Delaware is thinking about a new law school. Bainbridge and Pileggi don’t like it. Says Steve:
the last thing Delaware–or the country as a whole–needs is another law school churning out graduates into a still dismal job market. We need to be killing off the bottom dwellers, not starting new ones.
I agree, with a caveat. We need fewer old law schools, but we also need more really new ones. These really new law schools would be prepared to fathom and address new markets for legal services. Unlike legacy law schools, they would not be bound by outmoded views of the law market as a cottage industry.
I have more specific suggestions in my new article, Practicing Theory. In general, I argue there that law schools and law professors should “devote much more study to dynamic law markets than they have in the past.”
Existing law schools could reinvent themselves, but it’s often easier to write on a blank slate. Rather than a marginal operation churning T4 students into a shrinking existing market, this could be an opportunity for an elite university to offer the kind of advanced thinking that reinventing the legal market demands.
In other words, it may be time for the MIT School of Law.
