Podcast: Bill Treanor on 30+ Years as a Law School Dean & Standing Up to Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike interviews William ("Bill") Treanor on his long and recently-concluded tenure as Dean of Georgetown University Law Center as well as his experiences and perspectives from a 40-year career. Bill talks about the the biggest changes he's seen during his time in legal education (16:06), the coming changes he foresees in the short-term future both good (19:22) and bad (20:56), his proudest accomplishments as a law school dean (41:57), the biggest challenges law students face today (24:27), and how he reacted and famously responded to the letter from Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin threatening not to hire Georgetown Law graduates if the school was found to be teaching a curriculum involving diversity, equity, and inclusion (1:33).

Dean Treanor's response to then-Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is below. You can also read it in full here.

Other topics they discuss include the value (and lack of value) of the Socratic method (16:30), experiential learning in law school (16:06) and the potential effects of a current proposal before the ABA (20:56), the growing field of law and technology (19:22), the prospect of government taking accrediting authority from independent organizations (21:57), the current and coming impacts of AI on legal education and practice (23:43, 46:58), how law firms have learned from past recessions and overreactions (29:33), Bill's take on the current surge in law school applicants (30:36), his advice for prospective law students today (33:48), and his thoughts on the law school rankings (35:18).

Bill Treanor served as Dean of Georgetown University Law Center for 15 years, prior to which he served as Dean of Fordham University School of Law for almost 20 years. His accomplishments at Georgetown were innumerable—you can read more about him and his impressive career here.

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.

Full Transcript:

Mike: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. I have the great honor to be with Dean Bill Treanor, who was dean of Georgetown's law school for 15 years, and before that Fordham's law school. He's been involved in legal education for the last 40 years. Hearing Bill's take on what's changed in the last 40 years and what will be changing in the near future I think will be of interest to all.

But the story at the start of this podcast about the letter he received from Interim United States Attorney Ed Martin. Ed Martin was threatening to not hire Georgetown Law students unless they change their curriculum, which violates the Constitution. And then the story about how Bill thought it was a hoax—I don't want to get into too much detail—for several reasons that are fascinating, and Bill's response, and the reaction to his response is illuminating but also heartwarming. So I'll let Bill tell the story, and without further delay, here's me and Bill Treanor.

I'm joined with Bill Treanor, the recently former dean, longstanding dean of Georgetown University Law Center. Hi, Bill.

[1:18] Bill: Hey, Mike. How are you? Delighted to be here.

Mike: Yeah, our paths have crossed at conferences, and I think we share some similar opinions and maybe some different opinions. But can we start at the end, sort of the very end of your tenure at Georgetown?

Bill: Absolutely.

Mike: Okay. Also, the context, and you lived it, I didn't, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a new administration. They have a different vision of higher education and legal education than the previous administration. From my vantage point, I'm seeing them pick a battle with Harvard as an example. And essentially, they sent Harvard a letter saying, "Here are our demands. Among others, we demand that Stephen Miller become chancellor—or make decisions for—Harvard University," and they draw the line and push back. Where are you in the timeline of this when you get the letter from interim US Attorney Ed Martin?

Bill: So we're, I think, before anyone else in terms of the direct attack. I think the date of the initial letter is at the end of February, and then he emails it to me in early March. So it's very early, and it's before others.

Mike: No one had fought back yet.

Bill: I think I was the first to fight back, but definitely I fought back before Harvard.

Mike: What was the content of the letter? I actually couldn't find it online, his letter. I found yours a million times over.

Bill: So his letter said that, you know, "I understand that you have been teaching DEI at Georgetown." Doesn't define what DEI is. "And unless I'm satisfied that you stop teaching DEI, I'm not going to hire your graduates, and I'm not going to have internships for your students." So it was totally focused on the academics and our teaching—again, he didn't define it—but our teaching DEI. And I have to say, when I got it, I was shocked, because it was really about a prosecutor telling us what we could teach and holding our students as hostage. So if we didn't teach the way he wanted us to teach, he was going to punish our graduates, and he was going to punish our students.

And when I first saw it, I was first shocked, and then I also thought it was a hoax. If you look at the letter, which you can find in various places online, first of all, the seal of the US attorney, it looks like about a seventh-generation Xerox. It's kind of fuzzy along the ends. Then it also, the stationery says "United States Attorney Edward Martin," and he wasn't the US attorney. You know, he was the Interim US attorney, and I worked for many years with the Department of Justice, and people take seriously their title. And so if you're Interim US Attorney, you don't send US Attorney stationery.

And then there were no legal citations. So my first reaction was that this was a hoax.

[4:00] Mike: So interesting. So I'll use my words: a poorly presented letter that triggered alarm bells in your mind, this might not be real. Are you nervous at the time? Are you nervous for your school? Are you nervous for your students? It sounds like he might not have taken the time to research your background and know that you're a constitutional scholar, so...

Or are you completely confident from the get-go, even if this is real, this is a violation of X, Y, and Z, and you can spell out for us what X, Y, and Z were?

Bill: So first of all, I thought it was a hoax. And I was about to call our threats assessment person at Georgetown, and it gives you a sense of what kind of times we live in that the university would have a threats assessment person. And I was about to call that person when people convinced me, no, that this was, in fact, from the Interim US Attorney. And I really was shocked. The idea that a prosecutor would try to tell a law school what they could teach and punish their students if we didn't comply.

And it was obviously unconstitutional, and that's several dimensions. First of all, Georgetown is a Catholic and Jesuit university, and one of our core commitments—and it's the start of our mission statement as a university—is that we want to hear all the voices. The dialogue from people of different faiths and no faiths and different beliefs, that's how we learn, and that's a moral and spiritual imperative. And the government can't tell us not to do that. The government can't tell us that we have to exclude some perspectives.

And then it's just flatly unconstitutional for the government to be telling universities, regardless of whether they're religious institutions or not, what to teach. And there's a Frankfurter concurrence 50, 60 years ago in the case New Hampshire v. Sweezy, which has become the standard, and it says universities get to determine what they teach. It's a First Amendment right.

And then it's also violating our right as a law school, First Amendment right, it's violating our right of religious free expression. And it's also punishing our students for their First Amendment right of deciding where they want to go to school. So, clearly unconstitutional on many levels. But at the same time, to push back is not something you do lightly. You don't do it lightly because this is an administration that has shown itself to be very vindictive in punishing people who push back, and then also just personal safety.

So before I sent the letter, I talked to my wife and I said, "I think this is clearly the right thing to do. It's clearly the right thing to push back. This is unconstitutional, and it's simply unacceptable, and the right thing to do is push back, but there is a real possibility of personal risk. So, you know, I want to talk about that before I respond." And she supported me in saying, "You should do the right thing. You should push back. You should tell him we will not change our curriculum because you don't like it."

[7:00] So after I'd written my letter, I talked to my wife, and I have to say, whenever I do kind of major letters or statements, I always run them by her to get her input. And she said, "You know, I think it makes all the right points." She said, "I have one suggestion." I said, "What's the suggestion?" She said, "You shouldn't call him US Attorney, because he's not US Attorney. Call him 'Interim US Attorney,' and you should do that several times." And so I made that change, and it really has been remarkable to me. It's been very affirming that when I sent out the letter, you know, I heard from so many people, people from all around the world, people from on the right and on the left. I got a petition from 18,000 people from a Christian group supporting me. Just really extraordinary support, and it's been uniform, all positive.

Now, I have to say, in all candor, the one thing that has annoyed me a little bit is that when people tell me their response to the letter, what I hear again and again is, "The letter is great. And you know what I really like?" And they don't talk about my talk about Jesuit values or academic free speech. They say, "What I really like is the way you refer to him as Interim US Attorney." So that's Allison's contribution—I want to give her credit for it. But I have to say, it's a little bit annoying to me that that's what people again and again will focus on as the thing they like the most about the letter.

Mike: I imagine you got some fervor directed towards you, but hopefully nothing that set off any alarm bells after you responded with your letter?

Bill: One of the things that happened shortly after I sent out the letter was, we had a Domino Pizza delivery to the residence. And we got a call that there's Domino's delivery; after we said we didn't order any pizza, I then called up our threats assessment person; I said, "I'm sure this is just a coincidence, but we've never gotten a pizza delivery that we hadn't ordered for, and this just showed up. So I'm sure it's a coincidence, but I thought I should touch base with you." And she said, "There are no coincidences."

And after that happened to us, we started to see in the press the fact that this was done to a lot of judges, their families, a range of people, really as a way to intimidate and as a way to say, you know, "We know where you live." So, you know, in this world, you don't do something like this without thinking about the personal risk that you're putting yourself and your family at. But again, it was clearly the right thing to do. You clearly can't back down when the Constitution is being violated and your rights as a religious institution, as a law school, are being challenged. It was both an easy decision, but it's not one that you make lightly.

[9:41] Mike: When we publish this podcast, we'll publish the letter, so we don't need to get too into the letter. Was there anything that you found particularly devastating to his threats on your law school, or anything you would take back for that matter?

Bill: I wouldn't take back anything. When you're in these jobs for a long time, as I've been, when you do something like this you get a range of reactions, typically. You get people who agree, people who disagree, you get people on the right, people on the left who disagree. So you're just used to a range of reactions. And that's also something that you anticipate when you take a stand that you believe in. Remarkably—and this is not something that I'd anticipated—the reaction was positive uniformly. You know, apart from kind of a couple of crazy emails, I received hundreds and hundreds of letters and calls and emails, and they were all positive. And they were from around the world. I had people in Australia and in Europe reaching out to me to voice support. And they were from people on the right and people on the left. For example, Eugene Volokh, who's a serious scholar and very conservative, came out strongly in support of what we'd done.

Mike: Because it was a violation of the Constitution, was that—

Bill: Yeah, because it's a violation of the Constitution. And I think, importantly, it's something that, because there was both the university's right to determine its curriculum and the religiously-affiliated university and law school's right to teach what we think we have a moral and spiritual imperative to teach, I think those two things helped make sure that really everybody, right and left, was behind the position I took.

My biggest concern was that the students would have a mixed reaction, because what I was saying was, you know, we're going ahead, even though it may cost our students internships, and even though it may cost our graduates jobs. And remarkably—and again, I'd not anticipate this—but every single student response that I've received has been supportive.

I was in New York a few days ago, and I was jogging in Central Park. A student called out to me and ran over and introduced himself and said, "Dean Treanor, I just want to say thank you for standing up for the university, and thank you for standing up for free speech." I've heard that again and again at graduation. It was really very moving, I would say. We have section speakers, and probably most of the section speakers talked about the letter. Because people come to law school because they want to do the right thing, and they're willing to take sacrifices. They're willing to give up some job opportunities if it means doing the right thing. And I have been really touched and heartened by the uniformly positive support that I've received.

Mike: If you feel comfortable saying, was there anyone in particular that surprised you? You mentioned one person, but did like a Matthew Gaetz reach out? Was there an outlier surprise?

Bill: Matthew Gaetz did not reach out. I was concerned about some of our more conservative alumni, because we have almost 50,000 alumni, and people voted for all different candidates at the last election. And so I thought I would get some pushback from people who are supporters of the administration. And even our most conservative alumni, I heard from them reaching out to support my position. So I was surprised, and I was really heartened.

I think the thing that touched me most is, I received a letter with 18,000 signatures from a Christian group voicing support of me. Actually, one of—my Vice Dean told me, shortly after the letter went out, that her nanny had signed the petition in support of me, not knowing any kind of connection. Then I got this email with 18,000 signatures attached and 400 pages of comments, all supportive. It was really overwhelming.

Mike: It's a heartwarming story. I've had a little bit, like I've been in airports and former students have called out my name, but nothing nearly as heartwarming, I mean not even on the same scale of someone just seeing you at Central Park and saying, "Thank you for standing up."

Bill: I mean, that's just the most recent examples I've had. Since March, I've had so many people reach out to me, people stopping me on the street. The emails, it has been really both unanticipated and remarkable. Then my wife, who is in a different world, who worked for many years for Saks Fifth Avenue, told me about so many of her friends who were, like, doctors across the country and people in the fashion industry, all were aware of the letter and just uniformly positive. So it was powerful, not just in the legal community but, you know, across the spectrum.

Mike: I'm going to guess the reason why I couldn't find Ed Martin—who, again, was not confirmed—why I couldn't find his letter is because your response letter went so viral. His is buried on page 50, and I only made it to page 47. That makes me feel good.

[14:24] One final question before we move on. I am curious about one thing. My last 26 years have been higher education. My doctoral program was higher education leadership. But you said something that made me think of a question I've never thought to ask anyone. If a university goes off and decides they want to teach a curriculum on Nazism—"Hitler was a legendary figure who we all should aspire to"—is it the market's responsibility to shut that down or the accrediting agencies'? There's got to be some sort of check and balance there.

Bill: I think it's the market, depending on what they teach, and maybe the accrediting agency. But, you know, the bottom line is, universities get to determine what they teach, and that's not government's job to say you can't teach this or you can't teach that. You know, "We're offended that you're a Catholic and Jesuit university, and we would like you to teach something different." There was a decision term before last, the NRA decision, in which the Supreme Court said, "NRA has First Amendment rights. New York can't penalize people who do business with the NRA, because the NRA has First Amendment rights." So, the NRA has First Amendment rights, universities have First Amendment rights. And it's absolutely crucial to stand up and support them.

Mike: 100%. Consulting does too. And we talk a lot in the media, and sometimes people don't like what we say, and we have every right to have opinions on things. So I'm with you there.

I think you were a student 40 years ago, but we can concentrate on the 40-year runway, or maybe your time as a dean, or even just the last 15 years at Georgetown. In my 26 years, there's been a lot of change. Wherever you want to start—40 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago—where does your mind go when you look at legal education now versus X number of years ago? And you can pick X.

Bill: So, the biggest change is the rise of experiential education. So experiential education, when I went to law school, and I graduated in 1985, was pretty much at the margins. And it's now something that we realize is absolutely crucial. And so clinics and practica and externships have become a core part of what we teach. I think that's the biggest change.

I would say, kind of at the next level, when I went to law school, it was really the Paper Chase model. So you had a faculty member, big lecture hall, you read the cases, and the professor might call on you and then just grill you with Socratic questioning. So Paper Chase, you know, was a big novel and a movie and a TV show, and it really captured the way in which that teaching was done. And I always say it was like being a pilot of an airplane—kind of, hours of boredom and moments of terror. You kind of sit there and you're constantly thinking, "Please don't call on me, please don't call on me." And then you get called on. So another thing that we realize over time is, that's just not a good way to teach. It may work for some students, but we've moved much more towards less intimidating, more humane classrooms.

There's a focus on smaller classes. So one of my goals at Georgetown is to try to have first-year classes like contracts, torts in classes of 60 as opposed to 125. We're not all the way there, but this year, 5 out of the 7 classes will be like that. So it's both in terms of moving away from the Paper Chase model and trying to think about, how do you have kind of a more interactive and less intimidating, more team-building approach to teaching?

[17:48] Mike: What if I were to push back and say, "Well, as a professional, as a lawyer, you better be calm under pressure. You're going to get pressure from your clients. You're going to get pressure from the opposing counsel, the other business you're trying to acquire. You're going to get pressure from the judicial system." So would that be the kind of argument that the Socratic method had a purpose, which I'm sure it did?

Bill: I think that's part of it. One thing to realize is, first of all, that's not all you do. You know, if you think about what you do as a lawyer, a lot of what you do is part of teams. You work together for a work product, and the Socratic questioning and also the traditional law school exams is focused on somebody working alone and a particular skill set of responding quickly under pressure. It's not that that's irrelevant, but it's a fairly small part of what lawyers do.

Then, to the extent that what you're trying to do is teaching people how to respond under pressure, there actually are ways that we can do it that are much more like what you're going to in fact encounter in practice. So you are working in a clinic, you are arguing before a court, you are questioning a witness, you have to write a brief. So these are things that actually reflect more what lawyers actually do and the ability to respond quickly and under pressure than Socratic questioning does. Socratic questioning really doesn't teach you that much. And so I think it can be part of the legal education, but a very small part.

Georgetown has a faculty of 130. I think, at this point, there's probably not anybody who is a traditional Socratic questioner. So that's a huge change.

Another change is—and we're seeing this recently more; this is the past 10 years—is a focus on teaching technology-related courses. When I was going through law school, that just wasn't a thing. And I have a friend who's one of the leading data privacy scholars, and when he was starting out and we were law school classmates, and he was working on an article on data privacy, his faculty mentor said to him, "What are you doing?" He said, "I'm writing an article on data privacy." And the faculty mentor, who was a very distinguished person, said, "You're really making a mistake. You gotta have a thing. Torts is a thing. Contracts is a thing. Data privacy is not a thing. So focus in on a standard subject." Even as I was starting my teaching career, people were in fact discouraged from focusing on the area.

And that's something that we're seeing now, so many jobs are in data privacy or cybersecurity or responding to AI, and that's just going to continue. And so another big change that we're seeing is increasingly focusing in on teaching technology-related courses. That's been a big focus of mine at Georgetown, as it actually was when I was at Fordham. And we now have, I think, 16 faculty members full-time whose focus is on law and technology. And I think we probably have 60 courses in the tech space.

[20:43] Mike: So these are all positive changes, which, I mean, are more pleasant to talk about. What about in the last 20, 10, 40 years, anything negative that kind of concerns you that's changed in legal education?

Bill: I think one of the things that I'm concerned about that's an immediate concern is, there's a proposal of the ABA Council to increase the number of experiential courses that people have to take from 6 to 12. And I'm a big fan of experiential education. I've devoted a lot of my career to supporting that. But I think that's going to be harmful. It's going to be harmful, among other things, to experiential education, because resources at schools are limited, and if you have to have 12 courses and you've got a limited budget, what you're going to do is you're going to shift from clinics, which are pretty expensive, just to having externships and practica, which are much cheaper. Kind of a "check the box" is going to lead to worse experiential education. And it's also not reflective of what people do in their career. So again, I'm a big fan of experiential education, but people do all different kinds of things, and they should be able to choose a curriculum that reflects what they want to do. So I think that's something that we're seeing right now that I'm concerned about.

The biggest concern that I have right now is that the administration will take away accrediting authority from the ABA and the American Association of Law Schools, which are independent authorities. And I don't know where it'll go if it's taken away, but the profession has standards, and accrediting should be done by professional independent organizations, not by the government.

Mike: I saw a recent video of Professor Scott Galloway at NYU, and I'm curious your thoughts on this. He talked about how higher ed creates this scarcity demand, you know, NYU denies 89% of their applicants. It amused me that he said, "And when the dean reports this, the faculty get up and applaud that they're only admitting 10%." I've done this 26 years. I've never seen a single faculty member stand up and applaud our selectivity. Right? So that's a little bit of a marketing line.

But he talked about the creation of scarcity. He gave an analogy of a purse company that could make an extra million purses, but they can increase demand and price by limiting purses. I think what a lot of people don't realize is, you have a classroom cap, you have a faculty resource cap, you have a housing cap, and this is aside from the rankings impact. Could you magically wave a wand and admit 50 more students, or is that literally impossible even for a school the size of Georgetown Law Center?

Bill: So Georgetown is the biggest law school in the country. We get more applicants than anybody else. But if you're going to do face-to-face learning, there are limits to it. I think having smaller classes that are more interactive contributes to the learning environment. That's not scalable.

Mike: Exactly. A purse company is scalable.

Bill: A purse company is scalable.

Mike: Higher education is not scalable.

Bill: What it would mean is, if you want to have a contracts class of 55 and you wanted to triple the size of the first-year class, first of all, it would take time. You'd have to build the new buildings, you'd have to build the new infrastructure, and you'd just be replicating what you already have. You'd have three times the faculty members, you'd have three times the career planning people. You know, if you're making a million purses, you can bring down the costs. I don't think that if you have the model that we have, that you would bring down the cost by having more first-year students.

Mike: Agreed. And the only reason I bring up this video is, experts sometimes say things with such confidence that the market's apt to believe them. This was something presented by an expert who knows a lot more about higher education than I do, with such confidence, but everything in this short clip was just wrong. So I'm glad that more of an expert—you—agreed with that take.

Students. What's the biggest challenges you think they're facing now in legal education, or their careers for that matter?

[23:34] Bill: The biggest change that we're all facing is, we don't know what AI is going to mean in the future. I have an alumni board that I meet with that gives me strategic advice, and I had a meeting relatively recently, and the head of a major firm said, "Within the past week, I received two messages from clients. One reached out to me and said, 'If I find that you're doing research for me and you're not using AI, I won't pay the bill.' And then I received another message from another client that said, 'If I find out that you're research and you are using AI, I won't pay the bill.'"

Mike: I knew where that was going.

Bill: And I can understand both positions.

Mike: Can I refuse to pay my legal bills? That'd be awesome.

Bill: I think you probably don't have the market power that some companies have.

Mike: I would agree. I have learned that we have no market power.

Okay, so AI is the elephant in the room, but none of us really know what direction it goes in. On any given day, Bill, I talk to someone in the AI arena who will tell me that in 5 years, 82% of jobs are going to be devastated by AI, and then the next day I talked to someone who says, "No, this is not a problem at all. If you look at the history of human evolution, we solve our own problems. It is our own best interest to create jobs and feed our families. Worrying about AI is no different than worrying about computers or worrying 10 years from now about quantum computing. We'll figure it out, Spivey." Where do you tip?

Bill: I think more towards the latter, but I do have apprehension. So, probably the closest analog for me, the last wave of concern, was with e-discovery. And so when I graduated from law school, if you went to work for a big firm, you spent the first couple of years—and I didn't do that; I worked for government—but if you went to work at a big firm, you spent the first couple of years, and a lot of what you were doing was document review. And that was a key to the success model of firms, to be able to have first- and second-year associates do all this incredibly laborious work.

Then it became that you could have an algorithm and a computer and you could do it in a nanosecond. So the kind of work that first and second-year associates went away almost instantly.

First of all, I think that was a good thing, because it made first- and second-year associates do things that were actually more conducive to eventually becoming successful attorneys. Things that involved building their judgment and building their leadership skills and building their interpersonal skills. And my hope is that we see something like that with AI, that it causes attorneys to focus not on stuff that's pretty routine, but on developing skills that are really more judgment skills and interpersonal skills. And that's probably going to be, you know, across the spectrum. We're already seeing it in brief writing and in memo writing.

The question is, to what extent will that mean that you have less need for first- and second-year associates and junior associates? Because a lot of what they've done will be done through AI. And then, you know, the challenge for firms is that you can't start people out of law school as third-year associates. You need first- and second-year associates just in terms of the business model. So I think the question will be, you know, does AI alter the type of work that associates do and cause them to actually do higher-order work than they do now a lot of the time? But again, this is something we're just trying to grapple with. I don't know where it'll lead, but that's my guess.

[27:48] Mike: Okay. So if worst case is, AI becomes sentient and sends Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to kill me, what's the more realistic worst case? I'm a former dean of career services; I can go to the worst case. "Why do we need to hire your law students when we can hire transfer associates from other firms who already have two to three years experience, and now AI can do the first and second year?"

Bill: So the big concern that I have is, again, that it's going to affect the entry level, the hiring market for law. Now, the limiting is, you can't hire transfers of third- and fourth-year associates if they're not there. Somebody's got to be hiring.

Mike: Yeah. It's self-limiting. You can only do that for a couple of years, right?

Bill: Yeah. Right. You can do it right now because they're out there, but at a certain point, they won't be. So I think that's not so much my concern. My concern again is that there will be fewer associates overall, which will affect the model of law schools. And, you know, it may ultimately lead to there being fewer law school graduates because there will be fewer entry-level jobs.

Mike: To be determined. I mean, one thing, you're a couple of years older than me, so you've probably noticed this too, but the applications to law school—my thing—but also legal hiring—also my thing, a little less—it swings on this pendulum. And hiring goes down, and there's a panic. I mean, I was a dean of career services during the Great Recession, and there was a deep panic, but hiring went back up. Applications go down, and schools panic, but in my entire adult life, this thing swings back and forth. And I think it may swing down with AI for a couple of years, would be my best guess, and then businesses find ways to need more things that students with judgmental capacity, with moral capacity, with human stress mitigation capacity—I could go on forever—have needs, and then the pendulum goes back again.

Bill: And that's true. I graduated from law school in 1985, and we've seen a lot of cycles since then. Cycles in which entry-level hiring has gone down, and when it's gone back up. One of the things that's changed over time is, a lot of times in the past, firms overreacted to cycles, and so some of them stopped hiring first-year associates, and then in two years, the market had changed, and then they didn't have any now third-year associates. Or other times when the economy turned, big firms let people go, and then they realized in the next cycle when there was incredible demand for associates, people didn't want to go to a firm that had a reputation for letting people go. So I think firms are more cautious and they're more aware that cycles shift over time.

Mike: I've seen that since the Great Recession. There's less elasticity. They've built that into their models. They realize that they were too reactive during the Great Recession.

Bill: Because they really were overreactive. You know, I mean, what we saw in a very short period of time was, big firm hiring was cut in half, and firms realized that that was an overreaction.

[30:36] Mike: Yeah. And it hurt them, which is what they care about.

Which kind of segues to something I'm curious your take. We're on a multi-year surge in applicants to law school, and the number of registrants for the August LSAT is up 50% from last year. Now, there'll be some melt. People won't show up, for understandable reasons. It's not going to end over 50%, but it's going to end up on a very up year. So not only are we up 18% in applications—which you know as well as I, that's pretty rare in admissions—this year, we're probably going to be up decently this coming cycle. And now we're on multi-years of having more applicants than the previous year. So we're in this glide path upward. Do you have any thoughts on why that is?

Bill: So, one thing that I think has produced the increased number of applicants is actually the president, Trump's, administration. I think before 2017, there had been a real focus on business and on technology, and the most talented students thought, "These are the opportunities to pursue." And now what people realize is, the rule of law is something that can be at risk, and it's very important. And so that has just spiked a real drive in applications to law school. So I actually think one of the reasons why we're seeing such a big leap now is precisely what we're seeing in national politics. We saw the exact same thing in 2017, huge increases. So there's an upward trend generally, but I think the fact that college graduates now grasp the importance of the rule of law is one of the reasons why applications are up. There's increased interest in climate and environment that's driving other opportunities. Again, this administration is turning away from supporting jobs that focus on climate change, but things that I think recent graduates focus on right now reflect the environment and reflect what they realize is important. And rule of law is at the top of the list.

Mike: Yeah, I would say that there's obviously micro levers, but to me, there's two macro levers. You nailed one. The other one is, I think for the first time ever since 1988, when they started measuring this, unemployment levels with people graduating from college are higher than people not graduating from college. What's known as the "great stay," people aren't leaving professional-level jobs, is really limiting entry-level jobs for college graduates. To me, that would be the other factor.

Bill: So another thing that we've seen, kind of generally over time, is the number of law school applicants is responsive to market conditions. Now, one of the things that's interesting, again, that kind of runs against the standard over time is, law school applications typically go up when the economy is poor, because people graduate from college and they think, "I'm going to be unemployed, so why not go to law school?" What we're seeing right now is the economy is pretty good. So that's not the reason why people are applying to law school. Now, I think your point about people staying in their jobs and that affecting college graduates' opportunities is right, but again, the other factor is the economy is very good. And so it's really—it's unusual to see applications go up when the economy is good.

Mike: Yeah, it's multifactorial. One thing I do know is, the market will self-correct. We're going to have an up year this coming year, and I can't predict longer than a year out, but then applications are going to come down. This is the one thing I know with certainty, because I've seen it for my entire adult life.

If you were an applicant right now, if you were applying to law school, knowing what you know now, what factors would you consider in choosing a law school to attend?

[33:56] Bill: One factor is the reputation of the school, because the reputation of the school is very closely tied to career opportunities. Another is, you know, I think experiential education is absolutely crucial for the opportunities that people have, how good you're going to be as a lawyer. So I would look at that. I would look at what kind of jobs are people getting, and are those the kind of jobs that I'm interested in? It's not just the percentage of graduates who get jobs, but are they the kind of jobs that you're interested in?

What's the mission of the school? Georgetown's mission is, you know, "Law is but the means, justice is the end." We really educate people who are going to follow all different paths. Some are going to be in big law. Some are going to go to corporations. They're going to go into government. They're going to go into nonprofits. But the school is a school that really is focused on helping people think through what they want to do and then how do they get there. So different schools have different missions, and so think about, is this the right fit for you?

You know, so, Yale Law School sends people into academia. Is that where you want to go? If you want to practice in a local market, you know, if you want to practice in Columbus, Ohio, going to Ohio State gives you all kinds of opportunities. So, you know again, I think people don't really focus in so much on this as applicants. What kind of law you want to practice, where you want to practice, and what the mission of the school is, those are things that should be very high on your focus.

Mike: How does someone parse out reputation from rankings that are given and dictated to them? When I was an admissions officer, so many applicants would walk around with the rankings in their hands and go to the tables. They could choose their number, the top 14 law schools, the top 25 law schools, and they would hard stop based on something, metrics that were dictated to them that they don't even know the methodology of. So how would you parse out reputation from rankings?

Bill: Let me just talk about the rankings for a minute before I get to how students should evaluate them. You know, Mike—because we've talked many times over the years about this—that I have been very troubled by U.S. News' approach over time and, you know, the fact that the people who put together the rankings had no idea about what a legal education should consist of. And so for many years, the dominant factor was spending per student, and so Yale was always #1 because it had a huge endowment. And so, among other things, that caused students to go to schools that just had a big endowment, regardless of whether there was any other fit. And then also, within spending per student, it was also tailored towards rewarding some spending more than others. For example, if I had a dollar and I was just concerned about ranking, and I used it to buy books for the library, for the ranking, that was rewarded in a way that giving a dollar for need-based financial aid was penalized. So it was a terrible system.

So we pulled out. Yale terrifically led the way. Georgetown was one of the schools that pulled out shortly thereafter, and I worked very closely with Heather Gerken, the Dean at Yale, who really was the first one to pull out, which was very important. Now they're focused on outputs, but again, they don't really know what they're doing. You know, if you look at what's the output? So bar passage a few years ago was 3% of the ranking; now it's 25%. And bar passage is significant, because if you haven't passed the bar you can't practice law, but to go 3% to 25%—and to do it at a time in which the legal profession is actually turning away from the bar. The next-gen bar is being put into place. So in jurisdiction over jurisdiction, they're saying, "The bar passage is just kind of rote memorization. You know, we don't want to use that as the gateway to the profession." So you have these kind of two inconsistent trends. You have, kind of, the profession is turning away from evaluating bar passage as getting it right, and U.S. News is just—3% to 25% is just stunning. And again, I think it's because they're really not thoughtful about the way in which they make the evaluations.

When I started at Fordham, one year Fordham was ranked 25th in the country, and the next year they went to 40th. And the reason why they went from 25th to 40th is U.S. News decided to stop considering average starting salary, which was a great fact for Fordham because it was very tied into the big firms of New York. So we went from 25th to 40th, like, in a year, and people were like, "Why is Fordham falling apart?" And it had nothing to do—actually, Fordham was stronger in all of the metrics. It's just that they took away the starting salary as a factor.

So I think one thing as a prospective student that they should think about is realizing that U.S. News is not educators. They are people who are coming up with rankings, but it's not an accurate system. And so people will say, "I'm going to go to Vanderbilt as opposed to Georgetown because this year Vanderbilt's ahead of Georgetown" or "Georgetown's ahead of Vanderbilt." That really is making so precious what U.S. News does in a way that has nothing to do with what students should be looking for.

[38:58] Mike: I could eviscerate rankings off the planet, but I won't. But I will give two things of optimism. Number one, I used to meet with hiring partners as part of my job responsibility. I've met with hundreds, if not thousands. I've yet to meet a single managing partner or hiring partner of a firm who could name the current top 10 law schools accurately. Not one. They always get them wrong. And they revert to what they think is prestige, which is what you mean by reputation. So, you know, the hiring authorities aren't noticing micro-changes, like Vanderbilt jumped up or Vanderbilt jumped down, Georgetown jumped up. They're not even aware of these things.

The second reason for optimism would be, the person who has, I would use the word arbitrarily at times, done things like changing bar passage from 3% to 25%—I could give some pretty strong examples, I'm going to hold back—that person had a long-standing career and stepped down. So here's an opportunity to maybe look at, why do we make these changes to the methodology? What is the impact? And what going forward would be more sensible, higher education-oriented changes versus business changes? So it's an opportunity. I don't know how it's going to break, but I think it's an opportunity.

Bill: I mean, what I would hope, and I've pushed over the years a lot of times, is that somebody else would start doing rankings. I mean, there are other rankings, but, you know, one of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, somebody that has kind of great stature, really even outside the profession, would start doing rankings. Because I think, you know, it's like in business school, there are different ranking systems and people can feel like, "I'm interested in starting salary," or, "I'm interested in the quality of the faculty," or, "I'm interested in the student experience," and there are different ranking systems that prioritize different factors. So it would be better if we could move to a world in which the Wall Street Journal looks at average starting salary; I mean, you look at everything, but weighing certain things differently would lead to different outcomes. And then you could decide, "I'm an applicant. What reflects what I value?"

Mike: Yeah, we do that, by the way. We have something called My Rank by Spivey. It's free, and you can play with all the different metrics and weigh them however much you want.

Bill: Which is terrific, but the students don't want that.

Mike: There's evolutionary and societal reasons why people like ordinal rankings, and there are reasons I'm not aware of, but you might be, that in the legal arena we haven't had a diffusion of rankings to other sources. We've had people clinging to this one thing. And I think it's because, if I had to guess, is the legal arena is prestige- and attribute-based more than most, and they like one source saying this is where the prestige rests.

Bill: When I've talked to different publishers, the major factor for them is that it's a very small market. There aren't that many people who apply to law school. So if the Wall Street Journal was to devote a tremendous amount of resources to do law school rankings, there are not that many people who would buy the Wall Street Journal because they're doing that ranking, because there aren't that many law school applicants. So the amount of money is limited. So I think that's a major factor.

[41:52] Mike: We'll look into dental schools and see if there's only one source. We'll test your theory.

Any final thoughts going forward about the next 5, 10, 15 years other than AI? What have you been proud of most of what you've accomplished at Georgetown? And what will all your successors, at any school, what do you think is most optimistic that they could be proud of 10 to 15 years from now?

Bill: One of the things that I'm very committed to is access and supporting people. You know, my father was a doctor. I had all the opportunities in the world growing up. So I don't have a personal experience with doors opening up to me because of scholarship support. But my grandfather was a fireman who dropped out of school in fourth grade when his parents died. And he worked as a handyman and as a fireman, and my father had the opportunities to become a doctor because he got scholarships to high school and to college and to medical school. I know that because of the opportunities he had, I had opportunities and my kids have opportunities. So opening the door has been very important to me. So yeah, I'm very proud that at Georgetown, during my time, you know, we've doubled the level of financial aid.

And particularly, we have a program that has just dramatically increased that's called the Opportunity Scholars Program, which are for high-merit, high-need applicants. I remember a few years ago, I was walking across the courtyard at the law school, and a student came up to me, and it was just before we were going to have a fundraiser for the Opportunity Scholarship program. And he said, "I just want to let you know, Dean Treanor, I would never have dreamed that I could get into Georgetown Law and attend. I'm not only the first person in my family to graduate from college, I'm the first one to graduate from high school. And I'm from a little town in Alabama that you have never heard of, but it's really because of this program that I am able to be at Georgetown, and that's a dream come true." And I'm very committed, and I'm very proud of the increase in financial aid.

We've had a program called RISE, which has about 100 students in every class right now, and it's for people from backgrounds where they're not exposed to the legal profession so much growing up. And we provide them with, what's a law school classroom looking like? How do you prepare for exams? How do you look for your first job? And I think in the last four years, three of the four editors-in-chief of the Law Journal and three of the four presidents of the Student Bar Association have been RISE fellows. So the increase in opportunity has been very, very important to me, and I'm very proud of that.

The other thing that I always highlight is, we've tripled the number of experiential opportunities for students. So we've expanded clinics, we've expanded practica, we've expanded externships, because I think hands-on learning is just very powerful, and so it was important to me to increase those opportunities. And then I've also focused in on tech. So we've done a lot of hiring in the law and tech area, and we have established a Tech Scholars Program. And we have courses like learning programming for lawyers, learning AI for lawyers, because that's so much about where the profession is going.

And then the final thing that I highlight when I talk about my career is the postgraduate opportunities for public service. So we have had as many as 50 students, graduating students a year, get public interest jobs because of fellowships that we've started. So we have created something called partner fellowships, where we put up basically half the money for a fellowship, and a government agency or a nonprofit puts up the other half, and then it's a fellowship for a year. And that has made such a difference because it's a pathway into public interest, because in public interest, the hardest jobs to get are the first job. Those are the things that I highlight that I'm really most proud of.

You know, we'll have a new building, which I spent a lot of time fundraising for, which I'm incredibly excited about, that will reflect the way we teach now. Better clinical space, smaller classrooms. You know, it's been 15 years, and the average law school deanship is about 4 years, as you know.

[45:49] Mike: Yes. I may get into executive search because of that statistic, but it's a tough job. I think a lot of faculty don't realize how tough of a job it is. There's so many different stakeholders, but let's not end on that note.

Very few people who are listening now will care about what legal education is going to look like in 10 years. What about in 2 years? Let's end on that note.

Bill: I think in 2 years, what we're going to see is if the ABA council adopts this rule, you're going to have to have 12 experiential courses, which they may very well. There's going to be a ramp-up time. So in the next two years, you're going to see a dramatic increase in experiential courses. I think we're going to see more increase in tech courses, because people know that's where the jobs are. AI is only going to increase that. So that will be kind of a very immediate factor, both in terms of what's offered, faculty hiring. And then the kind of jobs that students get.

So I think those will be the two biggest changes that we're going to see in the next two years. The biggest concern that I have is what we talked about earlier, which is that the administration might move away from allowing independent professional authorities then take it over by the government. That's a possibility, and that would be a terrible change.

Mike: So when people ask me this question, I'm kind of talking sideways because this is not my expertise, but I also bring up the possibility—tell me if I'm crazy—with the ability for students to produce work at home that's not theirs and the stories that are becoming more rampant about the percentage of undergraduate papers/take-home exams that are floated past the professors that are produced by AI, do you see a world where, it's not back to the Socratic method, but you see oral examinations becoming a part of grading of students? Because you're on the spot, you don't have an ally.

Bill: You know, we're very focused, and I think every law school faculty across the country is focusing on, how do you deal with AI and exams? A year ago when AI was less sophisticated than it is now, one of our faculty members said, "You know, I teach an upper-level tax course, and I put an exam question in and immediately got an answer, and it was, like, between an A- and a B+." So I mean, you know, this is a very complicated, difficult-to-master area, and boom. We're all trying to figure out, how do we respond to that?

You know, we're seeing right now, kind of, immediate changes of fewer take-home exams, because you can get really good answers through the technology, more in-class exams, you know, exams where you don't have access to the internet. Closed-book exams. Who knows? We may even see at some point oral exams, you know, as you suggest, or written exams, handwriting.

Mike: I was wondering about that.

Bill: Yeah, I mean, when I started that was—most students did handwritten exams, and for the faculty member, that was a nightmare. And it will also, if we go that way, it will put a priority on mastering cursive!

Mike: I'm doomed. My handwriting is dysgraphic. There's a word for it; you can't read it.

Bill: Mine is exactly like that. And I think when I was in law school, a lot of the people who had excellent grades were people who had excellent handwriting. We may see a return to Palmer penmanship, Palmer penmanship workbooks.

[48:51] Mike: Well, it's funny because, and this is a great note to end on, I do think that there's a possibility we go back to systems and processes that are so antiquated like handwriting exams. I found online an old Elon College application from, like, I'm not kidding, 1870 or whatever. I'm making that up. It might've been older. And one of the questions they asked for admissions was, how is your health? So the more things change... I think we're going to see in admissions a lot of emphasis on interviews over essays or test scores. I think interviews are the future of admissions. 60 years ago, that's how admissions was done. So I like it; I like that trend.

Bill: Yeah, but it's also, it's a problem, interviews. That can really reflect, "What do I personally value? Who looks like me?" So, you know, if we're going to go that way, we have to be very careful that we do it in a very systemized and careful way. For example, when we do searches for positions, we hire a search firm so that they will say, "Here are the seven questions that you ask every applicant. The rigor and the systematization." You know, when you move to something that feels old school, it's also got to be different than it was 20 years ago.

Mike: Right. I think smart people are working on these things. I'm optimistic. Any final thoughts, Bill?

Bill: This is the time in which the rule of law is more important than ever. I'm very aware of the threats that we're confronting and the challenges to the ability of law schools and universities to teach what they think they should be teaching. At this time, you know, in which we're facing a real threat to the rule of law, I think what we do in law schools is more important than ever. And I was very proud of my response to Ed Martin and the uniformly positive response that I received—uniformly, from people on the left, from people around the world—shows that this is a moment in which people are realizing that the rule of law is crucial, and it's important to fight for it.

Mike: So we're proud to have had you on and honored. If anyone tries to bully us, I'm going to give you a call. I know how to reach you. I won’t send Domino's pizza.

Bill: I will be keeping the lines open, Mike.

Mike: Thank you, Bill.

Bill: It was terrific to be on this podcast; thanks for the opportunity.