American law schools are in deep crisis. Enrollment is down, student
loan debt is up, and the profession's supply of high-paying jobs is
shrinking. Meanwhile, thousands of graduates remain underemployed while
the legal needs of low-income communities go substantially unmet. Many
blame overregulation and seek a "free" market to solve the problem, but
this has already been tested. Seizing on a deregulatory policy shift at
the American Bar Association, private equity financiers established the
first for-profit law schools in the early 2000s with the stated mission
to increase access to justice by "serving the underserved". Pursuing
this mission at a feverish rate of growth, they offered the promise of
professional upward mobility through high-tech, simplified teaching and
learning.
In Law Mart, a vivid ethnography of one such environment, Riaz Tejani
argues that the rise of for-profit law schools shows the limits of a
market-based solution to American access to justice. Building on
theories in law, political economy, and moral anthropology, Tejani
reveals how for-profit law schools marketed themselves directly to
ethnoracial and socioeconomic "minority" communities, relaxed admission
standards, increased diversity, shook up established curricula, and saw
student success rates plummet. They contributed to a dramatic rise in
U.S. law student debt burdens while charging premium tuition financed
up-front through federal loans over time. If economic theories have so
influenced legal scholarship, what happens when they come to shape law
school transactions, governance, and oversight? For students promised
professional citizenship by these institutions, is there a need for
protections that better uphold institutional quality and sustainability?
Offering an unprecedented glimpse of this landscape, Law Mart is a
colorful foray into these essential questions.
