Brian Tamanaha tops the list, followed by Bill Henderson, Frank Wu, Erwin Chemerinsky, and then a recent law school gradudate, Kyle McEntee of Law School Transparency. I'd break down the list this way: three of them are exploring law school reforms and the other two are finding ways to recapitulate the prestige-chasing tournament in the new economic era. One of the traditionalists exemplifies the law school struggling to maintain its precarious position in the prestige-chasing tournament and the other exemplifies success in the prestige-chasing tournament. It will be interesting to look back at this list in ten and twenty years. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the traditional prestige-chasing model will survive largely intact once the total law school enrollment drops by 25-40% from its height and that serious reform will happen only at the edges and margins. It will be hard to overcome the institutional bias and organizational inertia of the current system, coupled with too-easy credit and some degree of unavoidable irrationality of law school applicants. I hope I'm wrong about that, and I hope that legal education will have a lot more variety to it, but that's my guess. I'd put 75% of my money on Chemerinsky and 25% on Tamanaha, Henderson, and McEntee.
The prestige chasing model is about the self interest of the professors not the students.
Ths same is true with corporations that chase prestige for their officers instead of value for shareholders and other constituents. With law schools, however, there are no hostile takover bids and there is no other market for corporate control. The stakeholders who foot the bill -- students and to some extent the legal profession -- have even less voice in management than shareholders do in a corporation.
Is any of this a surprise?
Posted by: Richard Painter | January 03, 2013 at 07:48 PM