Wow, there are a lot of new students at UCLA this year. New lockers in the library, new student mailboxes, crowded classrooms ... it's like being at the DMV!

But, as a professor explained to me, the big story is not the uptick in JDs. We admitted about 20-30 more 1Ls than normal this year, despite the large drop in applications last year. Did we increase our admission rate? Unclear, I'll have to wait for next year's US News rankings.

The problem with JDs is that 1) many of them are on financial aid 2) many of them get discounted state resident tuition 3) much of the tuition collected has to be kicked back to the UC system for general costs.

No, the big story is LLMs. We apparently tripled our LLM enrollment from about 15 last year to about 50 this year. LLMs have none of the above-mentioned problems of JDs: they pay full fare, and the law school keeps all the money. So that's a hefty profit margin, baby.

Why are LLMs willing to pay for the privilege? My understanding is that if someone with a foreign law degree wants to sit for the California bar, one way to do it is get a local LLM first. Some LLMs seem to get what's going on; others, I'm less sure about. But either way, law schools are in a position to exact a tax from them as a prerequisite to practicing law here.

(Little known LLM benefit: all LLMs get an extra 15 minutes per hour of exam time. This is designed to make it easier for those whose grasp of English is not so hot, but even LLMs who speak English beautifully get the bonus time.)

I'm not complaining, mind you &mdash after that Kashmiri unpleasantness, the law school has a bit of a budget deficit to close up. If taxing foreigners is the answer, rather than raising my fees, so be it. Whoops, is that more discrimination by national origin? Well, I guess I can let it slide.

24 Aug 06