Mass. Gets Its Crappy Law School

Despite a full-court press by three of Massachusetts's crappy private law schools and other groups worried about a surfeit of lawyers in the state, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education approved UMass's plans to acquire the Southern New England School of Law. The school, which will now be run out of UMass Dartmouth, will be the state's first public law school, making Massachusetts the 45th state to offer one.

The UMass Dartmouth School of Law has already gone online and is accepting applications for the 2010-2011 school year. Tuition will be $23,500 for in-state students, a price that advocates say will allow more Massachusetts law students to enter low-paying public interest work with a lower debt burden. Tuition at private Suffolk University, by contrast, costs nearly $39,000. UMass Dartmouth will also offer fellowships to students interested in public interest law.

The drawbacks? It's hard out there for lawyers. The legal market has contracted substantially since the recession began, and graduating law students are finding few job opportunities available in both the public and the private sector. No reliable estimates of postgraduate employment for the class of 2009 are available yet—most schools report on the employment of their students 9 months after graduation—but if you believe blogs like The Jobless Juris Doctor (URL: "NoToLawSchool"), graduates of lower tier schools are basically out of luck. The Jobless Juris Doctor, for one, deplores the "toilet war" over UMass Dartmouth's new law school—"toilet" is a euphemism used by unemployed law graduates for lower tier law schools.

Elsewhere, Harvard Law grad Elie Mystal wonders whether there aren't enough public interest lawyers simply because public interest law cannot compensate for the massive loans—$23,500 times 3 years isn't chump change, not to mention the cost of living—and lost opportunity that law school requires.

And us? As we suggested before, we welcome any downward pressure on tuition to law schools in Massachusetts. If Bay State students aren't going to a top tier school, there is no reason that they should have to pay top-tier prices. It's basic economics. Their degree will simply not be worth as much as that of their peer who graduates from Harvard, BU, or even lower ranked Northeastern, which is already a bulwark for public interest in the state.

However, if the school is going to be anything more than a profit center for UMass, students who enroll will have to be made aware of the circumstances on the ground. Getting a job at a big firm will be highly unlikely, especially while the school still lacks American Bar Association accreditation. There are still plenty of things you can do with a law degree and a good work ethic, but they are not as financially remunerative. And students need to know that. They also need to know that Massachusetts already has a lot of lawyers, not enough jobs to go around, and that those numbers aren't going to start converging any time soon.

So, in a phrase that students will learn in their property law classes, caveat emptor.