Other than both employment and financial data not backing the idea, putting a state-supported law school in small-town northwest Louisiana might work.
Last week, Northwestern State University in Natchitoches announced it would seek establishment of a law school on its campus stating in fewer than 18 months. That would constitute a Herculean effort to have the necessary resources obtained, several faculty members hired, and accreditation secured. It would be the first located not in New Orleans, where there are private Tulane and Loyola, or Baton Rouge, where there are public Louisiana State University and Southern University.
For decades, complaints have circulated in the northern part of the state that not being near a state law school hampered provision of legal services. The Metroplex and Little Rock were the next closest locations for much of the area, and these out-of-state locations weren’t much closer than the state’s two largest cities for most living in the area. NSU alleges it has letters of support from lawyers in the area.
But this not an untested idea. About 15 years ago, now Louisiana Christian University tried to start up a school in Shreveport, hired a dean (now Speaker of the U.S. House), and bought a building, only to have the effort collapse. This would have been supported with private dollars.
More recently, Southern attempted to stand up a branch of its law school in Shreveport. It even for a few years ran a “Semester in Shreveport” program that allowed students to take their final courses at a temporary location in the city as it was thought this would give them a leg up for employment in the area.
The impetus behind the idea of a law school north of East Baton Rouge Parish comes from the perception that all that area northward was underserved. When SU broached the idea, the Board of Regents, prodded by the Legislature, commissioned a study to determine “how the state can best meet the legal education needs of students and the economic and workforce development needs” in the northwestern part of the state. And, in fact, the report found that, when compared to the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas, metropolitan areas did have fewer working lawyers per capita while the state’s was about average among its brethren. Shreveport/Bossier was comparable to Lafayette and Lake Charles, and higher than others outside of south Louisiana. Further, the metropolitan area was expected to have legal higher demand than other areas.
But it also revealed that community colleges were pumping out adequate numbers of legal paraprofessionals, the lawyer population was not shrinking due to aging out, and different kinds of graduate education were more in demand. As well, there was not expected nationally a surge for demand in lawyers, which subsequent history (since 2019) bore out. Total employment has remained flat while the number of jobs per graduate have increased slightly.
If anything, the report too optimistically gauged future demand. The northern part of the state’s population appears to have declined since its 2020 authoring, which would suggest reduced demand for legal services. It also noted that to establish a branch campus would cost at least $5 million, a cost which surely has risen since and probably it would be more expensive to start one from scratch. Finally, the most underserved segment it determined was racial minorities, which a historically black university such as SU would be best equipped on paper to address.
As for SU’s tentative branching out after the report’s delivery, the program seems to have been abandoned, presumably for lack of interest. Its website list nothing past 2023, the faculty member assigned to oversee the program doesn’t have that oversight listed at present in her biography, and the course schedule indicates all classes are taught at the Baton Rouge campus.
In conclusion, the report argued the apparent under-capacity of lawyers in northwest Louisiana (assuming that having more lawyers proportionally is a good thing; some researchers conclude there are too many for existing demand) is a problem of distribution of legal talent, not of provision. Hence, there would be no cost-effective reason why the state should fund another law school in that area.
There seems little reason to believe that this has changed in any way five years later. Legislators and the Regents need to understand that and forgo wasting taxpayer dollars involved in establishing and running a law school at NSU.
No comments:
Post a Comment