Riaz Tejani

Law Mart

Justice, Access, and For-Profit Law Schools

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Riaz Tejani is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at University of Illinois Springfield.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Juli 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 150mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 408g
• ISBN-13: 9781503603011
• ISBN-10: 1503603016
• Artikelnr.: 47283547

Autorenporträt

Riaz Tejani is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at University of Illinois Springfield.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Enrollment: Precarity, Casualization, and Alternative Admissions
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 presents the recruitment and training practices that fill the new
institution with flesh and blood people. This chapter discusses New Delta
School of Law's practices of recruitment of faculty and enrollment of
students-its techniques for finding the human resources making up its
organization. Through the use of various techniques, the school and its
parent company generated and maintained managed precarity-a condition
whereby teachers and students remain within its purview as employees and
clients out of felt necessity more than elective choice. Chapter 1 argues
that the operationalization of professional diversity through increased
"access" to legal education permitted NDSL to forestall market discipline
at a time when many expressed faith in the winnowing function of a legal
education free market.
2"Charter Review": Policy as Culture and Ideology
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 gives readers a window onto the corporate "culture" of the
proprietary law school. There, it argues that the unique law school culture
of NDSL served to hold back community reflection on the moral hazard of
for-profit legal education. Through structured repetition and reflection,
faculty and staff were taught to embrace the ideology of access rather than
dwell on their underlying business model-one that generated millions of
dollars annually in "subprime" student debt and transformed them into
off-site investor returns.
3The Legal Education Moral Economy Bubble
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 describes the feverish growth of the school in the years
following onset of the Great Recession. This sudden growth, leading to
logistical problems inadequately prepared for, had immediate effects on the
450 new students brought in as first years in 2011. Nevertheless, as this
chapter argues, difficulty meeting investor obligations-rather than any
great concern for logistical or pedagogical limitations-would quickly
impose a limit to this large burst of entrepreneurial expansion.
4Law School 2.0: Marketing Integration, Educating Investors
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 argues that Legal Education 2.0's emergence had less to do with
substantive improvements for law student learning than with pacifying
investor fears about the new "crisis" in legal education. Under new
professional realities, fourth-tier law schools had to reinvent themselves
or risk dissolution. Law Corp, fearful of the investor call on its capital,
ordered each of its three schools to develop a new curriculum. At New
Delta, the result was a campaign for integrating curriculum soon labeled
"Legal Education 2.0."
5Shared Governance in the Proprietary Legal Academy
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 moves from reinvention to survival. It describes in detail how
school administration conducted and mediated faculty deliberation and
democratic ratification of the revised curriculum proposal. This includes a
retelling of the unique manner in which the reforms were ultimately passed
and the direct impact this had on governance, academic freedom, and basic
feelings of respect and dignity among students and educators in this unique
environment. Above all, it suggests, Law Corp officers succeeded in
confirming a marketable reform agenda by framing the debate as one between
tradition and innovation.
6"They Want the Rebels Gone": Contract Relations in a Fiscal State of
Exception
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 describes how this fiscal "state of exception" changed the
structure of school governance by altering the terms by which employees
were retained. That shift, from customary to contractual security of
position, situates this story within the larger context of neoliberal
governance and legal culture. On one hand, academic employees were asked to
expand their duties into business development. In one notable episode, NDSL
sent several professors to Botswana to establish ties with the national
bar, train judges and attorneys in common law jurisprudence, and develop
this as a new income stream. On the other hand, with threats of a
"reduction in force" in the air, NDSL revised its faculty employment terms,
resulting in a conflict with and ultimate termination of tenured senior
professors. Amid this information's rapid spread on social media, students
flew into a panic and began requesting letters of recommendation to
transfer out in record numbers.
7The Policy Cascade: Deregulation and Moral Hazard
chapter abstract
Chapter 7 argues the regulatory frameworks governing schools like New Delta
have been greatly shaped by the rhetoric of student access. Accepting
school officials' narrative that the main hurdle to professional diversity
is becoming a lawyer, the scrutiny of key regulatory actors-here the
Department of Education and the American Bar Association-has been unable to
properly grasp the potential harm for-profit law schools are liable to
generate. In other words, these schools may not only produce substantial
moral hazard, they may also promote the transmission of moral hazard to a
new generation of would-be lawyers often rendered as "officers of the
court."
Conclusion: The Trouble with Differentiation
chapter abstract
The conclusion recaps the book's main themes to reassert its two core
claims. The first, directed at legal audiences, says that differentiation
by marketization-by exposure to the disciplinary power of free markets-is
likely to exacerbate professional inequalities. No longer just a theory,
this form of differentiation is indeed already on display at New Delta and
its sister schools. Thanks to rollbacks in oversight prompted by both
antitrust litigation in the 1990s and regulatory capture in the 2000s, the
ABA's relatively hands-off approach to for-profit law programs has allowed
them to recruit a diversity of students more freely while offering them a
different educational program. As my informants describe, these students
enter a local profession that already stigmatizes them for this pedigree.
Introduction: Marketing Justice
chapter abstract
This chapter introduces Law Mart, an ethnography of for-profit law schools,
as a contribution to the anthropology of policy and contemporary legal
education crisis and reform debates. It explains the recent historical
background to the study in a period of significant "boom and bust" in the
law school and legal services sector. The chapter situates this
intervention among social studies of legal culture, profession, and
education. The introduction then offers the book's two core claims. One,
directed at legal audiences, says that differentiation by marketization-by
exposure to the disciplinary power of free markets-is likely to exacerbate
professional inequalities. The second, directed at anthropologists,
underscores how the metaphor of the "market" has come to occupy the
imagination of so many, reformers included, in American academic law.