The dean of the law school where I work recently made two remarkable posts on LinkedIn about what he called "myopic prestige-based foolishness" and the "legal profession's snobbery," and then announced his resignation.
At risk of burying the lead, I want to focus on the two posts. On that score, tighten your seat belt, because you might never have heard these words from me before: I agree with the dean.
Young people's socioeconomic prospects continue to turn in bleak data—this week, a record low in first-time home buyers—spurring growing, alarming, and not characteristically American skepticism of democracy, at least the capital-driven version. (I wrote recently about the fondness of young Bhutanese for their socially minded monarchy.) I wonder whether this century will at last see American voters hit rock bottom and do something about our broken Constitution.
Socioeconomic stagnation, or worse, downward social mobility, in American society, irrespective of individual merit, is becoming ever harder to conceal behind starry-eyed paeans to the supposed land of opportunity.
I've written before about my own career track
and the not-a-meritocracy that America is and maybe always has been,
fabled reputation notwithstanding. It's unusual, though, to hear a law
school dean say anything critical of the socioeconomic status quo—much less speaking from personal perspective. Usually deans in public prefer to paint rosy pictures. And I get it: morosity
is not conducive to opening the checkbooks of well-to-do benefactors or prospective students.
Deans have their job, and I have mine. Mine just happens to trade in truth. If you catch a dean just as her or his light is being extinguished, you might catch a rare glimpse of truth even there.
It should be said, I like Dean Sam Panarella. I've always thought his heart is in the right place and that he prizes ideals over self-preservation and bean counting. The latter are the prevalent priorities in the well compensated ranks of higher-education administration. Maybe that's why he wasn't cut out for it.
My main worry about Dean Panarella always was how long he could stand to beat his head against a wall of willful intransigence. That's no secret; I told him that in our first 1:1 meeting.
I am sad but understanding in reporting that we now know the answer: three years.
Here is Dean Panarella's first post of two days ago. This post might seem innocuous, by the way—it did to me—owing in part to its polite eloquence. So know that things are going to heat up a notch thereafter.
I’ve resisted writing this for a long time, because I know it will not sit well with some people. But at some point, silence is agreement, so here it is: The obsession with pedigree by some in the legal profession is not just outdated—it is intellectually indefensible, socially corrosive, unbearably lazy, and, frankly, more than a little embarrassing.
We lawyers pride ourselves on analytical rigor, evidence, and logic. And yet we routinely presume competence—or incompetence—based on a single, often decades-old data point: where someone went to law school.
I had a recent and quite dispiriting experience with this myopic prestige-based foolishness. It was not the first time I bumped against the limitations placed on me by the schools I attended (which, to be clear, were excellent schools, albeit not highly placed in the ordinal rankings we humans love), and it won’t be the last. One of the many ironies of this “class ceiling” is that it is most often rigidly enforced by people who are professionally dedicated to fairness, equity, and due process.
For a new lawyer, the school they attended might serve as a rough proxy for competence in the absence of other signals. Though even then this is reductive, narrow-minded, and needlessly and harmfully exclusionary.
But beyond that, this already weak proxy collapses entirely - or should. At that point, we have something far more meaningful to evaluate: actual performance, judgment, and impact. You know, the job.
And yet, even decades into a career, doors still open—or more perniciously, are slammed shut—based not on what someone has done, but on where they once sat in a classroom as a 23-year-old.
That’s not just wrong as a matter of reason, logic, and common sense, it is profoundly self-defeating for a profession that claims to value merit.
Worse, it perpetuates the very inequalities many of us claim to abhor.
Because let’s be honest: access to “elite” law schools is not distributed by raw talent alone. Far from it. It is shaped by privilege, information, resources, and opportunity. I know, because my own daughters benefitted from this enormous head start.
When we over-index on pedigree, we are not selecting for the best lawyers, we are selecting for the most advantaged starting points.
And this bias is the worst in some of the most consequential and prestigious roles in our profession—BigLaw hiring, judicial appointments and clerkships, and academia. In other words, the very jobs that are rocket ships of social, professional, and economic mobility.
We discount decades of demonstrated excellence in favor of a brand name. If that doesn’t strike you as absurd, it should.
Where someone went to law school has near-zero probative value once they’ve built even a modest body of work. At that point, the only question should be what they have done with the opportunities they’ve had.
We can do better than this. In fact, for a profession built on reason, fairness, and evidence—we have an obligation to.
At the time I write this post, there is no negative reaction whatsoever showing under this LinkedIn post. Reactions and comments comprise nothing but heaps of praise and agreement, likes and applause.
But Dean Panarella must have heard some discontent from someone, and fast. Because here goes the second post, within a day.
My last post about the legal profession’s snobbery problem struck a nerve. That was the point. Not to provoke for the sake of it, but to surface something that many of us recognize and far too few of us, especially those of us in positions to do so, are willing to say out loud.
I’ve heard from a lot of people since—especially from those involved in hiring at large law firms and selecting for judicial clerks—who made a version of this argument:
“We don’t just look at the name of the law school. We consider GPA, experience, recommendations, interviews… it’s holistic.”
I don’t doubt that. But it misses the point entirely. Because by the time that “holistic review” begins the pool has already been pre-screened. And let’s be honest about what that means.
That stack of resumes you’re carefully evaluating? There’s a very good chance it draws from 5 to maybe 15 law schools at the most. And it’s the same 5-15 law schools in nearly every BigLaw corner office, dean’s suite, and judicial chambers. This out of nearly 200 law schools in the country, mind you.
That is both ridiculous and galling, and it’s not anything remotely resembling a level playing field.
It simply cannot be the case that 100% of the law students qualified to be BigLaw summer associates, federal judicial clerks, etc. are somehow magically all concentrated in less than 10% of the law schools. And you know what? Those of us who work in the other 90% of schools know for a stone cold fact that it isn’t true, because we are surrounded by a veritable plethora of incredibly talented, humane, and immensely capable students.
So yes, within that narrow band, you may be weighing candidates thoughtfully. But that’s not a wide aperture. It’s a highly curated subset of already advantaged pathways.
It’s like saying: “I’m completely open-minded about what I eat… as long as it’s organic, locally sourced, sustainably harvested, the color green, and fits in the palm of my hand.”
Within that category—sure, there's some choice, I suppose. But the category itself is doing all the work of narrowing. That’s the issue.
The problem isn’t just in how we sort the finalists. It’s how few people ever become finalists. The top of the funnel is the diameter of a nickel when it should be the diameter of a manhole cover.
And the consequences are enormous: We overlook exceptional talent. We replicate the same backgrounds. We convince ourselves we’re selecting for merit when we’re selecting for proximity to opportunity.
This isn’t about denying that certain schools produce outstanding lawyers. It’s about questioning a belief that ONLY those schools do. Because they don’t. Not even close.
If we’re serious about merit we must interrogate not just our decisions but the structure of the choices we allow ourselves to make.
Until we do, we’re not running a meritocracy. We’re running a sorting system for people who were already sorted long before they got to us. And what in the world is the point of that?
"Snobbery," you say? Well, the first post did not actually use that word, preferring instead the more genteel "foolishness." Yet the genteel approach "struck a nerve." I welcome the plain language to call out elitism for what it is.
U.S. News recently ranked UMass Law 171 of those nearly 200 law schools. That's bad—inexcusable—for the only public law school in the commonwealth at age 16.
A significant part of UMass Law's inability to better its ranking is forgivable as a function of the elitism problem the dean wrote about. Though U.S. News shrank the proportional input of reputational scoring in its law school ranking methodology since years past, now 25%, it's still a heavy investment in elitist defense of the status quo. U.S. News reported UMass Law at a sad 1.6 of 5 in academic peer review, and an only somewhat better 2.5 of 5 among lawyers and judges.
In turning down the volume of reputation, U.S. News amped up the value of inputs justifiably important to law students, such as placement and bar pass. Placement remains indirectly dependent on reputation. That's the very "class ceiling" the dean decried. It has been notoriously difficult for UMass Law graduates, regardless of merit, even to score interviews in the white-shoe Boston legal market. U.S. News reported mediocre employment outcomes at UMass Law.
Even a seemingly straightforward statistic such as bar pass conceals a bias in favor of privilege. In my experience, and the law school has some research to back this up, the number one obstacle my UMass Law students face in preparing for the bar exam is not being able to afford time off to study. Multiply that obstacle by the relentless demands of career and family for nontraditional students. The problem is money, not merit.
All that said, I am not letting UMass Law and the commonwealth off the hook. The bottom-line problem at UMass Law is and always has been, simply, the bottom line.
A public law school with an access mission sounds great in a speech. Indeed, UMass Law exists in part to combat the very elitism that oppresses it. But to assume that a public law school can be simultaneously more affordable for students and less costly to run than a private counterpart—well, I might call that myopic foolishness.
A school with an access mission will have more nontraditional students than its conventional academic counterparts. An access school will face greater student needs to overcome the serious shortcomings of American K16 education. An access school will have more students unable to afford resources, such as study aids, textbooks, and tutoring, not to mention the opportunity costs of working for free in field placements and internships. The list goes on.
The consequence of these student needs is that the school must shoulder a heavier than usual burden: more financial aid, more library resources, more faculty and teaching assistants, just to start. More resources means more costs. So a public, access school must cost more to run than its conventional counterpart in a competitive private school or foundation-funded "flagship" public school. Cutting pricey hors d'oeuvres from receptions and leather furniture from the lobby is not going to make up that difference.
Massachusetts never reckoned with this reality in creating UMass Law. The Massachusetts model of public higher education does not see universities as a social investment. Rather, academic units such as the law school are expected to pay their own way, balancing tuition and fees with expenditures.
Idealism doesn't make math go away. A law school cannot take in less than a counterpart, but spend more. Yet that was the calculation with which the commonwealth founded its public law school.
Dean Panarella announced his resignation today, effective at academic year's end. He will move on to be the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Natural Resources and Energy Law.
What job did he not get? We should call out the enforcers of that class ceiling.
Meanwhile, chalk up another win for the bean counters.
They are undefeated.
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