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In 1986, 70 percent of the first-year class of Harvard Law School wanted to pursue careers in public-interest law. Ten years later, the same percentage of this class was pursuing careers in private corporate firms. How is it that these students began their careers interested in using law as a vehicle for social change, but ended up in those very law firms most resistant to change? How are law students able to reconcile liberal politics with careers in corporate law? 

Richard D. Kahlenberg's Broken Contract serves to warn prospective law students on the transformation that happens during the second and third years. His memoir explores the intense competitiveness and insidious pressure leading to jobs that are lucrative, prestigious, and challenging, but ultimately unsatisfying. 

Though Broken Contract doesn't seek to convince every law student to go into public service, Kahlenberg means to challenge and restructure our social institutions to make it easier to follow our impulses toward good instead of toward the goods.

People differ in their cognitive styles—their ways of getting and using information to solve problems and make decisions. Alfred G. Smith and his associates studied these differences in a selected group of over 800 students at a score of law schools throughout the United States. Two major cognitive styles were identified: that of the monopath, who follows a single route of established principles and procedures, and that of the polypath, who takes many routes, as circumstances suggest.

A battery of both original and standard tests was administered to both law students and their professors to investigate differences in cognitive style and their relationships to self-image, anxiety, and academic achievement. This also revealed differences in prevailing styles at different schools.

The results will be of special interest to readers concerned with legal education, to psychologists, and to behavioral scientists. The research format developed here will serve equally well for raising significant questions about the professions of medicine, education, social work, and others in which cognitive and communication styles play a central role in determining outcomes.

On the surface, law schools today are thriving. Enrollments are on the rise, and their resources are often the envy of every other university department. Law professors are among the highest paid and play key roles as public intellectuals, advisers, and government officials. Yet behind the flourishing facade, law schools are failing abjectly. Recent front-page stories have detailed widespread dubious practices, including false reporting of LSAT and GPA scores, misleading placement reports, and the fundamental failure to prepare graduates to enter the profession.

Addressing all these problems and more in a ringing critique is renowned legal scholar Brian Z. Tamanaha. Piece by piece, Tamanaha lays out the how and why of the crisis and the likely consequences if the current trend continues. The out-of-pocket cost of obtaining a law degree at many schools now approaches $200,000. The average law school graduate’s debt is around $100,000—the highest it has ever been—while the legal job market is the worst in decades, with the scarce jobs offering starting salaries well below what is needed to handle such a debt load. At the heart of the problem, Tamanaha argues, are the economic demands and competitive pressures on law schools—driven by competition over U.S. News and World Report ranking. When paired with a lack of regulatory oversight, the work environment of professors, the limited information available to prospective students, and loan-based tuition financing, the result is a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.

Growing concern with the crisis in legal education has led to high-profile coverage in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and many observers expect it soon will be the focus of congressional scrutiny. Bringing to the table his years of experience from within the legal academy, Tamanaha has provided the perfect resource for assessing what’s wrong with law schools and figuring out how to fix them.

An indispensable introduction to legal reasoning, updated for today’s political and legal environment.

Since it was first published nearly five decades ago, Reason in Law has become the starting point for understanding legal reasoning, a critical component of the rule of law. The editors show how judges can integrate all the elements of a case to persuasively explain their rulings—and, even more importantly, why they sometimes fail to do so. Drawing on cases old and new, Reason in Law enables readers to become sophisticated “judges of judging.”

Now in its tenth edition, Reason in Law includes a new chapter on the increasingly contentious and politically consequential field of administrative law and addresses recent developments in the American legal landscape, including growing conservatism in the federal judiciary and the flood of lawsuits brought against the second Trump administration. It also analyzes new cases on the First Amendment rights of high schoolers, transgender civil rights, the responsibilities universities have for student safety, Donald Trump’s sweeping claims of executive power, and historic Supreme Court decisions expanding the rights of gun owners and allowing states to criminalize abortion. As always, Reason in Law connects legal theory with empirical research on the American judicial system, showing how trustworthy legal reasoning helps preserve social peace and the rule of law.

The way lawyers think about the law can seem deeply mysterious. They see nuance and meaning in statutes and implications in judicial opinions that are opaque to the rest of us. Accessible and thought provoking, Sharpening the Legal Mind explains how lawyers analyze the cases and controversies that come before the courts.

Written by William Powers Jr., the former president of the University of Texas at Austin, this book is an authoritative introduction to the academic study of law and legal reasoning, including insights into the philosophy of law and the intellectual history of legal thought. Powers discusses the methods lawyers use to interpret the law, the relation between law and morals, and the role of courts in shaping the law. In eight chapters, he follows the historical debate on these issues and others through different generations and movements in American legal thought—formalism, realism, positivism—to critical legal studies and postmodern theory. The perfect read for anyone looking for a primer on legal reasoning, Sharpening the Legal Mind demystifies the debates and approaches to thinking like a lawyer that profoundly influence the rule of law in our lives.