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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz Sep 2012

The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The legal education crisis has already struck for many recent law school graduates, signaling potential disaster for law schools already struggling with their own economic challenges. Law schools have high fixed costs caused by competition between schools, the unchecked expansion of federal loan programs, a widely exploited information asymmetry about graduate employment outcomes, and a lack of financial discipline masquerading as innovation. As a result, tuition is up, jobs are down, and skepticism of the value of a J.D. has never been higher. If these trends do not reverse course, droves of students will continue to graduate with debt that …


The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos Sep 2012

The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …


Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell Apr 2012

Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell

Michigan Law Review

What does it take to become a law professor? With the publication of Brannon Denning, Marcia McCormick, and Jeffrey Lipshaw's Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, we can now say-as academics do that there is a literature on this question. Previously, much of the advice on this topic consisted of postings to blogs and other websites, which comprise probably the most detailed set of writings law professors have created in that medium. The arrival of a monograph pulls this body of advice together, organizes it, adds substantially to it, and supplies a handy tool for the kit of any …


Old Habits Die Hard: Disengaging From The Bluebook, Mark Garibyan Jan 2012

Old Habits Die Hard: Disengaging From The Bluebook, Mark Garibyan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Incoming first-year law students dread many aspects of what lies ahead: the cold calls, the challenging course load, and the general stress that is associated with starting a new phase in one’s life. Most students, however, do not expect that the Bluebook—the citation system used ubiquitously throughout the legal landscape—will inflict “more pain” on them “than any other publication in legal history.” This pain might be a shock to many who are accustomed to the simpler systems utilized in other academic fields. A citation itself is, after all, merely a reference; it is “neither scholarship nor analysis.” Preferably, a system …