Brace yourselves, young attorneys and law students: you may soon face more competition in the job market.

The University of Massachusetts is pushing to open a new public law school. Strange timing, huh, given that this is perhaps the worst job market for lawyers since, well,
ever?

The Globe has a report today on the law-school plan, which was first introduced ─ and rejected ─ four years ago by the state Board of Higher Education.

The revived plan calls for UMass-Dartmouth to take over the private Southern New England School of Law in North Dartmouth.

“Law is a missing piece of the UMass curriculum,” said Jean MacCormack, chancellor of UMass-Dartmouth. “This would fill in that gap.”

We admit they seem to have a fairly strong case give that Mass has no public law school.
Still, the proposed new law school would be no bargain: $24,000 a year in tuition, fees and books. That is, of course, more affordable than many law schools. But given the glut of lawyers in the foreseeable future ─ along with recent past ─ that’s still a fair amount of debt to take on. Perhaps, on the other hand, a UMass public law school would not be much bigger than the existing law school it would acquire.

The stiffest opponents in the past of the plan, the Globe reports, were Suffolk Law School, New England School of Law, and Western New England School of Law in Springfield. They argued at the time that the new school would cost taxpayers millions while burdening the state with more law schools and lawyers than it needs.