Failing Law Schools
By Brian Z. Tamanaha
The University of Chicago Press, 235 pages, $25, hardcover

The book "Failing Law Schools" is a very depressing book for someone like myself who has spent his entire career in legal education. In Failing Law Schools, Brian Z. Tamanaha asserts that law professors are overpaid and under worked, and that the legal scholarship they produce is of little practical use to judges and practitioners. He accuses law schools of overstating the employment prospects for their graduates and fudging the data U.S. News and World Report uses to rank them. He describes the cut-throat competition among law schools in the scramble to attract students who use those U.S. News rankings to choose where they will enroll. And he concludes that more than half of the students currently enrolled in law schools will never earn enough to pay off the debt they are incurring.

What's so depressing about all this is that it's true.

Reviewed for California Lawyer magazine by:

Gerald F. Uelmen 

A professor at Santa Clara University School of Law