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Document Type

Article

Abstract

At the end of Brian Tamanaha’s instant classic, Failing Law Schools, tracing the economic forces behind exorbitant law school tuition and graduate debt and unemployment, he lays out his plan to help resolve the crisis. He would eliminate tenure, dispense with the final year of law school, rely heavily on adjuncts and apprenticeships, and loosen the ABA accreditation standards mandating “one-size-fitsall” law schools to allow the marketplace to fashion more affordable models of legal education. Some schools would remain in the traditional, three-year mode, with faculty conducting research. Others would morph into, or spring up spontaneously as, the “law school parallel . . . of vocational colleges.” Very candidly, Tamanaha explained that the “two-year law schools . . . would be dumping grounds for the middle class and the poor . . . . Few children of the rich will end up in these law schools.” He calls the plan “‘differentiated’ legal education.” Others, including Paul Campos, founder of the Inside the Law School Scam web blog and author of Don’t Go To Law School (Unless), and the ABA Task Force (“Task Force”) on the Future of Legal Education, have endorsed Tamanaha’s prescription.

DOI

10.37419/LR.V2.I2.2

First Page

215

Last Page

245

Included in

Law Commons

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