When Indiana Tech announced it would open Indiana's fifth law school last year, my reaction was, "Oh, goody, more lawyers." Now that the school is closer to opening, it's reaping scorn:
A new law school is opening its doors in Indiana in 2013, and it wants you to enroll even though it isn't accredited yet and the tuition is nearly $30,000 per year.
Prospective students are already up in arms on the Top Law Schools blog, ridiculing Indiana Tech Law School for looking like more of a diploma mill than a law school, Inside The Law School Scam blog pointed out.
Indiana Tech's mission is to open in third place among Indiana law schools, and "one that focuses on ethics from the very start of school," the founding dean of the school, Peter Alexander, wrote on Top Law Schools blog.
Law professor Paul Campos, who runs the Inside the Law School Scam, scoffed at the school's mission on his blog.
"Chutzpah has been defined as murdering your parents and then pleading for mercy because you're an orphan," Campos wrote. "How about setting up another legal diploma mill in a hyper-saturated market, while claiming that what will set your school apart is its emphasis on 'ethics' and 'professionalism'?"
Indiana Tech officials justified the new school because poor, underserved Hoosiers have only one lawyer for every 447 people, compared with the national average of one for every 267 people. But the unemployment rate for 2011 is around 40 percent, according to Campos. So what are all those new graduates going to do?
Find more "flaws" in the system that need to be fixed, probably, and slighlty more efficient ways for their clients to get through the legal maze they've created . As I said last year, the more lawyers we have, the more we need. Enough already!
