Indiana Wants Me

I've gotten three emails in the past week from people who sounded positively suicidal, so I'm not getting the mordant amusement from this exchange on TLS than I might otherwise be inclined to extract from it.  Under the subject heading "Indiana Tech Law School," someone asks:

Anyone know anything about this school[?] They emailed me a good luck email for the lsat today but, I cant find out anything about them on LSAC, or access the application. Anyone know what GPA/ LSAT's they are looking for?

After a few appropriately cynical responses from the TLS crowd, no less a personage than the dean of this institution makes an appearance:

For those of you who are wondering about Indiana Tech Law School, I am the Founding Dean. Perhaps I can answer some of your questions. We are located in Fort Wayne and we open next August. We are enrolling only 100 students in our Charter Class.

We intend to be a new and different kind of law school, one that intentionally blends theory and practice and one that focuses on ethics from the very start of school.

We will require all students to complete a professionalism course in the first-year curriculum and two ethics courses, one of which will also be taught in the very first year of law school. This is an innovation that sorely needed in legal education although very few law schools offer an ethics course until much later in a law student’s career. We will also require students to perform 30 hours of pro bono volunteer hours, as an additional condition of graduation, to benefit the public and to instill in the students the inherent value in the legal profession helping those members of society who are in need. A wide variety of opportunities will be developed so that students will be able to complete the 30-hour requirement from the very beginning of their law school careers.

In addition to the curricular innovations, we will give students the option to specialize their education by concentrating their upper-level electives in a particular area. Concentrations are much like undergraduate “majors” and, at Indiana Tech, students will be able to receive a notation on their transcripts that they concentrated their studies in one of four areas if they choose: Advocacy/Dispute Resolution, Intellectual Property/Technology Law, Transactional Law, and Global Law and Leadership. In order to complete the requirements to receive a concentration, students must not only enroll in a certain number of hours of coursework, they must also actually practice law either in a law school clinic or in a full-time, 40-hours-per-week “semester-in-practice” internship with a member of the profession whose expertise is in that same area.

In at least half of our courses, and all of our first-year courses, students will also be given opportunities to hone their lawyering skills by engaging in “experiential learning exercises.” Professors will give up some class hours so that a judge or lawyer from our area can take over the class and bring in real life examples of the theory and history that the students will have been studying. The students will write client letters, draft wills, prepare court documents, etc. and the hope is that our graduates will be viewed as more “practice-ready” than other law school grads when they interview for jobs. We firmly believe that the intentional blending of theory and practice skills will make them better professionals.

Regarding GPA and LSAT medians, we don't have any history so we can't set them; however, we would like to open in third place among the five Indiana law schools so that would place our medians at approximately 156 for the LSAT and 3.5 for the GPA. Our tuition is $29,500 per year and we have academic scholarships available.

For more information, please visit our web-site at http://www.indianatech.edu/law or email me at PCAlexander@indianatech.edu.

Peter Alexander
Dean and Professor of Law

Indiana, which contains 2% of the US population, already has four ABA-accredited law schools, including two "top 30" institutions, both of which feature legal unemployment rates for their grads of around 40%, and which are currently placing only 20% to 25% of their graduates in firms of more than ten attorneys.

Chutzpah has been defined as murdering your parents and then pleading for mercy because you're an orphan.  How about setting up another legal diploma mill in a hyper-saturated market, while claiming that what will set your school apart is its emphasis on "ethics" and "professionalism?"

Of course none of this is going to keep the ABA Section of Legal Education from accrediting this absurdity after the requisite site visits and other bureaucratic hoop-jumping. And until something changes nothing is going to stop the school from trolling the internet for victims future lawyers paying customers, who will fund this latest foray into professional school carnival barking via a combination of the generosity of the U.S. taxpayer and their endlessly naive willingness to believe people like Peter Alexander, Dean and Professor of Law.