Riaz Tejani: Law Mart: Justice, Access and For‐Profit Law Schools
| Author | Anthony Bradney |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12124 |
LAW MART: JUSTICE, ACCESS AND FOR-PROFIT LAW SCHOOLS by
RIAZ TEJANI
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017, 288 pp., £18.99)
In 1978, following orders given by Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones,
over 900 cult members either committed suicide by drinking Kool Aid laced
with cyanide and various prescription drugs or were murdered using the same
concoction. In Tejani's account of the for-profit law school, New Delta, one
academic at New Delta describes the management style at New Delta as,
`drink the Kool Aid'. Tejani suggests that this phrase, which is commonly
used in the United States, refers to both `everyday social conformity' but also
to `a larger political oblivion' which `signifies the act of surrendering critical
thought in the name of Utopia and a willingness to step into the unknown
when a leader gives the order to.' Tejani's elegant ethnography explains how
some legal academics can come to drink the Kool Aid whilst others refuse it.
New Delta Law School is anonymized for the purposes of Tejani's study.
However, it, its owners, and some of the individuals discussed in the book are
readily identifiable using very simple web searches. Law Corp, New Delta
Law School's owners, said that it was established to be a `student-centred'
law school that would look to an `underserved' market of students who came
from non-traditional backgrounds in contradistinction to existing law schools
who served an elite market. Graduating students would not just be educated to
pass professional examinations, as is the case with other American law
schools, but would be `practice-ready'; they would be able to open their own
offices as sole practitioners as soon as they had passed the professional
examinations. Whatever other merits this policy might have, it would be of
particular advantage to New Delta's graduates whose social background and
frequently comparatively poor previous educational attainments would mean
that they were less likely to secure jobs in more standard areas of legal
practice than was the case with graduates from more traditional law schools.
The educational ethos of New Delta not only attracted students; it also
appealed to some legal academics who believed in working for communities
they thought had been ignored by existing law schools. The financial model
for New Delta was predicated on the idea that an increasing number of
students would want to come to it, enticed by the possibility of secure, high-
earning jobs on graduation whilst being able to pay for their studies using
readily available federal grants. An extra level of complexity in this financial
model lay in the fact that the private equity group that funded Law Corp
expected particular levels of financial return and were entitled to remove their
funding if that return were not forthcoming.
One of the great strengths of Tejani's book is that it is not a simplistic
account of the exploitation of students and academics by financiers seeking
egregious profits. Tejani explores how students who would not have quali-
fied for traditional law schools and who would not, on their own, have been
able to navigate admissions and financing routes, were helped into law
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ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2018 Cardiff University Law School
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