When I was a kid, one of the most popular ways to finish the “you’re as useless as” line was with “a screen door on a submarine.”

The proposed law school at UC-Irvine deserves that criticism. There is no shortage of lawyers in California — even the American Bar Association agrees. Furthermore, California is, perhaps surprisingly, a state with a very open policy on entry into the legal profession. People don’t have to graduate from an ABA-accredited school to be eligible to take the state bar exam.

And, as former UC regent Velma Montoya observes, if there were an increase in demand for legal education, there’s nothing to stop the existing schools from expanding to take advantage of it.

Nevertheless, it appears from this IHE story that the state wants to go ahead and blow a lot of taxpayer money so Irvine can have a law school geared toward training “public interest” lawyers. There’s a commodity we really don’t need any more of.