The issue of ABA law school accreditation and the passage rates achieved by law schools is obviously quite volatile.  The arguments pro and con the proposed ABA rule on accreditation and the need for law schools to achieve a 75% bar passage rate over a two year period contain hidden agendas that involve preset political positions and the self interest of a variety of groups, including the ABA, HBCU’s and law teachers who are already threatened by sharply falling enrollments. 

 

I have tried to stay away from this issue for several reasons, one of which is that I am working away on a book on Artificial Intelligence/robotics (AI/robotics), job destruction and the resulting harm to the remnants of our “democracy” caused by having a very large number of chronically unemployed people who must somehow be supported in a system that has massive and growing governmental debt issues.  As I write that book it has become increasingly apparent that job loss on all levels, including law, promises to be considerably more significant and rapid than we might think. 

 

Serious analysts project up to fifty percent of jobs disappearing to AI/robotics systems in five-ten-or fifteen years in a sweeping transformation of work as we know it—including banking, finance, medicine and law—not to mention the low-level menial or repetitive labor tasks we automatically think of when considering the impacts of Artificial Intelligence and robotics.  Nor, as I have written elsewhere, should we take comfort in thinking that we are simply experiencing an innovative phase of a Schumpeterian cycle of “creative destruction” with a new burst of creative replacement production on the other side of the transformation.  What we are faced with is a permanent replacement by AI/robotics of all kinds of work in very significant numbers all the way up and down the hierarchy of work.