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2013 Neb. L. Rev. Bulletin 1 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/nelrvbu2013 and id is 1 raw text is: THE EVAPORATING TRUST IN AMERICAN LEGAL EDUCATION Kyle McEntee1 Copyright © 2013. Law School Transparency. All rights reserved. I once overheard a non-lawyer tell a popular lawyer joke. How can you tell that an attorney is about to lie? Without missing a beat the jokester quipped. The attorney's lips begin to move. The group found it funny, while I began to wonder what happened to my sense of humor. I smirked, sure, but more than anything the familiar joke diverted my attention from comedy to comity. Attitudes about lawyers follow an odd dichotomy. On the one hand, lawyers are esteemed. They play an essential role in a society built on the rule of law. Parents want their kids to grow up to be the next Atticus Finch or Sandra Day O'Connor. On the other hand, lawyers are reviled as opportunistic, morally deficient, and-perhaps worst of all-liars. For a profession predicated on trust, these colorful descriptions undermine, even if subtly, the rule of law. Lawyers have long had a trust problem (an important topic for another discussion). Now, the legal profession combats a new assault on trust. Law schools have lost much of the trust they've traditionally enjoyed. Through a combination of ever-increasing and unfair costs,2 disturbing self-dealing,3 and-most widely publicized-deceptive marketing,4 law schools now (justly) face historic skepticism about the services they provide and their methods of promoting those services. Persistent doubts about educational quality supplement concerns about law school economics.5 The result: total LSATs administered, total applicants, and total enrollees are each down for the third year in a row.6 Media attitudes are another proxy for changing societal attitudes. Broad coverage of law schools aside, my experience with journalists has completely changed since LST began its public

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