Death, Taxes, and Law School TuitionMaimon Schwarzschild

I will be chairing a symposium here in San Diego next weekend, with a group of about a dozen law school deans and law professors from around the country, to discuss the “ethics and economics of legal education”.  Tuition costs for law school have risen far ahead of the general rate of inflation over the past few decades: many law students now graduate with tuition debt in excess of $100,000.  Senior faculty salaries have also risen well ahead of the inflation rates, and teaching loads have fallen.  (A generation ago it was common for law professors to teach 3 or more courses every semester.  Now the norm at many law schools is 3 courses a year: 2 courses one semester, only 1 the other semester: half or less what the teaching load used to be.)  And the money put into “administration” has risen sharply too: far more administrative employees than there used to be, more lavish buildings and facilities, and so on.

To some extent, high tuition and low faculty teaching loads are a subsidy for faculty scholarship: publication of academic books and law review articles.  (Law professors judge each other on their writing much more than on their teaching.)  If students and their families – and taxpayers, through government guaranteed loans for example – are subsidising scholarship, should it matter if academic legal scholarship is overwhelmingly tilted to the political left, so that the public are getting only one side of the story for their money?

Not all – or even most – of my conference participants will necessarily agree with me about the unbalanced political partisanship of academic legal writing.  Or that students, their families, and the taxpayers, may sooner or later object to subsidising it.

So it should be an interesting conference.  The participants will be presenting papers, and the Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues – our symposium journal at the University of San Diego Law School – will publish them later this year.  I also plan to post and link to at least some of the papers here at the RightCoast.  So stay tuned.