Under no circumstances is this something Louisiana needs. The most overlawyered state in the union categorically does not need, and should not tolerate, a directional school starting up a factory for more middling attorneys. But Northwestern State hired a lawyer and former state Supreme Court Justice as their school president, and the old saw about how when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail immediately kicked in…

Northwestern State is in the process of establishing a law school. Currently, there are only four law schools in the state, none of which are in North Louisiana. Executive Vice President and Provost Greg Handel says people in the region want a law school in North Louisiana.

“We have probably 20 or 22 letters of support from attorneys and law firms and legislative delegations really getting behind the fact that this really is needed in this part of the state,” Handel said.

The idea started picking up steam when the school hired NSU graduate and former Louisiana Supreme Court Justice James Genovese as its new president last year. Handel says there are many steps that need to happen before the university can officially launch its law school.

“We would get some approvals this summer, this fall, and we would be able to go ahead and hire a few faculty staff and a founding dean to do some recruiting, to write accreditation documents, to write that curriculum and get all of that approved,” Handel explained.

Handel says they hope to welcome the first students in the fall of 2026.

“There will be some barriers along the way, but if we do our best on the front end to submit a strong proposal, we feel those barriers are surmountable for us,” Handel said.

We have 4.5 million people and four law schools, two of them public. This would make five law schools, or one for every 900,000 people in the state.

In Texas, they’ve got somewhere close to 31 million people and 10 law schools. In Florida the population is 23 million and there are 11 law schools. Arkansas has three million people and two law schools. Alabama? Five million people and three law schools. South Carolina? Five and a half million and two law schools.

Two of Louisiana’s four law schools are private – Tulane and Loyola. Both are in New Orleans. Several years ago there was a push to build a law school in Shreveport, and it was Louisiana College – now Louisiana Christian University – trying to build one.

An interesting bit of trivia: the chancellor of the proposed law school at the time was one Mike Johnson, now the current House Speaker on Capitol Hill in D.C.

Louisiana College couldn’t ultimately put the funding together to build that law school. We’re going to take that as evidence that the market simply doesn’t demand a law school in Shreveport or anywhere else in the northwestern part of the state.

And you certainly don’t want to exacerbate that problem by spending tax dollars pumping a supply of lawyers into a market which does not need more of them.

I can’t find the video clip to show it, but what this brings to mind is a great old movie called Reign of Fire, starring Christian Bale and Matthew McConnaughey. In it, dragons have reappeared from thousands of years of hibernation underground and have taken over the world, killing and eating practically everything that moves, and only a smattering of humanity is left.

And there’s a scene toward the end where the dragons start starving so much they begin eating each other to survive.

We’ve been advancing toward an analogy of that scenario with respect to lawyers in Louisiana for years.

Anecdotally, and I have no doubt the numbers will back this up but I’m a little too pressed for time to dig them up, but you’ll hear again and again that jobs at law firms in Louisiana are almost impossible to get and graduates of the four law schools in the state commonly either take jobs outside of the law, thereby wasting three years of their lives in many cases, or worse than that they’ll hang up a shingle.

We generally love small businesses here. But law as an entrepreneurial endeavor is not the same thing as making widgets or fixing cars. A society with too many lawyers is a litigious society, and inevitably an overregulated society, because if the lawyers don’t have enough to do they will make work for themselves in multiple ways, and that’s a society which will soon be less free and less prosperous than its neighbors.

We’re oversupplied with lawyers as it is. Under no circumstances should we be subsidizing a further oversupply by allowing a directional school in a tiny market with limited prestige and not much private endowment to bootstrap itself into opening a law school.

The state legislature and the University of Louisiana board need to put a stop to this now. It would be one thing if Louisiana Christian or Centenary were to make a run at building a private law school in North Louisiana. It’s another entirely to demand taxpayers fund an exacerbation of a fairly well-understood problem.