This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 18th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Law schools give students a false impression of the jobs that await them and the cost of a legal

education has left so many law students in six-figure debt that according to

Brian Tamannaha in his new book failing law schools we spoke following a forum for the book this week.

You say that the third year of law school is unnecessary and that

the law schools and lawyers in general have an interest in keeping the system the way it is.

How did that develop?

In the beginning of the 20th century, or late 19th century, there was a concerted effort on the part of elite law schools to impose a three-year law school requirement.

At the time, most law schools were two years and they impose this requirement

through two different agencies. One is the Association of American Law Schools and the

other is the ABA section on legal education.

And both organizations had a confluence of interest that supported this.

The law schools wanted the third year because it would provide more revenue to them.

And the bar wanted the third year because at the time there were a significant number of urban schools

that trained, were training immigrants or recent people from immigrant families and the bar was opposed

to what they call the flood of people without proper ethics coming into becoming shisters and so forth and they were concerned

about the image of lawyers.

So because law schools had this interest and the bar had this interest, the additional, the

third year served as a barrier to access to the legal profession.

And let me just add that at the time there were critics on the floor who opposed

the third year requirement precisely on the grounds that it would close down an avenue of

upward mobility in society for working people and middle class people, but these objections lost out.

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