The Faculty Lounge

Final Call for Applications: Participatory Law Fund Awards

This just in from my Drexel University Kline Law colleague, Professor Rachel Lopez.  Rachel is doing amazing work using tools of participatory law scholarship.

This is a gentle reminder that applications to the Participatory Law Fund are due on Dec. 15, 2023. The fund is devoted to supporting the production of an emerging genre of legal scholarship called "participatory law scholarship" or PLS. As defined in Participatory Law Scholarship, recently published in the Columbia Law Review, PLS is legal scholarship written in collaboration with authors who have no formal training in the law, but rather expertise in law's injustice through lived experience. The PLF provides awards to the co-authors of PLS who are not lawyers or academics.

Applications can be submitted here. Awards will be made in the amounts of $4,000 for full length articles (over 20,000 words) and $2,000 for essays (between 10,000 words and 20,000 words). The Selection Committee will announce the recipients of the awards in February 2024 and the funds will be awarded upon completion of the piece.

Donations to the fund can also be made here. Your donation will allow us to make more awards available going forward. The hope is to be able to continue to fund this work for years to come.

Stolzenberg Wins 2023 Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law

Emily Stolzenberg (Villanova) has won the 2023 Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law for her paper Nonconsensual Family Obligations, 48 BYU L. Rev. 625 (2022).  The press release is here. Here is the paper's abstract:

Even as the pandemic has both highlighted and compounded the challenges many U.S. families face in meeting their members’ basic needs, efforts to expand public subsidies for caretaking have gained little traction. Scholars have identified many historical and practical reasons for Americans’ entrenched skepticism toward the welfare state. Ideas matter, too, and this Article uncovers and critiques one that works to limit collective financial responsibility for families: the conviction that family support obligations must be legitimated through consent.

In family law, as in liberal political theory, consent works to reconcile state regulation with individual freedom. But because consent is a poor way to conceptualize relations of interdependence, consent-based ideas about what family members owe one another make family law doctrine less generous and justifiable than it could be. Such ideas also insulate citizens from financial obligations toward anyone’s family but their own.

Consent-based legitimation endures in part because “consent” can bear different meanings unless it is precisely defined—work that family law scholars have only begun to undertake. Contributing to that project, this Article develops a taxonomy that identifies the distinct roles consent plays in justifying family obligations. It then uses that taxonomy to analyze how uncritical consent-based reasoning contributes to an incoherent body of doctrine that naturalizes economic inequality within and between families.

To begin to address these problems, family law should incorporate additional principles beyond consent for justifying family support obligations. Adopting such a pluralist approach would allow family law to grapple with important normative questions directly and openly, contributing to more defensible (and potentially more egalitarian) doctrine. Recognizing what this Article calls “nonconsensual family obligations” is also the first step toward advocating for the collective responsibility to make the material inputs of family life available to all—rendering family support obligations both broader and more widely spread than we currently imagine them to be.

The full paper is available here.

Congratulations, Professor Stolzenbeg!

Maynard on "Killing the Motivation of the Minority Law Professor"

Goldburn P. Maynard Jr. (Indiana University, Kelley School of Business) has published Killing the Motivation of the Minority Law Professor, 107 Minn. L. Rev. 245 (2022). Here is the abstract:

This Essay hypothesizes that a significant number of minority junior scholars with radical or non-normative ideas forego those projects or mute them to fit their work within the dominant paradigm of legal scholarship. Even those who move forward and publish their radical or non-normative proposals spend significant time attempting to overcome internal and external resistance, negotiating with mentors, and finding ways to make the radical seem palatable. This disproportionately harms the productivity of minority law professors, not only through inefficiency, but also through the long-term destruction of intrinsic motivation that is vital and overlaps with successful, fulfilling, and productive careers. To counteract some of these stifling effects, this Essay proposes several ways in which universities and the legal academy can support radical and non-normative scholarship.

The full article is available here.

Read Ann Lipton’s Canceled Paper

Professor Ann Lipton, of Tulane Law School, wrote a paper, Capital Discrimination, which was accepted for publication in the Houston Law Review and posted to SSRN. As Ann explains over at the Business Law Prof Blog:

[T]he paper explores the problem of gender discrimination against women as business owners and capital providers, and proposes changes to both statutory law and common law fiduciary duties in order to address gender-based oppression in business.

The paper itself describes several business law cases from different jurisdictions, including Shawe v. Elting, a matter very familiar to business lawyers, and which involved an acrimonious dispute in the Delaware courts.  Just before Christmas, an attorney representing Philip Shawe sent this cease and desist letter to SSRN, demanding that the paper be removed from that site as defamatory. 

On New Year’s Day, SSRN removed the paper in response to Shawe’s letter.  After that, Houston Law Review could no longer assure me that the article would run in its journal, and stated that they would not preclude me from submitting the paper for publication elsewhere.   

Tulane has sent a response letter to SSRN noting that the article’s factual assertions are drawn from publicly available court opinions and filings and the author’s conclusions are nondefamatory statements of personal opinion.

 The full paper is available at this link. 

Update: 

 

And would be great if @SSRN laid out some guidance on their standards and how they plan to review such claims going forward https://t.co/tSEwgMWQFi

— Kim Krawiec (@KimKrawiec) February 14, 2022

Update 2: This is good news!

Information Fiduciaries and the Duty to Care for Data

My colleagues Dave Haendler and Jordan Fisher, and I, have our new article, Negligence at the Breach: Information Fiduciaries and the Duty to Care for Data, up at SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

Personal data is a cost of admission for much of modern life. Employers, tech companies, advertisers, information brokers, and others collect huge quantities of data about us all. Yet outside of a few highly-regulated industries, American companies face few legal restrictions on how they manage and use that data. Until now, individuals have had very limited remedies when their data is stolen from data collectors. But change is afoot. In a significant recent decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court took a consequential step holding that entities collecting personal data owe a duty of reasonable care to protect data subjects against harm.

This tort decision left a critical question unresolved. What is “harm” in the context of privacy? What is it exactly that data collectors must protect data subjects against? This paper takes one state's doctrinal move as a jumping-off point to consider a question of immense national importance – how to apply to common-law negligence principles in cases involving the disclosure and misuse of personal data, and specifically, what a “duty to care” means in the unsettled realm of privacy law. Building off Jack Balkin’s work, this article proposes that fiduciary law offers an appealing framework for conceptualizing privacy harms and the corresponding responsibilities of the entities who are collecting our data. In doing so, it begins the conversation of how tort law can take a central place in protecting individuals when data holders betray their trust.

Donley Receives Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law

Professor Greer Donley of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law has been selected as the winner of 2019-2020 Haub Law Emerging Scholar Award in Women, Gender & Law for her paper Contraceptive Equity: Curing the Sex Discrimination in the ACA’s Mandate, 71 Ala. L. Rev. 499 (2019). Professor Donley is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the joint degree program in law and bioethics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She teaches Legislation and Regulation, Bioethics and FDA Law. 

The prize is awarded by the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in recognition of excellent legal scholarship related to women, gender and the law published by a full-time law professor with five or fewer years of full-time teaching experience.

The full announcement is here.

Crim Law Works in Progress Series

Given the necessary (but unfortunate and sad) cancellation of the conferences where we’d usually get the chance to catch up this summer, Dan McConkie (also NIU) and I have decided to start an online workshop series this summer for our fellow crim profs. We envision it consisting of a panel each week that would run for 75 - 90 minutes, three to four papers each, with time for feedback from assigned commentators and the audience, of course. Let me know at [email protected] if you'd like to join us. If you’d just like to “attend” to offer feedback, that’s great, too! When responding, please indicate if you’d like to present a paper, if you’d be willing to moderate or serve as a commentator, or if you’d just be excited to see this going so you can give feedback. I'll keep you in the loop.

We don’t know yet which day we’ll be choosing for these weekly workshops but I’ll be sending out a poll of some sort to try to get that nailed down. Getting a sense of who’s interested first would be a really helpful starting point, however, so let me know.

University of Vienna Symposium on Polyamory in the Media and Personal Poly Identity

I had the honor of travelling to Vienna to comment on Stefan Ossmann’s Ph.D. project on polyamory at a symposium at the University of Vienna earlier this month.  My co-presenters were Christian Klesse of Manchester Metropolitan University and Elisabeth Sheff, formerly of Georgia State University.  Stefan, a Communications Ph.D. candidate, undertook an ambitious project in which he conducted content analyses of media articles on polyamory spanning from 2007 to 2017 and interviews of thirty-three people who are part of the polyamory community in Vienna. His work is being supervised by Franz Eder, a Professor of Social and Economic History.  Stefan’s dual approach of examining media articles and undertaking interviews enabled him to compare external perceptions of the polyamory community in the German-speaking world to the self-perception of members of the poly community in Vienna.

 

Copyright: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: Stefan Ossmann / pictures taken: Vanessa Rosenmayer

Copyright: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: Stefan Ossmann / pictures taken: Vanessa Rosenmayer

For the media analysis, he focused on one newspaper database of German language articles called WISO online datenbank.  He found 361 relevant articles and also determined that the number of relevant articles is steadily rising every year and that most of the articles were neutral in tone.  In terms of the interviews, Steffan Ossmann tried to interview as many members as possible of each poly relationship, or polycule, he encountered.  The interviews revealed some very interesting information.  For instance, the interviewees tended to want greater societal acceptance of their multiple relationships but, somewhat paradoxically, were reluctant to share the fact of their multiple relationships with family members (especially with parents), with friends other than close friends, and with co-workers.  Additionally, legal recognition appeared to be of only minor importance, though there was some interest in recognition of plural marriage and in recognition of multiple partners’ relationships to children.  Interestingly, several interviewees independently raised the desire to have a right to visit loved ones in the hospital when they were ill.  All in all, this is a fascinating project that will provide invaluable information about Vienna’s poly community, thus adding to the work others, such as Elisabeth Sheff and Hadar Aviram, have done on poly communities in the U.S. and that which Christian Klesse has done on poly communities in England.  Stefan also examined whether polyamory was perceived as a sexual orientation in the media or by poly individuals in Vienna, which dovetails with my previous scholarship on polyamory as a sexual orientation. I very much look forward to reading Stefan Ossmann's final product in book form.

A Dangerous Volksgeist: Indian Law Journal Rejects Solicited Article on Indus Waters Treaty

The following guest post is by Nadia Ahmad, Associate Professor at Barry University School of Law:

The National Law School of India Review solicited me to write a 2,000-word article on January 2, 2019. I responded that I would write about the Indus Waters Treaty. Yet because of my existing deadlines, teaching schedule, and other responsibilities, I said I could deliver at the end of February.

Between the time that I accepted the offer and submitted the piece, India and Pakistan verged on the brink of war. I felt it would be responsible to include an analysis of how those current events factored into the interpretation and enforcement of the Indus Waters Treaty.  The journal said it would not publish my piece, because I addressed “international relations” and not legal issues. I am at my desk still shaking my head as to how an international water treaty that has been litigated in international courts does not provide “legal, jurisprudential perspectives with an inter-disciplinary focus.” I was given no opportunity to update the piece, but merely a “thanks, but no thanks.”  

Here is the three-part blog post, published in Vermont Environmental Law Review’s EcoPerspectives Blog:

• Considering Climate Risks and the Indus Waters Treaty in the 2019 India-Pakistan Showdown (Part 1)
• Reassessing Climate Justice and Energy Security Between India and Pakistan: The Curious Case of the Kalabagh Dam (Part 2)
• Dam-Racing in South Asia: The Environmental Disasters Waiting to Happen (Part 3)

I chose to write about this slight now, because of the broader impact to dissent in India, which has been on the radar of Human Rights Watch:

Sadly, the fact is that there is little room for dissent in India under [Bharatiya Janata Party] BJP. Activists, journalists, lawyers, writers, teachers, actors or artists – anyone who criticizes the government or its divisive ideology – is at risk of being targeted. Either the state deploys its power by arbitrarily cutting off access to funding, ordering audits, issuing warrants for search or arrest; or the BJP’s supporters threaten violence or launch physical attacks. From deeming that to be secular is to be anti-national, or from deciding that to be anti-fascist is to be a terrorist, the heap of wild allegations is unending.

Maybe with the elections, the bigotry and hatred would pass, I reasoned. I was wrong. The rancor will only intensify.

Meanwhile, neighboring Pakistan is no stranger to silencing minorities as it removed a top Princeton economics professor from its national economic advisory board, because he was from a religious minority group.  And then Saudi Arabia is executing intellectuals.

I suffer from a misapprehension that the environment matters to public health, safety, and welfare of the people and their surrounding lands. I also have a misapprehension that war is not the answer to limited natural resource scarcity, and that wars should not be fought over oil, pipelines, land, and water rights. History rarely is on my side. History is on the side of power, war, and racism, and ignores voices of resistance for peace, justice, and equality. 

As the prototype academic, I write enough to raise questions, but not enough to ruffle feathers, so that I can benefit from the fruits of my research and writing toils and not face the backlash of it. It is a fine line to stay out of sight, out of trouble, and still seem like an intellectual. In 1927, French essay Julien Benda published this once famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age in La Trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals).  Roger Kimball noted the depth of the intellectual treason that Benda described:

The “treason” or betrayal [Benda] sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action.”

In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed “the cult of success.” It is summed up, he writes, in “the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt.” 

The election results in India are done trickling in – a landslide for the ruling party.

When I received the rejection email from the National Law School of India Review journal editor, the 2016-2017 protests at New Dehli’s Jawaharlal Nehru University were fresh in my mind. Students who criticized the government were called “fascists” and “terrorists.” The protests started as all students protests do with grievances that the administration would refuse to acknowledge and attend to, and then snowballed from there. Under normal academic discourse, there are responses and rebuttals, but with the heavy hand of the state, the free exchange of ideas is limited. The views of this diasporic Indian/Pakistani were unwelcome. I do not know what the full dynamics were that led to the rejection, but as a grandchild of the Indian Partition, I know when things are amiss. I know how stealthily narratives and information are reined in to put forward state propaganda.

Students and academics in India under BJP rule have been met with tear gas and pellets, faced contempt charges, been arrested under colonial era sedition laws, and are even killing themselves in despair.

The land of Mahatama Gandhi deserves better.

-Nadia Ahmad

Did Prohibition Give Rise to the New Deal?

Conventional wisdom holds that the Great Depression sank Herbert Hoover’s presidency. After all, how could it not have? When American voters went to the polls in November 1932, the unemployment rate exceeded 25% and the global economy languished amid the most severe downturn in modern history.

In light of the Great Depression, it seems obvious that when voters elected Franklin Roosevelt—a charismatic candidate who had promised a “New Deal” for the American people—they must have done so for economic reasons. Indeed, a central political tenet (then and now) is that voters always vote their pocketbooks. As the Democratic strategist James Carville famously put it in 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Surely the same was true in 1932? 

Judge Ronald Longstaff

I recently wrote an article on the life and career of Judge Ronald Longstaff, a highly regarded federal judge in Iowa. The article is titled “Common Sense and Compassion: A Judicial Biography of Ronald Longstaff” and it was published last fall by the Drake Law Review. Here is the abstract:

For over four decades Ronald Earl Longstaff served the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, first as a federal magistrate and then as an Article III federal judge. Longstaff’s professional life provides a unique window into the Iowa bench and bar from the 1960s to the 2000s. Over the course of his career, Longstaff heard a remarkably diverse range of cases, from civil rights actions to commercial disputes to murder trials. A highly respected and admired judge, Longstaff exemplified the two qualities he viewed as central to judicial service: compassion and common sense.

Judge Longstaff’s life is also a story of perseverance and triumph over adversity. As a child in Pittsburg, Kansas, he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The treating physicians advised Longstaff’s parents to institutionalize him, a common practice in the 1940s for children with cerebral palsy. But to Ronald Longstaff’s good fortune, his parents ignored the doctors’ advice. The Longstaffs’ decision to keep their son in school made it possible for him to achieve his full potential, which eventually included decades of service as a distinguished federal judge.

As part of the project, I did a number of interviews with Judge Longstaff at his home in West Des Moines. It was an absolute pleasure to get to know him. Dick Lyford, the president of the Historical Society for the Southern District of Iowa, joined me for all of the interviews and provided invaluable assistance to me. Dick also arranged for a court reporter to transcribe the interviews. 

If you are interested, here is a link to the full article.

Oñati Socio-Legal Series Volume on "Comparative Socio-Legal Perspectives on Judicial Decision Making and Gender Justice"

In May, 2017, I participated in a fantastic international workshop at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Spain. The workshop brought together participants from the various international Feminist Judgments Projects. Collectively, these projects focus on rewriting judicial opinions from a feminist perspective using the same law and facts in existence at the time the initial case was decided. Projects in Canada, England, Australia, the U.S., Ireland and New Zealand have resulted in published volumes of rewritten judgments. There are ongoing projects devoted to international law, as well as the law of Scotland, India and Mexico.

The first U.S. book focused on rewriting decisions of the United States Supreme Court. It inspired a series of subject-matter specific books. Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. There are volumes at various stages of development devoted to U.S. law in the areas of torts, employment discrimination, reproductive justice, family law, health law, and trusts & estates.

The May 2017 in-person meeting of representatives of the various jurisdictional projects resulted in the publication of a thought-provoking set of papers (edited by Linda Berger, Kathy Stanchi and me). All papers went through a double-blind peer review process with two external referees, which was a new (and positive) experience for me as an editor. All of the papers are open-access.  Here's the table of contents (with links to papers):

The Oñati Socio-Legal Series Vol 8, No 9 (2018): Feminist Judgments: Comparative Socio-legal Perspectives on Judicial Decision Making and Gender Justice

Issue edited by Linda L. Berger (University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA), Bridget J. Crawford (Pace University, New York, USA), and Kathryn M. Stanchi (Temple University, Philadelphia, USA).

Table of Contents

Introduction

Feminist Judgments: Comparative Socio-Legal Perspectives on Judicial Decision Making and Gender Justice
Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Kathryn M. Stanchi

 

Part I: Methods in the Feminist Judgments Projects

Collaboration as Feminist Methodology: Experiences from the Feminist International Judgments Project
Loveday Hodson

Accessing Court Files as a Feminist Endeavour: Reflections on ‘Feminist Judgments of Aotearoa - Te Rino: A Two-Stranded Rope’
Elisabeth McDonald, Paulette Benton-Greig

Women’s Court of Canada Act and Rules
Melina Buckley

 

Part II: Measuring the Impact of Feminist Judgments

Feminist Judging in the 'Real World'
Rosemary Hunter

Turning Feminist Judgments into Jurisprudence: The Women’s Court of Canada on Substantive Equality
Denise Réaume

Impact of the Feminist Judgment Writing Projects: The Case of the Women’s Court of Canada
Jennifer Koshan

 

Part III: The Reach of Feminist Judgments

‘Benchmarking’ a Supreme Court and Federal Court judge in Australia
Francesca Bartlett, Heather Douglas

The Scottish Feminist Judgments Project: A New Frontier
Sharon Cowan

 

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Tax Returns

Eleanor Roosevelt probably would have disagreed with Donald Trump on many topics. But a new article in Modern American History highlights one issue Roosevelt saw eye-to-eye with President Trump: the non-disclosure of presidential tax returns. 

In “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Tax Returns,” Carolyn Jones provides a short but illuminating history of how tax returns became confidential documents, shielded from public access. As Professor Jones explains in her article, tax privacy was not always the order of the day in Washington. When Congress adopted an income tax during the Civil War to pay for the Union war effort, the government allowed public inspection of all tax returns. Six decades later, in the case of United States v. Dickey, the Supreme Court held that no congressional statute or constitutional provision barred newspapers from publishing the details of individual taxpayers’ federal income tax returns.

In response to the Dickey decision, the Coolidge Administration made tax returns confidential. But during the Great Depression allegations of widespread tax evasion by the rich became a highly partisan issue. As Jones points out, when President Franklin Roosevelt called for disclosing the names of “very wealthy individuals” who used loopholes to avoid paying taxes, the IRS Commissioner publicly identified 67 wealthy people (mostly Republicans) who allegedly had not paid “their full share of taxes.”

Viewing the tax disclosures as a partisan attack as well as a blatant abuse of power, Congressional Republicans responded by demanding an investigation into the Roosevelt family’s finances. The intrusive nature of the investigation affected Eleanor Roosevelt as much as her husband. As Professor Jones notes, the First Lady made so much money from her product endorsements, speaking fees, and writing royalties that “her income sometimes exceeded her husband’s salary.” Although proud of her financial independence from her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt had little interest in revealing to the world the most private details of her personal finances, let alone those of her family. The controversy soon fizzled out, but the experience left Roosevelt with a deeply wary view of mandatory disclosure of government officials’ tax returns. 

During the 1952 election, the issue of presidential taxes returned to public prominence when Senator (and Republican vice presidential candidate) Richard Nixon challenged the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates to disclose their tax information. Eleanor Roosevelt, however, publicly disagreed with Nixon in a newspaper column. Although she understood the benefits of public disclosure, she nevertheless argued that asking “government officials to reveal their finances . . .  is a sign that we no longer believe people should be proved guilty before they are accused of wrongdoing.” The controversy over the Roosevelt family finances, Jones concludes, “helps explain [Eleanor] Roosevelt’s reticence in 1952 to Nixon’s call for politicians to disclose their filings.”

Professor Jones’s excellent article is timely, engaging, and concise (it is only 4 pages long). It is available here at the Cambridge University Press website. In addition, Legal History Blog has a link to the other articles in the new issue of Modern American History.

New Volume: Altruism, Community, and Markets

The latest Law & Contemporary Problems volume -- Altruism, Community, and Markets -- is now available! The entire volume is free online here. From the Foreword: 

That human motivations can be complicated and that the concerns of individuals for both self and others shape communities—local, national, and global—are simple observations. It is much harder to grasp the complexities of a rapidly changing world in which human beings with their varying commitments continually interact. Our desire to better understand how and in what ways the forces of self-interest and altruism intersect—and at times collide—in the early twenty-first century inspired us to organize a symposium on “Altruism, Community, and Markets.” The proceedings of that conclave are published in this issue. Held in Washington, D.C. in October 2017 and sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, Duke Law School, and the University of Virginia School of Law, the symposium brought together scholars in law, public policy, economics, medicine, and related fields to examine the institutions5 that promote and restrict market and nonmarket interactions. The group also explored how the powers of altruism and self-interest are (and have the potential to be) harnessed to create and distribute goods and services.

The articles produced for the symposium cover a wide range of subjects and are of exceptional depth and intellectual ambition. All address topics of current importance while situating their analyses in the broader context of the symposium’s theme. Taken together, the articles contained in this issue provide a snapshot of a world grappling with the challenges of “institutionalizing”6 human cooperation in the face of evolving social attitudes and technological advances.

As they say, download it while it's hot!

Policy Shock Has Arrived!

And you can get it at a discount. 

My new book, Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation After Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises  (Cambridge University Press, November 2017) is finally here. It is edited by Duke University Rethinking Regulation program members Edward Balleisen, Professor of History and Duke's Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies; Lori Bennear, the Juli Plant Grainger Associate Professor of Energy Economics and Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment; Kimberly Krawiec, the Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor of Law (AKA me!); and Jonathan Wiener, the William R. & Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law, Professor of Environmental Policy, and Professor of Public Policy. 

The book looks at responses to events over the last century in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and assesses how they affected laws, regulations, and institutions. (A special discount of 30% off the list price is available from Cambridge University Press until June 1, 2018, by entering the code:  Policy17.)

I’ve included screen shots of the Table of Contents below. As you can see, some great authors are included here, representing contributions from law, economics, history, political science, psychology, engineering, and more.

I’ve also uploaded a pdf of the Introduction.  Download 9781107140219_excerpt-2

You can also read this Q&A with my colleague and co-author, Jonathan Wiener, discussing the book.

Winner of 2016 Penny Pether Award + Call for Nominations for 2017 Award

The organizers of the Penny Pether Law & Language Scholarship Award for 2016 have issued these announcements:

2016 Winner

The winner of the Penny Pether Law & Language Scholarship Award for 2016 is Stephen Paskey, Telling Refugee Stories: Trauma, Credibility, and Adversarial Adjudication of Claims for Asylum, 56 Santa Clara L. Rev. 457 (2016). The committee reviewed 25 nominated articles, and we struggled to identify a winner due to the high quality and strong diversity in the scholarship. We congratulate Professor Paskey, and we thank all the nominees for participating.

Call for Nominations: The Penny Pether Law & Language Scholarship Award 2017

A passionate advocate for interdisciplinary scholarship in law, literature, and language, Penelope J. Pether (1957-2013) was Professor of Law at Villanova University School of Law and former Professor of Law and Director of Legal Rhetoric at the American University Washington College of Law. Her own scholarship focused not only on law, literature, and language, but also on constitutional and comparative constitutional law; legal theory, including constitutional theory; common law legal institutions, judging practices, and professional subject formation.

Beginning in November 2013, the Penny Pether Award for Law & Language Scholarship has been given annually to an article or essay published during the preceding year (September 1 to September 1) that exemplifies Penny’s commitment to law and language scholarship and pedagogy.

The Committee selecting award recipients from among the articles and essays nominated will look for scholarship that not only embodies Penny’s passion and spirit but also has some or all of the following characteristics:

1. “[S]cholarship concerning itself with the unique or distinctive insights that might emerge from interdisciplinary inquiries into ‘law’ grounded in the work of influential theorists of language and discourse.”

2. Scholarship that “attempts to think through the relations among subject formation, language, and law.”

3. Scholarship that provides “accounts of—and linguistic interventions in—acute and yet abiding crises in law, its institutions and discourses.”

4. Scholarship and pedagogy, including work addressing injustices in legal-academic institutions and practices, that is “[c]arefully theorized and situated, insisting on engaging politics and law, [and that] charts ways for law and its subjects to use power, do justice.”

More explanations and descriptions of these characteristics can be found in Penny’s chapter from which these quotations are drawn: Language, in Law and the Humanities: An Introduction (Austin Sarat et al. eds., Cambridge U. Press 2010).

Nominations should be sent by January 8, 2018, to J. Amy Dillard at [email protected]. You are free to nominate more than one work and to nominate work you’ve written. Please provide a citation and a pdf for each work you nominate.

We are shifting our definition of the preceding year to simply our process. But in this year of transition, for the 2017 prize, we will consider any work published between September 1, 2016 and December 31, 2017. In the future, we will work with a calendar year.

The Selection Committee includes Linda Berger, David Caudill, Amy Dillard, Bruce Hay, Ian Gallacher, Melissa Marlow, Jeremy Mullem, Nancy Modesitt, Stephen Paskey, and Terrill Pollman.

Members of the Selection Committee are not eligible for the award.

An ABA Accreditation Standard on Employment Outcomes? Part 5.

If you are at this point persuaded that, at least in theory, an employment outcomes accreditation standard is an intelligent response to the crises of too many law graduates, too few law jobs, and too much law graduate debt, then the challenge becomes crafting a reasonable and workable standard.

An important threshold matter is how to define “law jobs” for purposes of the standard. The toughest question here is whether to include JDA jobs as qualifying jobs. In my article, I propose to include full-time, long-term bar passage required (BPR) as well as JD advantage (JDA) jobs, but to cap JD advantage jobs that count toward to minimum law job employment rate at 15% of the school’s graduating class. I also propose excluding short-term, part-time jobs, law school funded jobs, and solo practice jobs; these jobs, I submit, are not the sort of jobs that the great majority of law students spend three or four years and tens of thousands of dollars to get.

In his post introducing me as a guest blogger, Bernie Burk expressed concern about including JDA jobs as law jobs. I see the concern, and could still be persuaded. Indeed, my first draft of the article did not include JDA jobs as qualifying jobs for purposes of a standard. There are sensible arguments on either side.

On the side of including JDA jobs, law school is often viewed as a “graduate degree in critical thinking” that prepares graduates for a wide range of careers beyond the practice of law, even if the typical applicant envisions practicing law for at least some stretch of time following graduation. Further, NALP data indicate that a majority of graduates in JDA positions are not seeking other jobs at 10 months after graduation, suggesting that most are satisfied with the utility of their legal education in the position. While this does not establish that law students ex ante would rationally decide to attend law school to obtain these positions, it does tend to support that proposition. Further, the likelihood that some students who matriculated with the intention of obtaining a BPR job will develop an interest in JDA employment during the course of their legal education should not be ignored. Moreover, many JDA jobs pay just as well (or poorly) as law jobs.

On the other side, there are good reasons to be skeptical of whether most jobs classified as JDA jobs are jobs that a rational law student would attend law school to obtain. The number and percentage of graduates taking JDA jobs has doubled in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007-2009, from 2,156 and 4.9% for the class of 2009 to 3,993 and 10.8% for the class of 2016 (excluding law school funded positions). The size and timing of the increase strongly suggest that some graduates are taking JDA jobs because BPR jobs are not available. This is generally confirmed by the fact that lower-tier law schools tend to report higher percentages of graduates in JDA positions, and further by the NALP data that 43% of graduates in JDA jobs were looking for other employment within ten months of graduation, compared to 15% of graduates in BPR jobs. Indeed, the ABA and NALP definition of JDA positions in large part describes employment for which one-year post-baccalaureate Master of Laws degrees are designed to prepare students. Also, as Bernie pointed out, the definition of JDA is less than precise – the line between JDA and Other Professional jobs is open to interpretation – and therefore reporting is subject to manipulation.

It would be interesting to know what others think. I came down on the side of counting JDA jobs as qualifying employment outcomes, provided that the current definition is narrowed to eliminate placements for which students would qualify with a Master of Law degree. It is hard to justify three years of time and expense for a J.D. degree where one year for the Masters is sufficient to prepare a student for the job. Having said that, perhaps it will be too difficult to tighten the definition and it therefore would be preferable to limit qualifying jobs to FT, LT BPR jobs, while setting the minimum employment rate somewhat lower to take account of the fact that there are some non-BPR jobs for which the JD degree really matters, as Bernie suggested.

As a starting point for discussion, here is what I propose for an ABA employment outcomes standard. It could be adopted in addition to or in lieu of the bar passage standard.

Standard XXX. Graduate Employment Outcomes

(a) A law school must demonstrate that for two or more of each of the last five graduating classes:

(1) at least 60% of the graduates were employed in full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required or J.D. advantage jobs as of March 15 of the year following graduation; or

(2) if the requirement of subsection (a)(1) is not met, at least 75% of the graduates were employed in either full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required or J.D. advantage jobs as of March 15 of the second year following graduation.

No more that 15% of graduates employed in full-time, long-term J.D. advantage jobs may be counted towards the percentage rates specified in subparagraphs (1) and (2) of this paragraph.

(b) A law school that fails to comply with subsection (a)(1) of this Standard with respect to any graduating class must promptly submit a detailed plan for how it will remain in compliance with the Standard.

(c) As used in this Standard,

(1) “graduating class” is defined as a cohort of graduates who graduated between September 1 and August 30 of the following year, and includes graduates whose employment status is unknown, but excludes graduates who are pursuing a graduate degree full time;

(2) the terms, “full-time,” “part-time,” “long-term,” “short-term,” “bar passaged required,” and “JD advantage,” are as defined in the Definitions and Instructions accompanying the ABA Employment Questionnaire, except, however, that graduates employed as solo practitioners shall not be counted as employed; and

(3) the term, “average amount borrowed,” is as defined in the Instructions accompanying the ABA Annual Questionnaire.

In setting the legal employment rate, I started by estimating the generally attainable maximum legal employment rate at 10 months after graduation. Historically, about 20% of graduates have not passed the bar on the first try. While a large proportion of these graduates pass the bar on a subsequent attempt, they often do not obtain legal employment until after the 10-month measurement date. In addition, some graduates decide to pursue a graduate degree full-time even though they have the option of legal employment; and a small percentage of graduates likely decide not to take legal employment for reasons other than the absence of opportunity, or are unemployable due to mental health or character and fitness issues, or because they interview poorly. Taking account of these factors, a reasonable estimate of the generally attainable maximum LT, FT BPR employment rate for law graduates at 10 months after graduation is about 75%. This estimate is borne out by the employment reports from schools with the very highest legal employment rates. At the schools with law job placement rates in the top decile, slightly more than 75% of graduates obtained FT, LT BPR jobs within 10 months after graduation.

At the schools with law job placement rates in the top decile, slightly less than 85% obtain FT, LT BPR and JDA jobs combined. So, 85% would be the combined maximum attainable FT, LT BPR and JDA combined employment rate.

The maximum attainable rate should be discounted to some degree to take account of the 10-month measuring point under the ABA’s current employment data reporting system. The 10-month measuring point likely obscures a number of positive employment outcomes. On the one hand, the large majority of law students attend law school with an expectation of having a law job within 10 months of graduation (at least assuming they pass the bar on the first attempt), and so no allowance for positive outcomes beyond 10 months is appropriate given the purpose of the employment rate standard to assure that program outcomes align with program objectives. (The fact that about 20% of graduates do not pass the bar on the first attempt and therefore do not land a law job until after 10 months after graduation is already baked into the generally attainable maximum law job placement rate discussed above.) Further, employment prospects likely diminish over time after passing the bar, and especially when the graduate must compete with the next year’s graduates for legal employment. On the other hand, positive outcomes may be delayed for a variety of reasons and regardless of the reason should be credited to the school.

The draft standard requires compliance with the minimum legal employment rate for two out of five years in order to ensure that temporary dips in employment rate caused by an economic downturn do not lead to loss of accreditation. A school would be in jeopardy if fewer than 60% of graduates obtained law jobs (defined to include JDA jobs) for four consecutive years. This is subject to the qualification, however, that if a school fell below the minimum legal employment rate in any one year, it would have to submit a plan for how it will remain in compliance with the standard, and the Accreditation Committee could find that the plan is not reliable.

Finally, the number of JDA jobs that could count toward the minimum standard is capped at 15% consistent with the premise that the great majority of law students attend law school to be lawyers. As mentioned above, the room for manipulation in employment reporting under the current standard should be narrowed by better defining JDA to exclude jobs for which a post-baccalaureate Master of Laws degree will qualify a student.

An ABA Standard on Employment Outcomes? Part 3

In my first two posts (August 3 and 7), I outlined the scope of the law graduate employment and debt problems facing legal education; and described admissions policies at some law schools with persistently very weak employment outcomes that only exacerbate their graduate employment problems. In this post, I summarize my argument for an ABA employment outcomes standard.  The entire draft of the article is available on SSRN here: http://bit.ly/2vnfvJf.

The ABA (or more precisely, the ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar) is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) as the accrediting agency for all programs leading to the J.D. degree. One of the ED’s key criteria for recognition requires accreditors to impose student outcome standards on the programs or institutions that they accredit. Accreditors must have outcome “standards [that] effectively address the quality of the institution or program.” The regulation does not require accreditors to impose any particular outcomes standards, but specifically mentions “course completion, State licensing examination, and job placement rates” as potentially appropriate standards.

The requirement that ED-recognized accreditors have student outcome standards serves two essential purposes. The first and primary purpose is to help ensure that students realize the promise of the degree program. The large majority of law students attend law school with the objective of practicing law. Indeed, the ABA Standards state that the objective of a law school academic program is to prepare students for admission to the bar and the practice of law. Students who complete law school and seek but do not obtain legal employment do not realize the promise of the J.D. program. The adoption of a new accreditation standard on employment outcomes would directly advance the central objective of the J.D. program by requiring ABA-accredited law schools to demonstrate that their student outcomes align with the objective. The argument for an employment outcomes standard is especially compelling where the cost of legal education has become so high.

A subsidiary purpose of the ED regulation is to conserve federal tax dollars. Higher education institutions receive their students’ borrowed Title IV tuition dollars up front and regardless of individual student outcomes, but if large numbers of those students are unlikely to repay their student loans because they do not obtain suitable employment upon graduation, the institution effectively receives an unintended federal taxpayer subsidy. The Title IV loan programs are loan programs, not grant programs.  There is a small but not insignificant number of law schools with both persistently very weak employment outcomes and very high average graduate debt.  It appears likely that these schools in particular have been receiving a large taxpayer subsidy.

While the ED recognition criteria do not mandate any particular student outcomes standards, the outcome standards adopted by an accreditor must be effective. Currently, the ABA has a licensing exam (bar examination) passage standard and the equivalent of a minimum course completion rate standard (a standard on attrition). While the ABA requires schools to collect and report detailed graduate employment outcomes information, the accreditation standards presently do not address employment outcomes.

An ABA employment outcomes standard would redress a gap in the ABA’s current outcome standards. As discussed in my previous post, the current standards on attrition and bar passage have not effectively constrained some schools with persistently very weak graduate employment outcomes to improve those outcomes. To the contrary, as discussed, some schools with dismal graduate employment outcomes have responded to the decline in law school applications by enrolling more students with markedly lower LSAT scores, almost inevitably leading to lower bar passage rates and further diminished employment prospects for their graduates. Moreover, some of the same schools with weak employment outcomes and large declines in entering class credentials also report high average student debt amounts (or no longer report the amount).

This is a tight summary of the argument for adopting an employment outcomes standard. In my next post, I will address what I expect will be the main arguments against it.

An ABA Accreditation Standard on Employment Outcomes? Part 2.

In my first post (August 3), I outlined the scope of the two major problems facing legal education today: too few law jobs for too many law school graduates; and the high cost of legal education and resulting severe debt burdens for graduates. In this post, I will focus on how law schools with persistently weak employment outcomes have responded to their numbers. In short, some of these schools have lowered admissions standards in order to minimize reduction in class sizes. In doing so, they almost inevitably exacerbate existing problems because their bar passage rates suffer and their graduates’ employment prospects are further diminished. In addition, many of the same schools with persistently weak employment outcomes and large declines in entering class credentials also report comparatively high average student debt amounts.

By “schools with persistently very weak employment outcomes,” I mean law schools that: (1) reported fewer than 40% of graduates in full-time (FT), long-term (LT) bar passage required (BPR) jobs at 9 months after graduation for the class of 2011, which was the low point for the percentage of law graduate employed in such jobs in the wake of the Great Recession; and (2) again reported fewer than 40% of graduates in FT, LT BPR jobs five years later for the class of 2016. There are 16 schools in this group, comprising about 8% of all ABA accredited schools. Four of these schools, 2% of all ABA schools, reported fewer than 30% of graduates in FT, LT BPR jobs at 9-10 months after graduation in 2011 and again in 2016.

How have these schools responded to their dismal graduate employment outcomes? The table below tells the story. In sum, most of the 16 law schools with persistently weak employment outcomes appear to have pursued admissions policies designed to minimize reductions in enrollment as law school applications have declined, rather than to improve graduate employment outcomes. Instead of increasing admissions requirements in order to boost bar passage and legal employment rates, most have increased acceptance rates and markedly reduced admissions criteria. The predictable result is that FT, LT BPR employment rates at many of the 16 schools have actually decreased, even as the LT, FT BPR employment rate across all law schools has increased by 6.9 percentage points between the classes of 2011 and 2016.

Here are the details. As reported in the table below, at all but one of the 16 schools, the 25^th percentile LSAT score has decreased, by between 1 and 7 points, with an average decrease of 3.9 points. (At one school, there was no change.) At all 16 schools, the 50^th percentile LSAT score has decreased from 2011 to 2016, by between 1 and 8 points, with an average reduction of 3.8 points. As a likely result, the FT, LT BPR employment rate decreased at 8 of the 16 schools, and the overall FT, LT BPR employment rate at the 16 schools increased by only 1.2 percentage points between 2011 and 2016. In the most extreme case, the school’s 25^th and 50^th percentile LSAT scores dropped by 7 points (from 148 to 141) and 8 points (from 151 to 143), respectively, while its FT, LT BPR employment rates for 2011 and 2016 were 26.7% and 21.9%, respectively.

Comparison of FT, LT BPR Employment Rates, Bar Passage Rates, 25^th Percentile LSAT Scores, and Average Debt at Schools with Persistently Weak Employment Outcomes, 2011 and 2015, 2016

School	2011 % FT, LT BPR	2016 %FT, LT BPR	2011 1st Time Bar Pass Rate	2015 1st Time Bar Pass Rate	Change in 1st Time Bar Pass	2011 25th % LSAT	2016 25th % LSAT	Change in 25th % LSAT	Avg. Debt 2015
1	15.5	13.7	55.05	53.66	-1.39	150	144	-6	N/A
2	17.1	29.7	56.54	38.07	-18.39	149	144	-5	$148K
3	20.5	34.0	64.29	47.35	-16.94	151	145	-6	$108K
4	22	26.8	62.09	38.89	-23.2	150	146	-4	$144K
5	26.7	21.9	45.85	48.23	+2.38	148	141	-7	$173K
6	30.8	35.7	67.19	58.14	-9.05	142	140	-2	N/A
7	32.2	31.9	78.88	52.25	-26.63	149	145	-4	$122K
8	34.2	37.5	63.19	66.39	+3.2	145	144	-1	N/A
9	34.2	32.9	72.06	48.11	-23.95	155	148	-7	$162K
10	34.6	38.9	60.69	50.64	-10.05	152	149	-3	N/A
11	36.5	36.4	87.77	67.95	-19.82	150	149	-1	$94K
12	36.6	36.1	76	61.56	-14.44	145	141	-4	$161K
13	36.8	33.6	67.13	64.29	-2.84	147	147	0	$137K
14	37.4	38.0	65.85	41.64	-24.21	146	140	-6	N/A
15	37.5	30.5	72.14	51.86	-20.28	143	138	-5	$138K
16	39.2	33.6	70.56	50.25	-20.31	147	146	-1	N/A
Avg.	30.74	31.95	66.58	52.46	-14.12	148.06	144.19	-3.87	$139K

[N/A in the Avg. Debt column means that the figure was not available because it was not reported by the school to US News.]

As also reported in the table, at 15 of the 16 schools, the first-time bar passage rate has fallen between 1.4 and 26.6 percentage points from 2011 to 2015 (the latest year for which bar passage data are now available). At the 1 school where the rate increased, it increased by 2.4 percentage points. The average decrease in first time bar passage rates across the 16 schools was about 14 percentage points, not quite twice the 8 percentage point decline nationally in bar passage rates since 2011. Moreover, further declines appear likely. The 2015 bar pass results capture mostly graduates who enrolled in 2012, and the entering class credentials at these schools have declined further since 2012.

Plainly, there is a gap in the ABA accreditation standards that permits schools with dismal employment outcomes to pursue policies that are directly at odds with improving those outcomes. In my next post, I will make the case for an ABA accreditation standard on employment outcomes based on the federal law and Department of Education regulations requiring accrediting agencies to measure program quality through one or more student outcomes standards.

An ABA Accreditation Standard on Employment Outcomes?

Thank you to Bernie for his introduction of my article, and for his comments and questions. Bernie’s reaction is similar to that of others who have read the manuscript: initial skepticism, followed by basic agreement with the argument, with some caveats and questions regarding important details. In this post, I will define the major problems facing legal education, and respond to one of Bernie’s comments in particular (and will respond to others as I lay out the rest of my argument in the next few posts).

In the article, I carefully describe the major problems facing legal education, and then make the case that an accreditation standard on employment outcomes is a viable response to those problems. It is abundantly clear that there are far more law school graduates than there are entry-level law jobs for those graduates, that entry-level salaries have been stagnant or declining for at least the past 16 years, and that the cost of a legal education and the resulting debt burdens are severe. (I would not describe the drop in applications and enrollments as a problem facing legal education; rather, they are a reflection of the job market and the high cost of a JD.) There has been a great deal of debate about how to address the crises, but to date, we have seen very little in the way of meaningful reform. The problems just continue to fester.

First, a bit of detail regarding the scope of the problems. The number of ABA-accredited law school graduates has exceeded the number of entry-level full-time (FT), long-term (LT) bar passage required (BPR) jobs by more than 30% in every year since 2001, ranging from a low of 30.7% (class of 2001) to a high of 45.1% (class of 2011). (2001 is when NALP began collecting and reporting law graduate employment outcomes in the current format.) The decline in FT, LT BPR employment has been substantially offset by an increase in the number and percentage of law school graduates employed in FT, LT J.D. Advantage (JDA) jobs – jobs for which the JD provides a significant advantage in either obtaining or performing the job. Counting JDA positions as law jobs somewhat reduces the oversupply of law graduates compared to law jobs, but the difference is still quite large. The number of graduates has exceeded the number of entry-level FT, LT BPR and JDA jobs combined by more than 25% for every class except one since 2001, ranging from a low of 23.7% (class of 2007) to a high of 37.0% (class of 2011).

Not surprisingly, the oversupply of law graduates has been accompanied by stagnation and deflation in entry-level salaries. Starting salaries declined in real terms between 2001 and 2015, and have been essentially flat since 2011, with a modest increase across the board for the class of 2015. The median salary has decreased by 12% between 2001 and 2015, and by 19% between 2009 and 2015, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The picture is similar for private practice and government salaries. The median private practice salary has decreased by 17% since 2001, and by 30% between 2009 and 2015. Government salaries appear to have fallen from their pre-recession high of just over $65,000 for the class of 2007 to less than $55,000 for the class of 2015.

The legal employment rate varies greatly across ABA schools. The following chart tells the story. At the 10^th percentile (21 schools) fewer than 40% of graduates in the class of 2016 were employed in LT, FT BPR jobs at 10 months after graduation; and just over 50% were employed in LT, FT BPR and JDA jobs combined.

 Range of Employment Rates Across Schools, Graduating Class of 2016

Percentiles	LT, FT BPR	LT, FT BPR+JDA
5th	32.9%	45.1%
10th	36.4%	52.0%
25th	50.0%	62.5%
50th	62.6%	74.3%
75th	71.0%	81.3%
90th	77.2%	86.7%
Range	0%-93.5%	0%-95.7%

At the same time, the cost of a legal education and the resulting debt burdens for graduates have continued to increase at a rate much higher than inflation. The following table summarizes the data on graduate debt for the class of 2015.

Average Amount Borrowed, Class of 2015 Graduates

Type of School	Schools Accounted For	Average Debt Per Student (% of all graduates borrowing)
Private (Non-Profit)	104/115 (90.4%)	$131,162 (77.6%)
Public	77/80 (96.3%)	$94,342 (76.6%)
Private (For Profit)	3/6 (50%)	$153,509 (82.8%)
All	184/201 (91.5%)	$118,230 (77.4%)

Of course, there is also considerable variation in the average amount of debt incurred by students at different law schools due to variations in tuition, cost of living, and perhaps other factors.

 Average Amount Borrowed Across Law Schools, Class of 2015

Percentile	Average Amount Borrowed
10th	$74,890
25th	$90,065
50th	$114,725
75th	$132,245
90th	$146,288

Having described these critical problems, my next post will take a close look at how schools with the very weakest employment outcomes appear to have responded to the problems – or not.

For now, I conclude by responding to one of Bernie’s comments in particular, that to address the critical problems in legal education with a minimum employment rate standard is to say that the legal academy should shrink even more than it already has. I believe that with an employment rate standard in place, most underperforming schools will make the adjustments necessary to comply with the standard. For some, that may very well mean reducing class sizes. For others, it may mean more expertly tailoring their academic programs to the employment market. Likely, schools will adapt in a variety of ways. Any new standard should have a phase-in period.

When I served as deputy managing director of the ABA Section of Legal Education from 2011 to 2014, which coincided with the precipitous drop in law school applications, which itself was likely a result of the sharp drop in law graduate employment outcomes in 2008-2011, I would often get this question from academics and practitioners alike: “What in the world is the ABA doing continuing to accredit new law schools?” Aside from the obvious answer that the anti-trust laws would not allow us to limit the number of school in order to limit competition, I would usually note that a 25% reduction in law school enrollments across schools was the equivalent of closing 50 law schools, although no individual school had closed at that point, but with the benefit to students of greater competition among the (now mostly smaller) schools to innovate, reduce costs, and improve outcomes, while complying with all accreditation requirements. The same is true with the introduction of an employment rate standard. Schools may focus their efforts on fewer students, among other changes or innovations, but an employment outcomes standard is not intended to eliminate schools nor does it necessarily lead to that end.