The bubble metaphor pops again

Law school admissions appear to have dropped 11.5% this year, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Slate Magazine's Annie Lowry goes for more drama, suggesting that “the law school bubble may have just burst.” In addition, while the Journal emphasizes the decline in the legal job market in recent years, Lowry, noting that it has recently turned up again (and not considering response lags) posits that "the biggest reason may be cultural, not economic. In the past year or two, scads of blogs have committed themselves to exposing law school as a 'scam,' and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have devoted thousands of words to telling readers why law school is a bad, bad idea if you do not actually want to be a lawyer."

How about legal fiction as a contributing cause? Let's look at a randomly (?) chosen recent entry that is all too typical in its negativity, if atypically satiric rather than melodramatic in approach:

"At the well-appointed offices of Ashby & Cinders, Peter Crossley, the partner who had been rather casually appointed to handle the new Barlow matter, was waiting for his subordinates. They were due to visit him at 4 o'clock, and already it was 3:59:30."

Not sure I'd want to go to school for 3 years (even if it's really not that bad) just as prep to work in a place with people like that.