Why Subsidize a Surplus?
As a future law-school student, scholarships like this should make me swoon:
Costs are rising rapidly throughout the University of California system, but its newest law school, at Irvine, announced this week that the 80 students chosen for the second entering class will get privately financed scholarships covering at least half their tuition for all three years…
Most of the scholarship money, Mr. Chemerinsky said, comes from Southern California lawyers. Just last week, Mark Robinson, an Orange County trial lawyer who had donated $1 million for the inaugural class, made an additional $400,000 contribution.
However, I can’t help wondering if it’s a good idea to so aggressively subsidize legal education. By all indications, there’s currently a glut of lawyers in the United States, a surplus that’s only expected to swell as more and more people enter law school to escape the economic downturn. Further, it’s not entirely clear to me what the marginal benefit of adding another lawyer to our society is. Do we really need more litigation in our society, our worthy cases being missed because of a dearth of lawyers? If the marginal benefit is low and if there are few jobs for newly minted lawyers to take, then it seems as if we’d want to encourage fewer people to attend law school rather than providing a huge incentive to pursue a legal education.
After all, if the status-quo holds, most of these new lawyers are going to have wasted three years of their lives and thousands of dollars on tuition (if they go to a conventional law school, unlike UC: Irvine) by the time they discover that they can’t find a job. Even worse, a surplus of lawyers means that the cost of litigation will fall and a whole host of marginal lawsuits that would otherwise be unprofitable to launch will enter the legal system, further gumming up our legal system. I think SoCo lawyers could find a better cause with which to commit their dollars.