A story in today's Boston Globe reports on the decline in law school enrollment attributable to continued weakening in the employment market for new lawyers. The precipitating event was the financial crisis of 2008, which soon thereafter led to a massive tightening of corporate legal budgets and an increasing intolerance by corporate counsel for the practice of staffing their matters with inexperienced law firm associates. Law firms reacted in various ways, with some rescinding offers of employment they had extended to soon-to-be law school graduates, others finding (and funding) temporary public sector placements for their incoming classes of new lawyers, and virtually all either eliminating or drastically reducing their summer associate programs from which new lawyers were typically recruited. Public interest law firms and other publicly funded legal employers were not immune from this sea change. The financial crisis also took a serious toll on their budgets, resulting in l
Meditations on Law and Life