Home > Journals > St. John's Law Review > Vol. 94 > No. 2
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Article
Abstract
(Excerpt)
Rarely a day goes by without headlines hailing new approaches to legal education, from mild changes to major modifications to the existing order. These new approaches range from minor tweaks to major overhauls and, in recent years, have included innovations such as formative assessment, flipped classrooms, two-year JD programs, tiered licensing, GRE admissions, online education, and refocusing on practice skills or professionalism—to name a few. Our era of disruption is a time to stop and reflect upon an earlier story of legal education experimentation, namely the rise and eventual collapse of for-profit legal education. It is a story outlined in compelling detail in Riaz Tejani’s Law Mart, and one which can be consolidated into a single question with many ramifications: how does the for-profit model affect the management and outcomes in postgraduate legal education? It is a perfectly reasonable question, and one I myself asked many years ago while interviewing for a position at a school managed by the InfiLaw System. As I slowly came to learn, and as Tejani makes clear in his work, the answer to the question depends largely on who you ask. That does not mean, however, that there is not an answer.