But she neglects the fact that the state has always been at the heart of the education market. For it was the state, through political mandarins, that introduced the uncapping of law places that has led to steep overproduction of law graduates.

This policy has led to a showering of public funds on the law schools. Law graduates are increasingly finding they are paying the piper for the largesse directed towards law schools.

The funding role of the state destroys any notion of pure free market principles guiding law school entry. Moreover, to be an apostle of the free market mantra apropos law student enrolments in the context of an oversupplied legal market can only result in exacerbating the overproduction crisis and setting mainly high-school leavers on the road to an expensive disillusionment.

For as graduates wear out shoe leather pursuing jobs in a tight legal market, they have to confront the spectre of eventually being forced to retrain, and then student debts from their law degree will come back to bite them.

Dubious statistics

Professor Evans uses Graduate Careers Australia figures that "74 per cent of those who graduated from law school four months earlier and were available for employment were in fact employed".

She notes that the average starting salary for law graduates is above that of other degree graduates.

But the data she utilises are far from robust. Graduate Careers Australia captures only part of the cohort tumbling out of law schools, and even then it only records whether individuals trained in law are working – but not what occupation they are in. It has nothing to say on those who failed to crack a law job.


The lack of longitudinal data is another glaring omission. Professor Evans also does not paint any picture of how not only the law graduates of her Melbourne Law School fared, but how their peers in redbrick universities, in metropolitan areas and the bush are tracking four months out from graduating.

In those less fashionable law schools there has been past evidence adduced by the Good Universities Guide pinpointing very high unemployment rates amongst their graduates four months out.

This should excite deep concern. Moreover, a sizeable slice of students from silvertail universities such as Adelaide Law School have on occasion not been immune from struggling to find work four months out from completing their degree.

Stonewalling

More particularly, the surveys are severely flawed by many university law departments seeking to hide from the public gaze by stonewalling on releasing their jobs outcome data.

On top of everything else, law graduates have to confront the legal market shrinking even more in the near future as law firms seek to relentlessly cut costs in a globalised world by potentially taking up the option to outsource work to countries like India that share many aspects of our legal culture.

Nor is outsourcing the only challenge to the future size of the Australian legal profession: the effects of the increasing tempo of the creative destruction unleashed by technological developments revolutionising the legal workplace haunt the profession.

Also, from Professor Evans we get no sense of the plight of those who experience the pain of rejection as their dream of a legal job fades. Rejection letters that bear testimony to students that their grip on their dreams daily frays and then breaks. It is not only the old, like Willy Loman, Arthur Miller's main character in Death of a Salesman, who wilt under the pressure of pining for a vocation they have dedicated their lifeblood to.

In a touch of delicious irony, Professor Evans' article came out on the very day the Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, spoke at an educational forum in Melbourne and flagged that universities needed to trim back their law enrolments, given employment prospects.

The state is mobilising, and the signs are the law deans are due for a reality check. As Bob Dylan sang, 'Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you,' Professor Evans?

Frank Carrigan is a Senior Lecturer, Law School, Macquarie University.