It’s fashionable to say that America needs a new law school like a hole in the head, but that’s not really fair because occasionally holes in the head serve important medical purposes. Probably more a fair folksy saying to adopt is that another American law school would be about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. As a phrase, it captures both the futility of opening another school in an environment where thousands of students every year can’t find full-time, long-term employment in legal work and the imagery of drowning, which is the aptest description of walking out of a law school with a pile of debt and no prospects.

So we’re obviously considering building a new law school.

This idea hasn’t gotten past the early germination stage yet, but it’s made it far enough that the president of the Jacksonville Jaguars casually let it slip during a meeting of real estate developers.

And if you think the combination of “mentioned by the Jaguars — of all entities — as part of an investment opportunity” sounds like an inauspicious beginning for a law school, you’re overthinking it. It was inauspicious the moment we said “Jacksonville.”

Earlier today, the Jacksonville Daily-Record posted an article titled “Lamping drops hint: ‘JU’ and ‘law school’” which I’ll admit I thought was going to be a story about anti-Semitic dog-whistling, but it turns out it’s really about Jacksonville University. The Jags’ Mark Lamping spoke at an event discussing steps he considered key to pursuing Amazon’s second headquarters.

“Where do you put a major health care, wellness center? Where do you put those things that the workforce that they’re bringing in are going to want to do as it relates to continued personal development?” he asked. “So things like moving the engineering school of the University of North Florida from its current campus (to) Downtown. Working with JU if they have a law school, moving that Downtown,” he said.

Does Lamping just not know if Jacksonville has a law school, or is there something in the works that we aren’t supposed to know yet?

Jacksonville University, a small regional private school in suburban Jacksonville, has no law school right now. But are they looking to go down that road? Maybe cash in on that surge in law school applications that all them media types are talkin’ about?

“It’s a natural conversation,” JU President Tim Cost said during an interview Feb. 7, but it’s not one that has risen to the level of action. He considers it a natural conversation because JU, a private liberal arts and science university, has been asked by community and industry leaders whether it would consider a medical or dental or veterinary school, considering its concentration in health sciences. A law school is part of that line of thinking.

While I don’t work in academia, I’m inclined to think — nay, hope — that building a professional school from scratch isn’t just “natural conversation.” Not only do I not think a school president’s office is just tossing around building a hospital over the water cooler, but I’m pretty confident that if a reporter asked about a drastic educational move that hadn’t received considerable discussion, the answer wouldn’t be “it’s a natural conversation,” it would be, “no, are you high?”

So just how likely is this new law school? It turns out that, for a guy who says they haven’t had serious talks about this, Cost has a pretty good handle on the exact business strategy for this hypothetical law school:

One, the private, for-profit, 22-year-old Florida Coastal School of Law is facing pressures because of its students’ Bar exam passage rate compared with other law schools.

Ah yes, that elephant in the area. While Florida Coastal is, by most accounts, the most successful of the Infilaw schools, that’s not saying a lot from the ABA’s perspective. The school faces an uphill battle in keeping its accreditation and if it were to disappear, there would be an opening for another Jacksonville law school.

Except… was there even a need for a Jacksonville-area law school in the first place? Florida Coastal runs a dismal full-time, long-term employment score, making one wonder if there’s enough demand here. In Jacksonville University’s defense, Cost says of any new law school that “[w]e would be smaller. We would be premier.” Except Florida Coastal is turning out under 300 graduates. It’s hard to get much smaller and make the economics work out.

We’ll set aside the “premier” claim for now.

Second, JU infuses law into its courses, including at its Public Policy Institute, which is led by former city General Counsel and Assistant State Attorney Rick Mullaney. “For a school like ours to consider this seriously, we need to consider our role,” Cost said. “JU has dozens of graduates over the years who have gone on to law school successfully, including many who are now judges.”

Comedian Larry Miller has a routine where he says the difference between men and women when it comes to thinking about sex is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. That basically sums up my feeling when I hear an undergraduate institution say they can open a law school because they have undergrad law classes.

But maybe this is going to be a thing? We’ll keep our eye on Blake Bortles’s social media for any updates.

Lamping drops hint: ‘JU’ and ‘law school’ [Jacksonville Daily-Record]

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.