality of education.

According to data reported in the insidehighered.com article, a study by Northwestern University's law school estimated that a whopping 15,000 attorney and legal staff jobs had disappeared from the nation's biggest firms since January 2008. So it seems only to make sense that law schools respond in this way.

In support of decreasing class sizes, from a strictly economic point of view, is John Yoo, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In a blog posting, per the insidehighered.com article, he wrote: ''Education is a product in the market, like any other. The producers (law schools) sell a service (a legal education) at a price (tuition) to consumers (students). If there is an oversupply of the product, or the demand falls, then the price should drop and eventually the quantity will fall until the market clears. I don't see anything so moral (or immoral) about it.''

Clearly, the concept of laissez-faire prevails.