Top Law Schools

Saw this in the Globe today. Insane amount of money for any law school, let alone one of New England's caliber.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2020/ ... story.html

TUwave wrote:Saw this in the Globe today. Insane amount of money for any law school, let alone one of New England's caliber.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2020/ ... story.html

It is hard to argue that the ABA exists for any purpose other than furthering and protecting academia’s pecuniary interests.

In a way, this confirms all of my intuitions about the *VERY GOOD HONEST CARING PEOPLE* who run these types bottom-of-the-barrel law schools.

Some might disagree, but in my opinion this TTTT is only one tiny step above trump university.

I agree with Prof. Campos. The retirement package approved by the board of trustees is shocking. John Sexton, who helmed NYU Law's phenomenal and stable rise into the T6, would probably deserve this kind of pay. I'm hard pressed to think of another law school dean who would deserve such outsized compensation.

objctnyrhnr wrote:In a way, this confirms all of my intuitions about the *VERY GOOD HONEST CARING PEOPLE* who run these types bottom-of-the-barrel law schools.

Some might disagree, but in my opinion this TTTT is only one tiny step above trump university.

Yes it is despicable. Especially the for profits. But I don’t blame a rat for acting like a rat. There will always be sleazy people willing to go right up to the laws edge to swindle others within bounds. It is the ABAs job to prevent this, protect applicants, and protect the profession.

The courts have stated law schools are held to lesser ethical standards than other businesses because students are expected to be more sophisticated consumers. If law schools are legally held to a lower ethical standard than strip-clubs and pawnshops, you could argue it would be overbearing for the ABA to require them to be honest or ethical. Under that view, if a law school dean behaves in a manner you'd expect of a reasonably sketchy strip-club manager, he should be applauded, not sanctioned.

LSATWiz.com wrote:The courts have stated law schools are held to lesser ethical standards than other businesses because students are expected to be more sophisticated consumers. If law schools are legally held to a lower ethical standard than strip-clubs and pawnshops, you could argue it would be overbearing for the ABA to require them to be honest or ethical. Under that view, if a law school dean behaves in a manner you'd expect of a reasonably sketchy strip-club manager, he should be applauded, not sanctioned.

Crediting this to show the absurdity of the courts’ decision and the current ethical standard. A sophisticated consumer by definition wouldn’t attend a TTT school (arguably many TTs).

LSATWiz.com wrote:The courts have stated law schools are held to lesser ethical standards than other businesses because students are expected to be more sophisticated consumers. If law schools are legally held to a lower ethical standard than strip-clubs and pawnshops, you could argue it would be overbearing for the ABA to require them to be honest or ethical. Under that view, if a law school dean behaves in a manner you'd expect of a reasonably sketchy strip-club manager, he should be applauded, not sanctioned.

Do you have a case citation? I’m interested.

objctnyrhnr wrote:

LSATWiz.com wrote:The courts have stated law schools are held to lesser ethical standards than other businesses because students are expected to be more sophisticated consumers. If law schools are legally held to a lower ethical standard than strip-clubs and pawnshops, you could argue it would be overbearing for the ABA to require them to be honest or ethical. Under that view, if a law school dean behaves in a manner you'd expect of a reasonably sketchy strip-club manager, he should be applauded, not sanctioned.

Do you have a case citation? I’m interested.

There are a few, but Taylor Casey, et al., v. Florida Coastal School of Law, Inc., Case No. 3:14-cv-01229-BJD-PDB (M.D. Fla.)

In addition to the sophisticated standard here, they also implemented the blatant ridiculousness of the school's advertised employment #'s in relation to its ranking. Consequently, the students failed to live up to even the reasonable consumer standard. I actually think that's fair, but those arguments seem contradictory -- the judge is saying the Florida Coastal students are sophisticated and stupid at the same time unless the suggestion is they knew the #'s were misleading.

But as someone who works in class actions by day, I think the reason for this absurdity was inexperienced lawyering in the first case on the issue that created bad precedent. There are a lot of (public) cases over diet soda being misleading because it's much worse for dieting than water and beers that promote themselves as being associated with a certain tropical place on TV as having no such connection to that place. Here, the consumers are just as unreasonable but these cases often survive summary judgment.

I think if the original batch of students were represented by Hagens Berman or a similar firm, we may have a different precedent. I read an article written by Harrison Barnes that describes an interaction with a former Cooley dean, and if that article is accurate and Cooley is indicative of similarly ranked schools, discovery may have resulted a smoking gun.

Johnnybgoode92 wrote:

LSATWiz.com wrote:The courts have stated law schools are held to lesser ethical standards than other businesses because students are expected to be more sophisticated consumers. If law schools are legally held to a lower ethical standard than strip-clubs and pawnshops, you could argue it would be overbearing for the ABA to require them to be honest or ethical. Under that view, if a law school dean behaves in a manner you'd expect of a reasonably sketchy strip-club manager, he should be applauded, not sanctioned.

Crediting this to show the absurdity of the courts’ decision and the current ethical standard. A sophisticated consumer by definition wouldn’t attend a TTT school (arguably many TTs).

I'd go a step further and say that even sophisticated consumers may have trusted the school's claims at that time. American society trains us to trust the educational system from an early age. This is obviously not a comparable issue in either relevance or severity, but one of the reasons many teachers and priests who were sex offenders were able to get away with it for much longer than the average child predator was that many victims assumed that if a teacher or priest said it was okay, then it was okay.

I could probably think of a better example if I spent more time, but my point is that it's not as though people go into law school admissions like they're playing poker. As much as anyone on this board says it's common knowledge that schools like Florida Coastal mislead the public, you only know this because someone close to you tipped you off to it or you happened to stumble across that knowledge. If I was 22 and had always respected my teachers and did as told, I'd assume I could take Florida Coastal's job statistics at face value because my initial assumption would be that law schools are honest.

It seems unfair to treat the students as distinct from other consumers but not treat schools as distinct from other types of businesses being that the reasonable person trusts schools more than most business entities.

IIRC a lot of the suits date to the early days of Law School Transparency/the transparency-scam movement generally, before schools had to release the ABA data, when it was actually kind of hard to find data besides school-provided puffery. So sophistication aside, I think schools were much more misleading in how they presented their numbers and there were fewer resources for checking those numbers. Claiming applicants are too sophisticated to be taken in is kind of tough when there was just less information readily available.

Even with all of the disclosed information, these institutions should not exist. The sinecures for the professors should be abolished. The ABA allows twice as many law school graduates a year as there are job openings. This is a professional school with little value other than practice. The ABA should immediately shutter at least a third of the school to approximate equilibrium.

So for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, I’ll say that the one argument against greater/more intensive regulation that’s tough to get around (for me) stems from one of the most basic economic concepts:

If a product is bad and/or unfairly priced (assuming it’s not like life-saving medicine or something else that is strictly necessary for a certain subset of the population to consume), the free market should deal with the problem itself via people refusing to pay for the product/service and that product/service improving or going away.

And yet, students continue to pay for these shitboxes in droves. For that reason (and from a crass-sounding, but objective and purely nonemotional standpoint), don’t the students kind of deserve what’s coming to them in a way...the same as people who buy a blatantly unreliable car model (with publicized info demonstrating the same), in a way, deserve to need to pay for another new car after 70,000 miles?

Put more simply, I have difficulty getting around the idea that the students (ie the consumers of these bad products) are largely to blame for their outcomes—these days—when everything is out there about employment prospects.

objctnyrhnr wrote:So for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, I’ll say that the one argument against greater/more intensive regulation that’s tough to get around (for me) stems from one of the most basic economic concepts:

If a product is bad and/or unfairly priced (assuming it’s not like life-saving medicine or something else that is strictly necessary for a certain subset of the population to consume), the free market should deal with the problem itself via people refusing to pay for the product/service and that product/service improving or going away.

And yet, students continue to pay for these shitboxes in droves. For that reason (and from a crass-sounding, but objective and purely nonemotional standpoint), don’t the students kind of deserve what’s coming to them in a way...the same as people who buy a blatantly unreliable car model (with publicized info demonstrating the same), in a way, deserve to need to pay for another new car after 70,000 miles?

Put more simply, I have difficulty getting around the idea that the students (ie the consumers of these bad products) are largely to blame for their outcomes—these days—when everything is out there about employment prospects.

I agree with this. While I may sound like a boomer, I believe that those with the tools and tenacity to succeed will eventually find success. I also believe that economic forces generally do a good job of dictating which businesses should stay in business.

That said, the line is drawn when consumers are purchasing something different than what they thought they were getting at the time of purchase. And while caveat emptor extends to many businesses, society trains us to trust schools from an early age and there's really no way to change that. If public schools made sure that children saw schools as businesses chiefly motivated by financial gain rather than their success, you'd see a decline in diploma rates, but I do think that fairness calls for such social changes if schools are legally treated as such businesses.

The current system -- training people to blindly trust the educational system from an early age while simultaneously penalizing them for just that creates a windfall for bad actors.

objctnyrhnr wrote:So for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, I’ll say that the one argument against greater/more intensive regulation that’s tough to get around (for me) stems from one of the most basic economic concepts:

If a product is bad and/or unfairly priced (assuming it’s not like life-saving medicine or something else that is strictly necessary for a certain subset of the population to consume), the free market should deal with the problem itself via people refusing to pay for the product/service and that product/service improving or going away.

And yet, students continue to pay for these shitboxes in droves. For that reason (and from a crass-sounding, but objective and purely nonemotional standpoint), don’t the students kind of deserve what’s coming to them in a way...the same as people who buy a blatantly unreliable car model (with publicized info demonstrating the same), in a way, deserve to need to pay for another new car after 70,000 miles?

Put more simply, I have difficulty getting around the idea that the students (ie the consumers of these bad products) are largely to blame for their outcomes—these days—when everything is out there about employment prospects.

I agree. They’d get conned in some other way if not LS. Where it differs is two fold (aside from Wiz’ points):

1. LS is a massive investment. It is multiples more than a car and can equal a house. There is not even a physical asset underlying the worthless degree.

2. The government subsidizes these schools through the tax system and guaranteeing the loans. We, the taxpayers, pay for these societally useless institutions. If they did not rely on our largesse, it would be a true free market. As it stands, the feds facilitate the scam.

Johnnybgoode92 wrote:

objctnyrhnr wrote:So for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, I’ll say that the one argument against greater/more intensive regulation that’s tough to get around (for me) stems from one of the most basic economic concepts:

If a product is bad and/or unfairly priced (assuming it’s not like life-saving medicine or something else that is strictly necessary for a certain subset of the population to consume), the free market should deal with the problem itself via people refusing to pay for the product/service and that product/service improving or going away.

And yet, students continue to pay for these shitboxes in droves. For that reason (and from a crass-sounding, but objective and purely nonemotional standpoint), don’t the students kind of deserve what’s coming to them in a way...the same as people who buy a blatantly unreliable car model (with publicized info demonstrating the same), in a way, deserve to need to pay for another new car after 70,000 miles?

Put more simply, I have difficulty getting around the idea that the students (ie the consumers of these bad products) are largely to blame for their outcomes—these days—when everything is out there about employment prospects.

I agree. They’d get conned in some other way if not LS. Where it differs is two fold (aside from Wiz’ points):

1. LS is a massive investment. It is multiples more than a car and can equal a house. There is not even a physical asset underlying the worthless degree.

2. The government subsidizes these schools through the tax system and guaranteeing the loans. We, the taxpayers, pay for these societally useless institutions. If they did not rely on our largesse, it would be a true free market. As it stands, the feds facilitate the scam.

One solution would be to make the schools a guarantor on any loan. If the student fails to repay the loan during their lifetime, then the school owes the government the balance + interest.

LSATWiz.com wrote:

Johnnybgoode92 wrote:

objctnyrhnr wrote:So for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, I’ll say that the one argument against greater/more intensive regulation that’s tough to get around (for me) stems from one of the most basic economic concepts:

If a product is bad and/or unfairly priced (assuming it’s not like life-saving medicine or something else that is strictly necessary for a certain subset of the population to consume), the free market should deal with the problem itself via people refusing to pay for the product/service and that product/service improving or going away.

And yet, students continue to pay for these shitboxes in droves. For that reason (and from a crass-sounding, but objective and purely nonemotional standpoint), don’t the students kind of deserve what’s coming to them in a way...the same as people who buy a blatantly unreliable car model (with publicized info demonstrating the same), in a way, deserve to need to pay for another new car after 70,000 miles?

Put more simply, I have difficulty getting around the idea that the students (ie the consumers of these bad products) are largely to blame for their outcomes—these days—when everything is out there about employment prospects.

I agree. They’d get conned in some other way if not LS. Where it differs is two fold (aside from Wiz’ points):

1. LS is a massive investment. It is multiples more than a car and can equal a house. There is not even a physical asset underlying the worthless degree.

2. The government subsidizes these schools through the tax system and guaranteeing the loans. We, the taxpayers, pay for these societally useless institutions. If they did not rely on our largesse, it would be a true free market. As it stands, the feds facilitate the scam.

One solution would be to make the schools a guarantor on any loan. If the student fails to repay the loan during their lifetime, then the school owes the government the balance + interest.

LSATWiz's bolded response has been a belief of mine for years. Either the schools need to have some skin in the game, or the government needs to stop guaranteeing hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans to 22-year-olds who have never worked and can't appreciate the value of a dollar. If either of these approaches were taken, the cost of law schools would plummet overnight because no school would want to be on the hook and no private bank would lend absurd amounts of money to individuals with no work history or assets.

rwhyAn wrote:

LSATWiz.com wrote:

Johnnybgoode92 wrote:

objctnyrhnr wrote:So for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, I’ll say that the one argument against greater/more intensive regulation that’s tough to get around (for me) stems from one of the most basic economic concepts:

If a product is bad and/or unfairly priced (assuming it’s not like life-saving medicine or something else that is strictly necessary for a certain subset of the population to consume), the free market should deal with the problem itself via people refusing to pay for the product/service and that product/service improving or going away.

And yet, students continue to pay for these shitboxes in droves. For that reason (and from a crass-sounding, but objective and purely nonemotional standpoint), don’t the students kind of deserve what’s coming to them in a way...the same as people who buy a blatantly unreliable car model (with publicized info demonstrating the same), in a way, deserve to need to pay for another new car after 70,000 miles?

Put more simply, I have difficulty getting around the idea that the students (ie the consumers of these bad products) are largely to blame for their outcomes—these days—when everything is out there about employment prospects.

I agree. They’d get conned in some other way if not LS. Where it differs is two fold (aside from Wiz’ points):

1. LS is a massive investment. It is multiples more than a car and can equal a house. There is not even a physical asset underlying the worthless degree.

2. The government subsidizes these schools through the tax system and guaranteeing the loans. We, the taxpayers, pay for these societally useless institutions. If they did not rely on our largesse, it would be a true free market. As it stands, the feds facilitate the scam.

One solution would be to make the schools a guarantor on any loan. If the student fails to repay the loan during their lifetime, then the school owes the government the balance + interest.

LSATWiz's bolded response has been a belief of mine for years. Either the schools need to have some skin in the game, or the government needs to stop guaranteeing hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans to 22-year-olds who have never worked and can't appreciate the value of a dollar. If either of these approaches were taken, the cost of law schools would plummet overnight because no school would want to be on the hook and no private bank would lend absurd amounts of money to individuals with no work history or assets.

Agreed 100%. Either the cost must go down this way or the schools get shut down by the ABA. Most veteran posters have experience online and in person trying to dissuade sub 155 lsat applicants from attending law school. It is almost impossible. Let’s either make the reckless decision impossible or less painful.