Con Law by Mark Gimenez Read Free Book Online Page A

Roscoe will finalize the deal before the semester is out.’
    ‘Then I propose a resolution that Roscoe be fired and replaced with a lesbian.’
    Roscoe Chambers was the law school dean. He was seventy-seven years old and a crusty old fart who ran the law school with an iron fist.
    ‘He’s untouchable, Sheila,’ Professor Goldman said.
    ‘He’s a Republican dinosaur. It’s embarrassing to go to law school conferences and have professors from other schools laugh at us because we have a Republican dean.’
    ‘He controls too much alumni money to be fired. He can pick up the phone and pull in five million today. He’ll hire whomever the alumni want for the next assistant dean.’
    ‘Well, he might control who runs this school, but we control who teaches here.’
    Professor Manfried sat, and the collective blood pressure of the faculty receded to normal levels. Which gave Professor Robert Stone (Chicago, 2006, Law and Economics) an opening. He stood to groans. He had a law degree and a Ph.D. in economics and looked like Book’s accountant. He was one of the new breed of law professors, a multi-disciplinarian who thought outside the box, normally not considered a positive character trait in a non-tenured professor. Book didn’t know him well, but he liked what he did know.
    ‘My fellow colleagues, in one month, accredited law schools across the country will graduate forty-eight thousand new lawyers, the most in history. But only twenty thousand legaljobs await them. The big corporate law firms are hiring fewer graduates, they’re firing attorneys, and they’re outsourcing their low-level legal work overseas to lawyers in India and the Philippines just like the tech companies do their call centers.’
    Professor Goldman: ‘Where’d you read that?’
    ‘The
Wall Street Journal
.’
    ‘You read the
Wall Street Journal
?’
    ‘Of course. Don’t you?’
    ‘No. I read the
New York Times
. If it’s not in the
Times
, I don’t need to know it.’
    ‘Jonah, you need to know that our graduates are facing the worst legal job market in two decades. We’re dramatically oversupplying the market. But we’re immune from market forces because the federal government is now the sole provider of student loans and lends the full sticker price for law school, including cost of living, whatever the cost. Last year’s graduating law class nationwide owed a collective three-point-six billion in student loans. The students don’t have a prayer of repaying that debt.’
    ‘What’s your point, Bob?’
    ‘My point is, Jonah, we can’t keep bringing four hundred new students into the law school each year, charge them thirty thousand dollars a year, and put them into a market where there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Nationally, one hundred fifty thousand students at two hundred law schools pay five billion a year in tuition. Law schools are cash cows on university campuses, Jonah, but in this job market, a law degree will be worthless for three-fourths of the students. Actually, less than worthless since they’ll owe a hundred thousand or more in debt.’
    ‘Why’s that our fault?’
    ‘Because we continue to raise the cost of a legal education. Over the last decade, we tripled tuition and doubled our salaries.’
    ‘Butthey keep paying it.’
    ‘With federal loans, debt that pays our salaries. We’re like peanut farmers, Jonah, subsidized by the federal government.’
    ‘How many peanut farmers have advanced degrees from Harvard?’
    Professor Goldman let out an exasperated sigh.
    ‘Okay, Bob, so what’s your brilliant proposal this time?’
    ‘We need to teach more and be paid less. We need to be honest with our students about their job prospects. We need to reduce the supply of lawyers to the demand for lawyers. I propose a faculty resolution that we reduce next year’s incoming class by twenty-five percent.’
    Professor Stone’s proposal evoked a collective gasp from the faculty. Professor Goldman stared