Legal Education for Profit and the United Nations Call for “Quality Education” and “Strong Institutions” in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda

Abstract

The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda calls for “quality education” and “strong institutions” in Goals 4 and 16. This call underscores the supreme importance of the rule of law in global perspective by construing law as both constitutive of social institutions and a fundamental institution in its own right. In both capacities law historically has acted to buffer public goods and vulnerable populations from the vicissitudes of market supply and demand. For this reason, law schools—where we teach and train most new lawyers and judges—have been a particularly sensitive kind of institution. Yet, during the 2000s the West saw the rise of “for-profit” law schools—institutions of legal education and scholarship newly created with the mission of commercial gain, sometimes for the benefit of outside investors or investment “funds.” What effect might this historical turn have had on law and its practice in the twenty-first century, and what does this say more generally about democratic ideals in the West during this period? For instance, that for-profit law schools emerged simultaneously with the major accounting and banking scandals of the decade may be no coincidence. This chapter argues, therefore, that the rise of for-profit legal education was a symptom of changes in U.S moral economy, and in the social and political climate of the West more generally. Namely, this development points to an emerging conception of law as primarily in the service of economic rather than social life.