Jamal Greene: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the best way to improve America’s legal education system? We put you in charge. What do you change? I think there’s a small thing I would change — and this sounds really small, but it seems so straightforward to me. Law students shouldn’t be buying their own textbooks separate from the ordinary expenses. You pay a tuition fee, and the price of textbooks should just be diffused through tuition costs, and the ways in which people pay for those should also pay for their textbooks, but that’s a small thing. The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative. I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks. At least in my world, which is the world of a certain kind of law school, that’s a major problem. If we made textbooks free, wouldn’t either tuition go up or the quality go down in some other way? At least with textbooks, there is a built-in price discrimination, so poorer students can buy used copies or older editions. But if the quality of food in the cafeteria declines or tuition goes up, everyone bears that, and in that sense, the change would be regressive.…

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