Maybe. WaPo sez:
Nearly 46,000 people have applied so far to go to an accredited U.S. law school in the most recent admissions cycle, a figure that puts applications on track to hit just short of 53,000 total. By comparison, there were a total of 77,000 applicants in 2010 and 90,000 in 2004, according to the Law School Admission Council.
The reason is that people age 22 or so are not interested in shelling out three years of their lives and $150,000 bucks to end up unemployed. Harvard and Yale will keep graduating pricks like Ted Cruz, John Bolton, and the Five Scotus Doofusi, so if you want to be a senator, judge, or warmonger, those are the schools for you. But for the vast majority of law students, they won't have the sort of automatic credentials that these schools anoint their graduates with.
Law school is far more expensive in real terms than it's ever been. Writing in the New Republic, one professor, Paul Campos, says:
In real, inflation-adjusted terms, tuition at private American law schools has doubled over the past 20 years, tripled over the past 30, and quadrupled over the past 40. The rate of increase for resident tuition at public law schools has been even steeper.
I am sure this is true. Back when I was going to law school, during the 2nd Triumvirate of Gaius Julius Caesar, Lepidus, and Pompey the Great, a reasonable wage for a clerk job (i.e. flunky at law firm) was $10.00 per hour. Law school then cost about $5,000 per year in tuition, or about 500 hours of work, or about (or just a little more maybe) what you could earn working full time in the summer and part-time in the school year, and living on Top Ramen or whatever.
Nowadays law school costs $50,000 (or more) per year. Try earning that on part-time and summer work. The problem is that the law schools have been fully subsidized by the federal loan program and have been under NO incentive to cut costs.
Now they're going to have to. In fact, the whole idea of law school as a means of training lawyers is dubious. The teaching method (stupid guessing games about appellate cases) is calculated to turn out lawyers who are only useful at huge law firms or as lackeys for federal appellate judges. Thus saith Dahlia Lithwick at the New Republic:
We mainly agree what’s wrong with contemporary American legal education: It’s all about training hundreds of thousands of brilliant young people to be wildly successful nineteenth-century lawyers. Legal education is about maintaining an expensive cookie-cutter pedagogy to satisfy rigid cookie-cutter accreditation standards, all aimed at populating huge law firms that are a thing of the past. All with the added burden of crushing lifelong debt.
BTW, it was not until 1950 that more lawyers had gone to law school than had not. The law schools, through the ABA, were very clever about convincing most (but not all) state legislatures and supreme courts that graduation from an ABA accredited law school was necessary (but not suffficient -- one still had to pass the bar in most cases) condition precedent to licensure as a lawyer.
Supposedly there is some movement to a more practical curriculum. I doubt it. I have recently mentored two new lawyers, both fine, motivated individuals. Neither one of them had ever written a contract.
We need a strong legal profession. We need good legal education. We don't need law schools, or at least the kind of law schools that we've been tolerating for a long time.