Law Alumni Weekend, Saturday, October 15, 2011
At the outset of what I hope will be an upbeat report on the state of UNC School of Law, I must take note of a necessarily grim picture. All over the United States, scores of private law firms, many government and nonprofit lawyers, most law schools and hundreds of thousands of law students find themselves caught up in a challenging economic and social storm. Private firms acknowledge declines in billings; clients are in financial distress, demanding that firms keep newer, unseasoned associates away from their cases and off their billing statements. Government and nonprofit lawyers face sharp cutbacks in state budgets or foundation support, shouldering the necessity to complete more work with fewer legal staffers.
Law school deans and administrators, in turn, talk daily with seasoned attorneys, under intense real-world pressures, pleading for graduates who are more practice-ready, better prepared for the fast-paced, harsh realities of 21st century legal practice. From another direction, law schools face questions from skeptical prospective students who've read headlines about law schools that have overstated the admissions credentials of their entering classes or hedged about the terms of student scholarships or misrepresented their graduates' employment success. Public law schools cope with these understandable student concerns while juggling state budget cutbacks, erratic endowment income and other fiscal challenges.
Law students especially feel the pinch of sharp increases in public and private tuitions and consequent increases in the average debt loads among law graduates. They wonder about the commitment of senior law faculty members to teaching and preparing students for real-world practice, and they worry about widely-circulated stories of declines in legal jobs and the viability of the law practice of the future.
UNC Chapel Hill is not immune from these interrelated concerns. We hear about them weekly. We and our students are experiencing them. Yet I am pleased to report that we have not stood idly by, resting on our national reputation -- as America's 17th finest law school, according to lawyers and judges nationwide, and 20th finest according to national faculty peers -- waiting simply to see what might come next. Instead, we have carefully deliberated among ourselves as administrators and faculty about appropriate responses to the present crisis, have closely consulted with many of you, our most faithful alumni and friends, and have devised a roster of strategies to move us forward through these rough seas. I want to report on how we have set our sails and what tack we're now taking. We're still determined to become the finest truly public law school in the United States. Let me share how, in this present unsettled time, we're proposing to do so.
Next: Carolina Law Students