The truth sank in during 2012. Law schools continued to suffer lower enrollment ; graduates kept struggling to find jobs; and educators began to accept that these changes might be permanent that the old way of doing things had to change. If 2011 was the year the legal academy hit rock bottom, 2012 was the year it began to come to terms with its new reality.
“Absolutely, this year was a turning point,” said Washington University in St. Louis School of Law dean Kent Syverud, chair of the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. “A large faction of the legal education community is aware and accepting of the need for change.” Perhaps nothing demonstrates the shift as clearly as law professors’ reaction to bad press. In 2011, they circled the wagons and loudly defended legal education when The New York Times published a series of reports questioning the value of a law degree. In November 2012, when Case Western Reserve University School of Law dean Lawrence Mitchell took to the Times opinion pages to decry the “almost relentless attacks on law schools,” the reaction was much different. Law professors and pundits refuted Mitchell’s arguments in print and online, accusing him of looking through rose-colored glasses.
