BY STEVEN LUBET

When the University of Alabama returned over $21 million to its largest-ever single donor, and removed his name from its law school, it either was or wasn’t because of his outspoken opposition to the state’s ultra-restrictive new abortion law. According to Hugh Culverhouse, Jr., “the administrators at the university [chose] zealotry over the well-being of its own students” in retribution for his support for an ACLU lawsuit against the state, and especially his call for a student boycott as long as the abortion statute remained on the books. The university tells a different story, stating that the dispute had instead been over Culverhouse’s attempted interference in academic matters, including “numerous demands about the operations of the University of Alabama School of Law.”

Writing recently in the Washington Post, University of Alabama law professor Ronald Krotoszynski provided some details. Without taking sides in the larger dispute, Krotoszynski confirms that Culverhouse “was insisting on Alabama significantly increasing the law school’s entering class size,” which, Krotoszynski explains, would have been a very bad idea.

“Class size has a direct, and inverse, relationship to employment outcomes for graduates,” Krotoszysnki explained, and the current job market – only now recovering from the crash of 2008 – dictates that Alabama keep its entering classes relatively small. And there are further obvious benefits such as fostering an intimate learning atmosphere and, of course, maintaining student quality.

Krotoszysnki makes an additional point, however, which I think is mistaken:

Rather than pushing for law schools to enroll more students, it would be better if would-be donors facilitated public-interest career paths by making it possible for current law students to graduate with lower debt loads. Taking this step would permit more newly minted lawyers to take positions that involve providing legal services to chronically underserved communities desperately in need of them.

I am all in favor of reducing student debt loads. But that is not likely to result in more students taking “lower-paying jobs as prosecutors and public defenders, and with state and federal agencies,” simply because the number of such jobs is relatively fixed and there are already more applicants than slots. So even if more graduates are able to enter public interest work, the number of jobs is not going to expand to accommodate them.

Krotoszynski is not the only one to make this claim, of course. It is a staple among educators and deans, but that doesn’t make it right. An economist colleague of mine explained it this way:

An economist would think of this as a shift outward in the labor supply curve (which is usually thought of as upward-sloping). Indebtedness goes down, and the hypothesized response is that at every wage level, there are more people willing to work as public-interest lawyers.

But what about the labor-demand side? I would say that there’s no reason to believe that labor demand would shift at all. Why would it? If labor demand does not shift, then the increase in labor supply just moves us along the labor demand curve.

And there could then be unintended consequences:

A outward shift in supply means that supply and demand cross at a new equlibrium: with a lower wage and a larger number of people employed as public-interest lawyers. So there might be more public interest lawyers, but it would be even less remunerative, which is exactly what the shift outward in labor supply means: there are more people would be willing to work at a lower wage. In this case, that willingness comes from carrying less debt.

Of course, a reduction in debt burdens might result in different lawyers taking public interest jobs – as the newly debt-free lawyers enter the competition for the limited spots as public defenders, prosecutors, and legal services attorneys – but that doesn’t mean the public will be better served. I am not aware of any correlation between indebtedness and quality, and I doubt that one could ever be shown. Given an inelastic supply of jobs, every applicant hired – no matter how indebted she is or isn’t – will just displace someone else.

The “less debt means more public interest” meme is attractive but inaccurate. In over four decades in academics (and a couple of years in legal services before that), I have never known a public interest job to remain empty because there was no one to take it.

Law students are carrying too much debt, which law schools should address in every way possible, even though that will not increase the number of public interest lawyers.

Public interest jobs are underfunded and too few, which is a separate issue. At the risk of sounding like a Republican, the solution to that problem is on the supply side. And at the risk of sounding even more like a Republican, the real need is for more job creators. Perhaps Mr. Culverhouse could use his $21.5 million to open a new legal services office dedicated to abortion rights. They could surely use one in Alabama.

Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor of Law at Northwestern University.