Abstract
Here, I pick up on Dean Matasar's work on the economics of legal education. In a 2004 article in the New York Law School Law Review, he provocatively compared a law student's investment in a legal education to buying a car and pushing it off the cliff each year for three years. That image brings home the dramatic rise in the cost of higher education generally and legal education specifically. In this Essay, I address one explanation for those rapidly rising costs-a phenomenon that economists call the "cost disease."