Law Mart ─ Justice, Access, and For-Profit Law Schools

American law schools are in crisis. Enrollment is down, student loan debt is up, and the profession's supply of jobs is shrinking. Private equity financiers established the first for-profit law schools in the early 2000s with the stated mission to "serve the underserved." In Law Mart, an ethnography of a for-profit law school, Riaz Tejani argues that the rise of accredited for-profit law schools exposes the limits of market-based solutions for American access to justice. Tejani reveals how for-profit schools marketed themselves directly to ethnoracial and socioeconomic "minority" communities, relaxed admission standards, increased diversity rates, shook up established curriculum, and saw student success rates plummet. If economic theories have influenced scholarship, what happens when they also shape law school transactions and governance? For students promised professional citizenship by these institutions,is there an obligation to better discern their quality or reputation?

Riaz Tejani is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at University of Illinois Springfield.