Part of the problem is that tuition and fees (which topped $40,000 a year, on average, at private schools in 2012) have been soaring, and law schools must do a better job of containing these costs. We also need more financial aid for students. But a straightforward solution — one that would shave the current law school bill by a third for those who take this option — is simply to permit law students to sit for the bar exam and begin practicing even if they have not received a law school degree.

While this wouldn’t increase the number of available jobs, a two-year option would allow many newly minted lawyers to pursue careers in the public interest or to work at smaller firms that serve lower- or average-income Americans, thereby fulfilling a largely unmet need. As it is now, many young lawyers say they would love to follow this path but cannot afford to because of their onerous debts.

The rationale for reforming the three-year rule, however, is not merely financial. As legal scholars, jurists and experienced attorneys have attested for decades, many law students can, with the appropriate course work, learn in the first two years of law school what they need to get started in their legal careers.

In the 1970s, when similar proposals were discussed, two distinguished panels of experts — one led by Paul D. Carrington, then a University of Michigan law professor, and the other, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, overseen by a Stanford law professor and a dean — issued reports supporting a two-year curriculum, as long as certain essential courses were included.

What, then, of the third year, those famous semesters in which, as the saying goes, law schools “bore you to death” and student attendance drops like a stone? With this reform, law schools would have an obvious financial incentive to design creative curriculums that law students would want to pursue — a third-year program of advanced training that would allow those who wished it to become more effective litigators, specialize or better prepare for the real-world legal challenges that lie ahead.