‘Dangerously, Outrageously, Elitist’ – A Solution to Law Graduate Unemployment?
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2013.00645.x |
| Author | Sally Wheeler |
| Published date | 01 November 2013 |
Review Article
`Dangerously, Outrageously, Elitist' ± A Solution to Law
Graduate Unemployment?
Sally Wheeler*
FAILING LAW SCHOOLS by BRIAN Z. TAMANAHA
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 216 pp., $25.00)
There is a sense in which the basic message of Tamanaha's book does not
tell us anything we did not know already; law school graduates in the United
States, like the United Kingdom, are struggling to find employment in
traditional professional roles as lawyers in private practice. Students from
what might be considered elite law schools on both sides of the Atlantic no
longer have an almost automatic entry to employment in a large corporate
law firm. As students in the United States, these individuals take on large
amounts of debt to fund their law school education and repayment is
premised on a high starting salary in a law firm after law school. They are
then left trying to service these debts when, on graduation from law school,
they are unable to secure the `big law' job.
1
Similar sentiments have been
670
* School of Law, Queen's University Belfast, 27±30 University Square,
Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland
s.wheeler@qub.ac.uk
1 M. Galanter and T. Paley, Tournament of Lawyers: the Transformation of the Big Law
Firm (1991), coined the term `big law' to describe the evolution of large firms in the
United States that provide comprehensive and continuous legal services, in the
broadest sense of the word `legal', to corporate clients. What Galanter and Paley were
setting out in their seminal work was a theory of hierarchy and reputation
management in the context of the law firm which has evolved into a literature of its
own. Much of this literature is reviewed in a reworked statement of the theory, see M.
Galanter and W. Henderson, `The Elastic Tournament: A Second Transformation of
the Big Law Firm' (2008) 60 Stanford Law Rev. 102. `Big law' is being used here to
indicate the scale of practice and the level of compensation that students aspire to
rather than as a comment on the theory itself. For a discussion of alternative
explanations, see E. Wald, `Smart Growth: The Large Law Firm in the Twenty-First
Century' (2012) 80 Fordham Law Rev. 2867.
ß2013 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2013 Cardiff University Law School
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