It seems that everyone, from Barack Obama down, thinks there is something wrong with America's law schools. The president questions whether their graduate courses need to be as long as three years. Potential students are spurning them: applications are falling, other than at a few elite institutions. Michael Schill, the dean of one of those top schools, at the University of Chicago, laments that lawyers are no longer making it to the top of big companies as they used to. Surveys suggest practising lawyers are miserable, perhaps because they feel their career prospects are limited. Many lawyers end up working in business, but their legal education leaves them ill-prepared for this. Apart from a bit of accounting, law-school courses typically contain little that is of help in running an enterprise. So Chicago's law school has just launched a programme in which students will also take courses from the university's Booth business school-the world's best, according to The Economist's latest 'Which MBA?' league table.
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