The headline on John Polivka’s Feb. 21 column, “LSU Law School crumbling from pedestal,” was neither supported by the text of the column nor otherwise fair or accurate. Although it is true that applications for admission to LSU Law are down substantially this year, this decline reflects a well-documented national trend that most attribute to nearly five years of weakness in the national marketplace for legal jobs. The decline in applications here at LSU Law is more or less in line with a similar trend at other law schools. For example, as of Feb. 15, 143 law schools out of approximately 200 in the United States reported an application decline of 20 percent or greater; 73 schools reported a decline of 30 percent or greater. It is hardly the case that this broad adjustment in the legal education marketplace reflects any intrinsic weakness or “crumbling” of our program of legal education, as the headline on Mr. Polivka’s column so unfortunately suggested.
In fact, by every objective measure, LSU Law’s star continues to rise. We have been ranked the No. 3 Best Value Law School in the nation by the National Jurist/Pre-Law Magazine in 2012; we remain solidly positioned among the Top 100 American law schools (currently at No. 79) in the 2013 U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Schools; and we have been named the No. 1 school in the nation in terms of first-time bar passage ratios in a predictive statistical model based on LSAT scores (Feb. 2012). Perhaps most significantly, some 93 percent of the graduates of the LSU Law Class of 2011 — the most recent class for which we have complete data — were employed as of nine months after graduation (95 percent reporting). When that data is broken down in greater detail, LSU Law actually ranked 11th in the nation in the percentage of 2011 graduates employed in full-time, long-term legal jobs within 9 months of graduation, according to an analysis published in June 2012 by The Wall Street Journal. No other Louisiana law school came close to that mark in the Journal’s analysis.
In recent years, we have enhanced our program on many fronts. We have created a vibrant live client law clinic and externship program that provides dozens of our students each year with real-world experience. We have created a new Energy Law Center to provide our students with broad training (and to prepare them for good jobs) in the critical energy sector. We have dramatically increased the diversity of our student body. We have changed outdated student educational policies and brought our grading system in line with other law schools. We have revitalized our faculty with highly promising law teachers and scholars — as we like to say, we have created the LSU Law “faculty of the future.”
We are disappointed, of course, that we are not among the five (yes, only five) law schools in the nation enjoying an application increase this year. We think we should be. We wonder whether we are being lumped together with the many law schools dependent upon national law firms that have drastically curtailed hiring since 2008 while Louisiana firms, the core employers of our students, have not. In any event, though, we are hardly a “crumbling pedestal.” We expect to attract another outstanding entering class in fall 2013 and to continue without a hitch on our upward trajectory of recent years.
I’m not sure if Mr. Polivka selected the headline or if someone else bears the responsibility, but all of us at LSU Law would appreciate your exercising greater care and sensitivity to the facts in the future.
