Myths of Sisyphus

Last spring I participated in a “debate” with Martin Katz, dean of the University of Denver’s law school, at a bar association event. It turned out not to be much of a debate: I presented the argument I published subsequently in my article The Crisis of the American School, and Katz, who had read a draft of the article, said he basically agreed with that argument.

I don’t actually know Katz, but from the few encounters I’ve had with him over the years, he seems like a very bright guy, as well as a pleasant, charming person. These qualities naturally made me want to think well of him. On the other hand, because I realize such qualities are useful if you’re a politician, or a university administrator, or an investment banker, or a serial killer, etc., I’m also aware that as a rational matter being smart and pleasant and charming has exactly nothing to do with one’s character, or lack thereof.

So reading this made me both sad and angry. It should make everyone who cares about reforming legal education both sad and angry, because it’s really bad stuff. (A distinguished colleague from a distinguished law school located outside the great state of Colorado reacted to it thus: “This is insane–so many misstatements and omissions . . . Their selective reporting violates any reasonable standard of professional ethics or academic integrity. Wow.”)

Reading it also made me realize that, for those of us in legal academia trying to do something about the mess we’ve collectively created, every morning our rock awaits us. I don’t have the patience to go through the whole thing line by line, although practically every sentence in Katz’s argument features some sort of statistical sleight of hand or methodological chicanery that does him no credit. To put it bluntly, becoming a law school dean has either destroyed Marty Katz’s reasoning skills, or his willingness to put intellectual integrity ahead of the felt necessities of the time.

Here I’ll focus on Katz’s treatment of DU’s employment and salary data for the class of 2011. Katz argues that legal employment opportunities for new law graduates are on average much better in Colorado than in the country as a whole:

The math in Denver and Colorado is very different. Here the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment projects that there will be roughly 550 lawyer job openings per year over the next few years.[13] This figure understates the job opportunities for JDs in the state, since it only counts jobs for which bar passage is required. (While some critics scoff at jobs that do not require bar passage, many law school graduates seek and enjoy such jobs. Even during the boom years, when law graduates had fewer constraints, roughly 16% selected jobs for which bar passage was not required.[14]) But even counting only the 550 bar-passage-required jobs projected each year in Colorado, the situation looks good. When you consider that our state’s two law schools, the primary suppliers for Colorado’s legal market, produce fewer than 450 new law graduates per year, the math here looks favorable – more than one lawyer job for every law graduate in Colorado. And most of those jobs are in Denver.

Of course lawyers move across state lines. So a comparison of in-state law job openings to in-state law graduates may not fully capture the available jobs situation. Because Denver is such a desirable place to live and practice law, graduates from out of state law schools come here for jobs as well. In 2012, roughly 1,000 people passed the Colorado bar exam. However, because of our strong networks in the Denver legal community (roughly half of the practicing lawyers are our graduates) and our strategic plan designed to produce practice-ready lawyers, our graduates have a strong advantage in competing for jobs in this market.

This argument is weak well past the point of disingenuousness. Presently about 1100 people pass the Colorado bar each year, so the ratio of available legal jobs to annual bar passers is two to one. That figure should daunt the most special of snowflakes, but the actual situation is far more problematic than that ratio suggests.

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