Dean, Unemployed Young Lawyer Living With Parents Differ on Value of Law School

Vegas Seven, Now’s the Time to Break into Law:

Daniel Hamilton, the dean of UNLV’s Boyd School of Law:  ... “This is the best time to apply and go to law school in a generation,” he says. “The competition is fierce, and the ability to negotiate tuition is widespread.” Negotiate tuition? Yep. Nowadays, applicants can—and should—leverage multiple offers to get the best deal, Hamilton says. “A student applies to law school at UNLV or anywhere else, and calls you up and says, ‘I’ve got this offer at school A and this offer at school B. Let’s talk.’” ...

Anyone pursuing a law degree today is likely in it for the right reasons, which is to say they’re wholeheartedly devoted to pursuing a legal career. “I think it’s fair to say that in decades prior you could apply to law school as a kind of holding pattern,” Hamilton says. “[These changes] in legal education have done away with law school as a default option.”

Cedar Rapids Gazette op-ed:  Law School Is Broken, by Steve Waechter ("a 2009 [Drake] law graduate who lives at home and works in a factory to pay down student loans"):

American law schools take bright, ambitious young people and leave them broke, humiliated, deeply indebted and disaffected. They do this by squeezing them for student loan money for three years and then hurling them into an economy that can barely employ half of them. ...

Law schools have graduated more than 250,000 students since 2009, and very few of them found work that paid enough to cover student loans and the cost of living.

We don’t need any more broke, humiliated, disaffected law school graduates.