Dean and Professor of Law Nora V. Demleitner was quoted in the following New York Times article.

Another View: Lock the Law School Doors
By Dan Slater
The New York Times
September 2, 2009

This summer, in the staid world of legal education, where curriculum is uniform and scholars are trained in the art of like-mindedness, one dean hatched a contrary plan.

In a memo to incoming students, Patricia D. White, the dean of University of Miami School of Law, surmised: “Perhaps many of you are looking to law school as a safe harbor in which you can wait out the current economic storm.” She then urged them to “think hard” about their plans and offered incentives for those willing to defer for one year.

“The nature of the legal profession is in great flux,” Dean White observed. “It is very difficult to predict what the employment landscape for young lawyers will be in May 2012 and thereafter.”

Recently, The New York Times reported on the dire straits of today’s law student. As firms begin an industrywide overhaul, which has entailed slashing jobs and reconsidering hidebound inefficiencies like the lockstep salary, students will compete for half as many $160,000-a-year jobs this year as they did last. According to the National Association for Legal Career Professionals, the 2008 recruiting season marked “what is likely to be the beginning of a weaker legal employment market that may last for a number of years.”

Meanwhile, as job opportunities abate, law school matriculation rates rise unchecked. Each year, the number of students who enroll at one of 200 law schools approved by the American Bar Association inches closer to 50,000. Even at Miami, where 32 students took Dean White up on her offer to defer, the school is still left with a first-year population of 527 — ­ 35 percent more than last year’s incoming class.

This fall, as thousands of second-year law students wait in vain for callback interviews and ponder instructions to cast a wider net, they might wonder why, when they signed up for all of this, no one mentioned times were changing. They might even look at Miami’s attempt, however futile, to stanch enrollment and call it an honorable thing.

The American Bar Association, which continues to approve law schools with impunity and with no end in sight, bears complicity in creating this mess. Yet a spokeswoman, citing antitrust concerns, says the A.B.A. takes no position on the optimal number of lawyers or law schools. So then how about the schools? Can they save future generations of students from themselves?

If it means shrinking classes, don’t count on it. Limiting education is un-American, not to mention anticapitalist, even if many law schools appear to profit from what may charitably be called an inefficient distribution of market information.

Take, for instance, the employment statistics posted on the Web sites of three low-ranked law schools in New York City, the country’s biggest market for legal employment. All three advertise that 45 to 60 percent of their 2008 graduates who reported salary information are making a median salary of $150,000 to $160,000.

Now, of course there must be some way of slicing and dicing the numbers to yield that magic result. But what happens, in practice, is that prospective degree-purchasers enroll in these $43,000-a-year programs believing their chances of landing that Big Law job are about one in two. Tempting odds.

Other schools market their degrees without six-figure promises. “If you counted on starting at $160,000 per year, then you’re in for a huge disappointment,” said Bryant Garth, the dean at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, where enrollment is up 11 percent. He disagrees with Miami’s approach and believes that trying to shrink class size amounts to panicking. “I insist law is still a good career,” he said. “Students may just have to make it in a more entrepreneurial fashion.”

Either way, the burden falls ultimately to aspiring legal eagles to reconsider motivations rather than borrow money on the expectation that they’ll make fat salaries, pay off debt in short order and win that express ticket to an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Because those days, grand as they might have been, are gone.

But will next year’s round of applicants heed the signals? Or, like Gatsby’s revelers, will they simply push on at an ever greater clip, boats against the current, toward that green light in the ivory tower and the promising future that, quite literally, recedes before them? After all, there will always be the possibility, however faint, of Big Law money and white-shoe prestige — ­ those powerful tonics for every new batch of wandering liberal arts graduates.

“I don’t know if we can take it for granted that a 22-year-old knows what it means to borrow $100,000,” said Nora V. Demleitner, the dean of Hofstra Law School, where enrollment is up a relatively modest 5 percent. “They look at the $100,000 in loans, and then they look at the $160,000 salary. And they think, ‘Well, that’s not so bad.’”

Dan Slater, a former litigator, is a freelance journalist in New York and a former writer of The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog.