Much in the news the last few days are reports
of a growing number of law schools offering one-year full-time or two-year
part-time pre-JD master’s degrees in law.
Apparently nearly 30 institutions offer or soon will offer a degree of
this kind. Coverage in the National Law Journal can be found here; Wall St. Journal (subscr. req’d) here; Above the Law here. The degree is variously denominated a “Master
in Legal Studies” (MLS), “Master of Studies in Law” (MSL), “Juris Master” (JM),
“Master of Jurisprudence” (MJ) or “Master of Science in Legal Studies”
(MS).
So many acronyms. Is this just another case of More Universities
that Like to Collect Tuition (MULCT)?
Let’s look at the early evidence.
The NLJ
quotes the view of one senior faculty member at Indiana University at
Indianapolis that “[t]his is about finding a different pool of potential
students.” While this is a refreshingly
candid reflection on why the program might be good for law schools, particularly those with rapidly diminishing JD
enrollments, it does raise certain questions about the degree’s utility for
potential students.
On this question, the NLJ quotes Frank Wu, dean at UC
Hastings, and in my own opinion one of the genuinely thoughtful, constructive
and creative law-school administrators navigating these difficult times:
“Many lawyers work in human resources, but you don't have to have a
J.D. It’s the same thing with compliance
officers in banks and hospitals. There are all these jobs in law — criminal
justice jobs, law firm management jobs, consultants — where a J.D.
makes no sense but some legal training is useful.”
Fair
enough. But wait a second. Those familiar with the dreary tidings that
the ABA and NALP employment outcome figures have borne in recent years know
that these days law graduates’ reportable employment
successes come in two principal categories—positions that require a law
license; and “JD Advantage” positions that do not require a law license but for
which the law degree provides “a demonstrable advantage in obtaining or
performing the job.” The ABA Section on
Legal Education defines “JD Advantage” positions in part like this:
“A position in this category is one for which . . . the JD
provided a demonstrable advantage in obtaining or performing the job, but
itself does not require bar passage, an active law license, or involve
practicing law. Examples of positions
for which a JD is an advantage include a corporate contracts administrator,
alternative dispute resolution specialist, government regulatory analyst, FBI
agent, and accountant. Also included
might be jobs in personnel or human resources, jobs with investment banks, jobs
with consulting firms, jobs doing compliance work in business and industry,
jobs in law firm professional development, and jobs in law school career
services offices, admissions offices, or other law school administrative offices. Doctors or nurses who plan to work in a
litigation, insurance, or risk management setting, or as expert witnesses,
would fall into this category, as would journalists and teachers (in a higher
education setting) of law and law related topics.”
These “JD Advantage”
jobs are counted (at least in part) as
employment successes by US News in
determining the employment component of its rankings, and are touted by various
Panglosses (like this one) and
Polyannas (e.g., the second comment to this post)
in the legal academy as a consummation devoutly to
be wished and an independently sufficient justification to seek a JD. But the
very positions offered to justify a one-year master’s “where a J.D. makes no
sense”—“human resources,” “compliance officers,” ”criminal justice jobs,”
“consultants”—are specifically enumerated examples of “JD Advantage” positions
in the ABA definition. Oops.
Of course, this doesn’t prove that there
is no position not requiring a law
license for which a JD provides advantages so irreplaceably substantial that it
justifies three years’ time and tuition.
Undoubtedly some such positions exist.
But what it strongly suggests is that many of the jobs conventionally
offered as examples of such positions really aren’t, and that overall there are
vastly fewer genuinely JD-Advantaged positions than some law schools’
self-reporting or a sensible definition of the category might imply. Put slightly differently, the broader the
population for which a one-year master’s degree makes sense, the narrower the
range of “JD Advantaged” positions for which pursuit of a JD provides any
cost-justified advantage. This also
suggests that this novel marketing tactic may prove self-defeating, as the
wider availability of one-year masters’ programs persuades larger numbers of
potential JD seekers that there is a shorter, cheaper path to a range of
law-related work.
Those of you who are kind enough to
follow my posts on this site will recall my repeated insistence that What
Matters Most right now is that there are substantially more seats in law
schools than there are law jobs for graduates.
(E.g., here, here and here.) How many of you seriously believe that the
solution to this problem is to find more butts—that “[t]his is about finding a
different pool of potential students”?
If you think that the solution to the
legal academy’s excess supply is to develop “products” that can be “marketed”
to a broader range of “consumers,” then the law-school scam brigade is right that
you should be regarded, and treated, like a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. If, on the other hand, you view the master’s
degree as an innovation designed to regulate the proportionality of the cost
and extent of legal education to its utility in particular circumstances (and
from his comments I would put Dean Wu in this camp), you may be on to the
beginning of something interesting.
--Bernie
Recent Comments