Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2023

DOI

10.1111/ajes.12488

Publication Title

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Volume

82

Issue

1

Pages

29-42

Abstract

We rely upon a 50-state, 20-year panel to find that the number of Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) takers is only loosely related to economic conditions—although slightly more for men than for women, who in 2020 accounted for 58% of all LSAT takers. The number of test takers rose more than 35% between 2014 and 2020. This wave accentuated an already existing downtrend in the median real income of lawyers, and thus provides support for the hypothesis that most states have more lawyers than they need.

Rights

© 2022 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Comments

[Data Availability Statement] Article States: LSAT data were supplied confidentially to the authors by the Law School Admissions Council. All other data are available on request from author James V. Koch, jkoch@odu.edu.

ORCID

0000-0002-6221-814X (Koch), 0000-0002-5895-3707 (Gonzalez)

Original Publication Citation

Koch, J. V., & Blake-Gonzalez, B. (2023). Using the LSAT as a labor market thermometer for lawyers. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 82(1), 29-42. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12488

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