ONE OF THE truly great and unique creations in higher education, the American law school, is in trouble. But before we get to that, let us acknowledge what makes the American law school so special. While in the rest of the world, law schools mostly house scholars focused either on theory or on practice, the American law school bristles with scholars focused on both. Law professors achieve professional success by publishing brilliant theories in scholarly journals, but also by translating their ideas into briefs, magazine articles, or laws. The American law school stands out not just for the professors but also for the students: for the past seventy-six years, every presidential election has featured either a presidential or a vice-presidential nominee who was at one point in time a law student. But after a century of mainly positive attention, law schools are now making news with something else: the existential crisis they face.

Brian Tamanaha’s book is the best analysis yet of this crisis. American law schools are, as the title of his book says, simply “failing.” They offer only a one-size-fits-all law school education that does not teach many law students what they should learn and is also incredibly expensive. If we are to save one of our cherished American institutions, we must take Tamanaha’s concerns to heart.

The problems affect almost all law schools because law schools are required to be more similar to one another than different. There are at least two major reasons for this. First, the American Bar Association (ABA) decides which law schools can be accredited, and it requires that law schools primarily employ tenured or tenure-track professors. Sixty-five percent of professors in American universities are employed in positions not eligible for tenure, but any law school that tried to match that proportion could lose its accreditation. As a result, law schools shoulder the cost of a permanent crop of highly compensated professors. Law schools also lose the flexibility to shuffle professors in and out as pedagogical and scholarly needs change.

Second, like the accreditation rules, the primary rankings system for law schools—U.S. News & World Report—uses the same criteria to evaluate all law schools. If a school’s ranking drops, faculty and alumni will be deeply unhappy, the school will attract worse students, and the students it does attract will have a harder time finding employment after graduation. Indeed, Tamanaha notes that “[m]ultiple deans have resigned after a drop in rank.” Fear of a ranking drop inhibits law schools from experimenting to serve their precise student population and instead forces law schools to direct resources to what the rankings value.

This would all be very disturbing to anyone who works in legal education, and just mildly distressing to any observer, were it not for the fact that the consequences go beyond the legal academy. Tamanaha argues that tuition and the federal government are paying the price. Tuition at public law schools increased 200 percent, and at private law schools by 179 percent, throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s, law student debt quadrupled. Meanwhile, the job market for lawyers has contracted dramatically, and without any immediate prospect for improvement. In this climate, lenders might be less inclined to lend—except that the federal government has emerged as a major enabler. If your income is meager enough to make it difficult for you to pay back your law school loans, your monthly payment will be lowered, and the federal government will help. After twenty-five years for most lawyers and ten years for those working in public-service jobs, any remaining law school loan balance will be forgiven—paid for by the federal government and the American taxpayer. (This applies to some other professionals, as well, like doctors, but lawyers, on the whole, are the professionals who face the hardest time paying back their rising debt.)