Michele R. Pistone and Michael B. Horn

Facing dramatic declines in enrollment, revenue, and student quality at the same time that their cost structure continues to rise and public support has waned, law schools are in crisis. A key driver of the crisis is shrinking employment opportunities for recent graduates, which stem in part from the disruption of the traditional business model for the provision of legal services.

Although this root problem will soon choke off the financial viability of many schools, most law schools remain unable or unwilling to address this existential problem in more than a marginal way, as they instead prefer to maintain the status quo and hope that the job market soon improves. In reaction to the growing crisis, most law schools have accordingly continued to focus their attention and energies on maintaining their existing status within the legacy model used to rank and compare law schools: the U.S. News & World Report’s annual law school rankings. In the face of the crisis, the dominant focus of law schools and their administrators has been to retain their school’s ranking so that their school can outlast competitor law schools—some of which, the argument goes, may have to shut their doors—until, in the long run they hope, the market evens out and everything returns to the pre-crisis status quo.