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by Michael Maiello

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What's Wrong With Law School? A Lot.

by Articleman 11/25/2011 - 11:22 pm   |

While in a Starbucks on vacation this week, I was surprised to see that the New York Times placed above the fold a supposed news item about how law schools aren't actually training folks to be lawyers.  This isn't really news to anyone who knows anything about American law schools, much less anyone who incurred three years of debt to attend one.  But the real reason the piece was a supposed news item is that it was in fact a very long, wide-ranging, and thoughtful editorial piece about the many failings of legal academe.  This blog is about why I agree with its many critiques of our broken legal academe.

 
Law Schools Hide From Their Vocational Nature
 
Law school is trade school.  It just is.  Unfortunately, most of the people who teach in law schools don't understand this, or even find such a statement preposterous or offensive.  Teaching students how to pass the bar is a mission for the least respected (and least exclusive) law schools, which sometimes sport higher bar pass rates than far more highly rated schools with more intelligent cohorts of students.  The ideal of the contemplative, cloistered first year of law school as a time to learn lawyerly critical thinking feeds an aversion to teaching the practice of law.  The emphasis in law school thus remains on learning fairly general subject matters in the abstract without any practical application of the learning.  
 
Concededly, law schools have improved their clinical offerings (e.g., courses in actual practice) in number and quality in the last two decades.  Yet clinical offerings are far fewer in number than classic, general subject courses, and those that exist remain heavily weighted toward litigation experiences and the provision of services to indigents.  While I continue to provide legal services to indigents and think it great to do, good legal education would offer opportunities to learn how to deal with the mundane nonlitigation matters that are so much of private practice in America:  real estate transactions, divorces, advising small businesses, tax advice.  Yet these are things that students are particularly ill-suited to supporting.  Accordingly, law schools do not tend to provide meaningful interactions with, or training in, these experiences.
 
Legal scholarship certainly ignores the vocational nature of law school to its great detriment.  Chief Justice Roberts actually nails this when he points out that much of what passes for legal scholarship is of no aid to the bar or bench.  He is right.  Particularly as law schools people themselves with J.D.-Ph.D.'s, law reviews tend to fill with absurdly narrow treatises on obscure historical or economic subjects, or exegeses of an author's given identity politics.  To obtain tenure, one needs to do something novel, and thus, authors traipse further into new terrains of narrowness and irrelevance, to plant their flags in ever-more obscure subject areas.  Law review article titles are often puns around weirdly narrow cultural markers, with a colon in between to set the pun off from the narrowly drawn and drolly expressed subject.
 
The inanely esoteric nature of much legal scholarship is particularly frustrating, given the openings for scholarship that can really matter.  Issues like how:  the Supreme Court's turn toward fact pleading in the Iqbal and Twombly cases have affected litigation and clients; race, class, and gender continue to impact the enforcement of criminal laws; the nonpublication of court decisions leads to incoherence and unaccountability by courts that should publish all of their written work; and so forth.  There is a lot that is intellectually rich in the practically impactful.  And yet most scholarship turns away from these pursuits as less worthy than self-evidently impractical matters such as critical theory.  After all, why write about how judges sentence the accused, or how prosecutors decide to exercise their discretion as among different groups of offenders, when you can write about Jurgen Habermas?  
 
Law Schools Hate Lawyers and Law Practice
 
Then there is the allergy to having anyone teach law school who is a real lawyer.  Legal academics don't like lawyers in their ranks, and they widely acknowledge that too much law practice (meaning, more than a meaninglessly uneducational and token year to three years) makes you less attractive to faculties choosing new junior members.  Seriously, how stupid is that?  The justification is that through practicing law one becomes too practically-minded and insufficiently theoretically-minded to be a top-flight professor.  That suggestion is simply moronic, a badly-reasoned patina of argument that scarcely masks cultural bias.  Of course someone smart enough upon graduation from law school to "do theory" -- whatever that means -- remains smart enough to do it two or four or ten years later.  The real differences between the preferred nonlawyer and the less-preferred lawyer are twofold:  (1) the age-advanced lawyer comes to understand law as a practical thing (what you'd think trade schools would appreciate and benefit from, since their charges will mostly replicate that career track and not the professor's); and (2) the age-advanced lawyer comes to acquire a skill the academic lacks.  This makes the academic culture feel all hurty and threatened, so it retreats into a delusional value system in which practicality is deemed disadvantageous, so the academic can replicate his or her own cultural bias, and can feel smugly superior to people who understand better than they do what they prepare their young charges to do.
 
I experienced this weird bias against practice the two times I interviewed to be a law professor, which is done at an annual conference of school representatives.  As a second year lawyer, I got really nice interviews and was the first called back by one school (meaning I was their presumptive leading candidate).  As a fourth year lawyer, despite having a new law review article in a very good journal, I got fewer callbacks.  I was suddenly too old for legal academics, sullied as I was by two more years of the practice of law.  Because we want really smart, inexperienced 28 year olds teaching 23 year olds what it is to be a lawyer, apparently.  Ecch.  I also saw this anti-practice slant when I taught law as extension faculty much later in life.  Real professors do not want to help students learn legal writing, not that they understand it well, judging from the character and style of much scholarly output.  No, lawyers are brought in to do this dirty work, though when I was in school legal writing was such an academic ghetto that it was taught by other students.  Consider that legal writing is most of what lawyers really do, writing briefs and memoranda.  Despite that fact, practicality-challenged professors can't and don't teach it, and often outsource it to a motley group of underpaid or unpaid volunteers from the local bar.
 
Given Their Allergy To Practice, Law Professors and Law Education Are Much the Worse
 
All of this has consequences.  Pedagogically, a professor who never practices law is ill-suited to teach professional responsibility, where rules meet difficult and complex practice situations.  A professor who never practices law is ill-suited to teaching the rules of procedure, because the professor doesn't have experience with how variably they are enforced, and how their practice and meaning changes with the folkways of particular markets or judges.  These professors are teaching blackletter law -- vanilla rules -- but not practice.  The conceit that it is not the course subject but the discussion that is the core of legal education has a limited validity.  Yes, during the first year of law school, the type of critical thinking fostered in Socratic discussions of rule-based material is very valuable to future lawyers.  And the first sip of a bottle of Coke is really tasty, too.  But like the last two-thirds of a bottle of Coke, the last two years of law school taste worse than the first swig, and add empty (intellectual) calories to the consumer:  the discussion-form is repetitive, old-hat, and adds no value in and of itself, as the second and third years are about specialized subjects, not Socraticism.  
 
Academics don't get exposed to what law really is:  the exercise of imperative force by the state against a private person, or by a corporation or private person against another.  Contracts or rules of procedure are not simply ideas.  They are ways to get things from others, or to have things taken from you.  These actions help and hurt real people, sometimes very deeply.  Lawyers understand these realities better than academics, because they have that "practical" thing the academy so abhors.  
 
Law School Takes Too Long, and Kills Its Victims With Debt
 
The legal academe protects itself not only with its asinine preference for those virginally pure of law practice, but also by forcing students to buy three years of its product.  If law school were two years and not three, there would be less of a need for faculty, as the number of courses taught would decline accordingly.  For this reason, law school will always be three years and not two.  The crushing debt loads that today's law students shoulder -- mine was $72,000 twenty years ago and took eight years to retire, today's are routinely twice as large, or more -- could and should be reduced.  
 
The existence of the unnecessary third year of law school is especially heinous given two convergent factors:  (1) the lack of law jobs available upon graduation; and (2) the non-dischargeability (e.g., unavoidability) of educational debt if one files for bankruptcy.  If you are in a top 25 school, or are doing very well at a state school, you will likely get a decent job on graduation, though one you'll need to keep for a decade to get out from under your debt.  But the rest of the human mass the legal academe is processing are extruded right into prebankruptcy, with a debt the value of a small home, often no way to pay it down, and the likelihood of financial ruin.  
 
Why was there an outcry among some against banks for lending money to people who later couldn't pay it back, while there is no corresponding outcry against law schools for admitting rafts of people for whom there are no jobs?  Shouldn't the schools be warning people against attending them?  Do they bear any responsibility for the debt-crushed cohort of jobless lawyer-wannabes they produce, so they can write homages to literary theory and the law?  I would think an adult who already has a job would be in a better position to assess the reasonability of taking out their mortgage than a never-employed college graduate would be to assess the likelihood that the legal job market would afford them a reasonable chance of employment.  But no one cares about these people.  Maybe failed lawyers are like failed vampires, beyond the reach of human concern.  All I know is, the third year of law school is a criminal imposition on the fates of the folks paying off these loans, and those who cannot afford to do so.  And that the schools don't care.
 
Even When Law Schools Try To Do Vocational, They Tend To Screw It Up
 
In some fancy-pants theory class, I learned that Kant's categorical imperative is that a person should not use another person as a means to an end.  The career services professionals at some law schools could use to learn this lesson.  Law schools have become unduly focused upon the U.S. News and World Report ranking of law schools, which rests in part upon quantitative measures of a school's success, including the average income of a graduate.  This metric is stupid, because it falsely overestimates the quality of middling law schools in California, New York, and Illinois, in which the nation's largest cities offer higher starting salaries.  But is also has the perverse effect of incentivizing second-tier market career services professionals to try to send their charges to first-tier markets.  This makes sense to many of their charges, who went to law school because it was the next ascending step on a ladder they don't understand or define clearly.  To be sure, many in the field do not do this, but some do, and I have seen it.  Middle-tier schools would rather have all of their students employed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, because it helps with the U.S. News rankings.  These students may wash out of Big Law in two or three years in this cutthroat economy, but the school will get its competitive boost.  
 
In a similar vein, when you hear Very Important Law School Deans talk on panels about evolution in the practice of law, they inevitably talk about how large clients of Big Law firms aren't taking as many of their graduates in a way that implies that Big Law (the top private firms doing mostly civil defense) is their school's vocational Holy Grail.  (Sorry for blogging so much about Holy Grails this week.  Beats Hitler analogies.)  When I was in law school, placement offices de-emphasized placement in government careers in relation to Big Law.  With the economy down but the number of government lawyers less liable to fluctuation, you would hope law schools would rethink their relative lack of emphasis on those career paths.  Perhaps some are.  The deans I have heard do not, and that fits with the U.S. News-driven false emphasis on starting salary for graduates as an important metric for the schools themselves.
 
Conclusion:  Unless You Have $150,000 To Spare and Know You'll Outperform Almost Everyone, Don't Go To Law School
 
On the positive side, if you choose to be a lawyer, you don't have to worry about me teaching you in a class.  On the negative side, if you choose to be a lawyer, you don't have to worry much about being taught by any other lawyer with twenty years of experience.  That would be bad, from the point of view of the institution that will force-feed you three years of service before letting you figure out how to practice law after you're out.  While I like what I do today very much, the reality is that there are few jobs out there, and fewer fun or good ones.  Law school costs too much, and uses students more than it serves them.  Like many American institutions, law school needs badly common-sense reform that it will not receive any time soon.  Those most disserved least understand what is going on or why and are powerless to cause the sweeping changes that would improve legal education.  Those providing it have a skewed view and disincentives to change deeply.  Some employers get it, but don't have the influence to cause this change.  And so our broken legal education system lumbers on, costing too much, teaching too little, and interested as always in perpetuating itself, first and foremost.  Caveat emptor.

With all of the 'hits' I cannot believe there are no comments here.

Maybe my software is off.

I got into a prestigious law school by testing out--prestigious for the MW.

There were only like 210 slots.

They were just bringing in women.

Blacks were 'given' some affirmative action slots.

Vets were 'given' some affirmative action slots.

I tested out.

That is how I got in.

I finished after three years and I knew nothing about the practice of law.

I still don't. hahahahahahahaha

You argue positions that are favorable to your 'clients' even if you believe otherwise.

You find out that you must stand up for your client when the rules tell you otherwise.

I actually had two or three judges tell me that I could not make an opening argument for my 'criminal' defendant unless I was going to present witnesses.

I actually had judges tell me that I could not remove jurors for cause who were law enforcement officers.

I won each and every one of these trials, but the issue was:

ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO FUCK WITH THE JUDGE?

I would go to a CLE course, and they would tell me, you must make an opening argument regardless...

Oh well.

You must tell the judge to go f&^k himself and risk incarceration in many parts of this country, or you cannot properly represent your client.

The other side of the coin is obvious.

I watch some repubs on TV and they are making an argument.

They do not believe in shite!

It is so clear to me.

And yet, media must say:

WELL YOU MUST PRESENT BOTH SIDES!

I had other neurological issues, but really, I could not take this any longer.

Rhetoric is such a lame art, really.

It always means that the means justifies the result.

Bachmann's followers will back her no matter what the hell she says.

And on the ground, the comedians always like to say that:

OJ was guilty.

So what is the law school supposed to do?

Stand up and lie.

The sophists shall always be with us!

the end

 

 

by Richard Day 11/26/2011 - 8:18 am

Hey Dick.  Surely you represented some guilty folks if you've done criminal defense, likely a lot.  Your comment about sophists will always be with us, and that rhetoric means confusing means and ends is kind of an argument against argument, as it reads to me.  I mean, that's what we do here too, right?  Make arguments.  

To the nub of it, you hear a lot of nonlawyers say that lawyers are just bloviating sophists and that they disserve truth, but that's really a criticism of the adversary system, properly understood.  That is, for an adversary system to work, you need both sides played out properly and well.  Not that you lie or deceive, but that you advocate fully and fairly and as persuasively as you can.

For all of its faults, most of which can be fine-tuned by emphasizing duties of candor and fairness in the canons of ethics and professionalism, I find the adversary system a better vehicle than a German-style judge-led enterprise.  I'd be interested in whether you support or reject the adversary system.  a

by Articleman 11/26/2011 - 7:25 pm (re: Richard Day)

Like democracy, the adversary system is a terrible thing indeed.

It is just that the adversary system is better than any other system I can think of.

If I had a point it was that law school has nothing to do with lawyering. Researching, yes.

Lawyering no.

by Richard Day 11/27/2011 - 1:19 am (re: Articleman)

So if we are of a Churchillian mind and believe that democracy and the adversarial system are terrible, but the best we can hope for, then can we admit that Sartre was right hell is others.

by Another Trope 11/27/2011 - 1:26 am (re: Richard Day)

I agree that law school has to do with research more than lawyering, that's for sure.  And any system to decide things as important as incarceration, whether someone lives or dies, whether you ever get free from debt, is bound to have pitfalls and areas of potential failure from many perspectives.  My primary problem with the adversary system is that it can waste resources unnecessarily.  We need better procedural rules that are more focused on disclosure and truthseeking to right that.  But I have seldom seen the clever lawyer with the crappy case get the better of a bad lawyer who should win.  It happens, but less than people think.

by Articleman 11/27/2011 - 1:39 am (re: Richard Day)

As an additional response, the hits are actually real.  The piece got picked up by some content aggregator and some are coming through FB, with a goodly number from someone's Twitter feed.  Some of the stuff I put up gets lower response from dag people but higher general Internet traffic, because I sometimes like to get away from the classically political posts.  The people from outside the site who are not registered are far less likely to comment.  Even with posts that top 1500 hits and that are featured on Crooks and Liars in the blog roundup, you only get one or two folks emerge from lurking to comment.  This piece has that profile, roughly speaking, so it's unsurprising no one outside commented it, though of course I'd enjoy those comments a lot.

by Articleman 11/26/2011 - 7:49 pm (re: Richard Day)

This is a great blog.  But as someone whose legal expertise is reduced to Law & Order reruns, I don't think I am in position to make much of a comment.  In other words, it seems only those who are actually part of the system are qualified to comment on the topic. 

Maybe as a follow up blog you could address what it is those who are not actually working in the legal system can do about this situation.  Otherwise, it just becomes one more of those things that is what it is.  Not ideal, but just the way it is.

by Another Trope 11/26/2011 - 7:58 pm (re: Articleman)

Hi Trope.  Thanks.  At least two of the four other commenters are not lawyers, so I think you can comment without being a lawyer if you felt like it.  I mean, I'm not a defaulting homeowner, but I have some understanding of the forces that lead to defaults and the plight of the defaulted, so it's just another datum out there about how our economy is working or not working, if you will.

One recurring frustration I face is that the general public does not prioritize the judiciary as an issue.  This is a big problem for the administration of justice, as we have too few judges, and our systems for choosing judges tend to be more political and less meritocratic than we should want to have.  There are things, boring traditional political pressure things, that people can do about that, speaking of your what can be done question.  It seems pretty clear that the public does not care much about that issue, which in the end disserves that very public, by curtailing its meaningful access to that system.  a

by Articleman 11/26/2011 - 8:08 pm (re: Another Trope)

The thing that comes to mind is Sandra Day O'Conner's outrage over the SC decision about Citizens United because of its impact on judicial election.  Most people don't realize that most judges are elected and thus are dependent on fundraising as politicians are.  The SC decision on "justice" and the legal system is probably even more devastating than those on the legislative body.  One only has to see how Don Blankenship bought judges (in their attempt to raise funds for their re-election) led to the mining disasters to see the influence dynamic in our legal system.

by Another Trope 11/26/2011 - 8:18 pm (re: Articleman)

O'Connor is a great fan of and defender of merit selection, which is Arizona's system (O'Connor is an Arizonan).  Oddly, federal bankuptcy and magistrate judges (both a rank below district judges) are picked by other judges, and are thus by far less subject to political selection biases than are district judges.  They are also in my view simply selected better than district judges (which is not to say that they are better judges, but simply that they are chosen better).

by Articleman 11/27/2011 - 12:29 am (re: Another Trope)

Just by way of background: I'm not a lawyer, nor have I had any desire to become one, but have known many. Still I know nothing about what it takes to become a lawyer, except that year one is supposed to to be very hard, but not the other two years.

The first thought that occurred to me as I started your article was: Why couldn't lawyers become lawyers through apprenticeships at law firms? It seems to me that the practical side of doing almost anything is precisely that kind of thing that one can learn by working alongside a skilled mentor, doing small, simple tasks and gradually moving to more complex tasks.

It's possible one might need some brief basic training that one could get at a "trade school," just so a person could do some tasks on day one. But maybe not.

My second thought is that expensive training should be devoted to subjects that would be hard to "pick up on the job." These would include theory, or rather, The Big Questions. What is law? What is its role in society? What is justice and its relation to the law? How can the law promote greater justice, and what is the lawyer's role in this promotion? What makes for good legislation and bad legislation? How can we improve our laws and legal system?

I don't know. Maybe these are stupid or misguided questions. But I think the proper role of higher education is to give the student the space to think through the big questions in life. Higher education law school should, similarly, give the person the space to think through the big questions about the law. This is stuff you're not going to pick up in the day to day practice of law, but could help give a life devoted to the law meaning and purpose.

by Peter Schwartz 11/26/2011 - 12:12 pm

Hey Peter.  Year one is much harder than the other two, yes.

Lawyers could become lawyers by apprenticing, and essentially do.  That's what they do now, but we make them take a bar exam first to indicate subject matter proficiency.  Our system used to be that you apprenticed with a leading lawyer, and then were a lawyer yourself, without the formality of three years of law school.  Law schools was a nineteeth century innovation, though lawyers predate it.  (As a digression, I have lots of 19th Century stuff from and about law school, which I really enjoy collecting.  It has changed quite a bit since then.)

I sort of agree with your points about people thinking about law, but find it very idealistic to the point of not being practical.  For one thing, before people go to law school, they should already have spent some time on some of those big questions.  Political science and history give a lot of grounding in that project.  We ask a lot of our students in this time of history and economy to take four years of undergraduate education, and then three more years of law school to be lawyers.  A combined five year program with grounding in some of what you said, or six, would make a lot of sense to me.  Seven is killer, it's just too long and expensive.  My legal education focused on most of your questions, and I had lots of great professors, but the third year was a kind of waste.

The reason I find your comments impractically idealistic is that most law students are not there to study with Socrates.  They are there to learn a trade.  When I taught law students, they were very bottom-line oriented, very grade and test oriented, and not very caught up in the interesting social policy issues the course materials read upon.  And while I wasn't teaching Ivy League, I was teaching students in the upper quartile of American law students.  And they weren't very interested in the project you suggest.

So I think your points are very good ones, but do you need three years to imbibe a sense of the abstract questions that suffuse the law, properly understood?  I'd say two years is plenty.  a

by Articleman 11/26/2011 - 7:38 pm (re: Peter Schwartz)

If they are there to learn a trade, then I think the apprenticeship route is the best way to go, maybe with a bit of a grounding in a paralegal course, or something, so they can do something other than photocopy on the first day.

by Peter Schwartz 11/27/2011 - 5:22 pm (re: Articleman)

The existence of the unnecessary third year of law school is especially heinous given two convergent factors: (1) the lack of law jobs available upon graduation; and (2) the non-dischargeability (e.g., unavoidability) of educational debt if one files for bankruptcy.

Seems like there should be an army of unemployed lawyers out there waging a fight to change this burdensome reality.  I'd personally welcome some modifications to the rules regarding student loan repayment.  I've got a modest debt from grad school that I'd love some relief from.  Nothing I've done in the 5-6 years since I got my papers has ever generated any serious income related to my field of study.  I like what I learned and have applied it with success on occasion, so I'm not willing to believe it was a bad investment.  But geez, student loan collections departments just won't take "no" for an answer.  They're right up there with death and taxes when considering the unavoidable.  So, if there are some newly minted lawyers out there looking for something to do, I say, get crackin'.  I'd do it myself if I knew where to start.

by kyle flynn 11/26/2011 - 12:32 pm

Hi Kyle.  Unfortunately, the Bankruptcy Code is the thing that would need modifying, if I understand your comment correctly.  I see some folks who are lucky get counsel to try to help them seek to get out from under their student loans.  You might want to consult with a legal services clinic in your region.  Your area has a lot of those, though I don't mean to suggest that their answers would be very helpful ones, without knowing your situation.  Here's an ominous piece about the issue.  a

by Articleman 11/26/2011 - 7:43 pm (re: kyle flynn)

Reading the comments at the NYT article, most of the 'decades of experience' lawyers who commented seemed of the opinion that law school is just an introductory dipping of one's toe in the murky and complex waters of jurisprudence. I half expected one of them to say 'Of course law school cannot do the job in 3 years, it takes at least 15 years to become a competent attorney, unfortunately, most students cannot afford 15 years of law school'.

by NCD 11/26/2011 - 12:35 pm

Hi NCD.  I think being a lawyer gets much more interesting with each successive five years you spend in practice.  For me, around 10 years it seemed suddenly to be more rewarding and interesting.  As an older lawyer in the East once remarked to me, in his market no one with a brain will let anyone under 40 lead any case.  Who wants to work when you can't do the big girl and big boy stuff for 15 years?  So if you want to be a lead, you need more patience than most (and to survive great attrition among your peers to be one of the few survivors) -- or -- and few people get this, I think, pick a second or third tier market, where you can be a bigger fish with smaller problems you can more readily run with.  The former alternative is hardly a great advertisement for the profession, but it is the reality in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, DC, and San Francisco.  The latter alternative is a better path, IMO.  The world doesn't begin or end with the nation's major financial centers.  a

by Articleman 11/26/2011 - 7:47 pm (re: NCD)

Having a moment to think about all this, there is a part of American cultural perspective, collectively, that once embraced the abstract notions of the legal arena, probably best summed up in the film Inherit the Wind.   This film captured the idealized notions of law and society.  We have lost this as lawyers have fought with politicians for who is most hated by the general public. 

What does it mean to be a country that runs itself by the rule of law?  This blog may be as much about the loss of faith in the blindfolded Justice as anything else.

by Another Trope 11/26/2011 - 8:11 pm

I think that since Inherit the Wind our legal culture and society have finally essentially realized the promise of the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause.  There was nothing good old days about the forties and fifties for incarcerated Japanese or Rosa Parks.  I think we have much more reason to have faith in our rule of law in 2011 than we did in 1955.  It's far from perfect, and there are and should be noisy debates about mistakes or alleged mistakes in adhering to it, but we are not worse off than we were fifty or more years ago.

And my blog is about much more mundane stuff than that, just law school, not the law itself.

by Articleman 11/27/2011 - 12:26 am (re: Another Trope)

I guess my point is that you able to say we are better off in 2011 than in 1955 is the sentiment about the rule of law that permeated our culture at the time of 1955 that unfolded during the ensuing decades.  If people had the view of activist judges etc in 1955 we wouldn't be where are today.  In other words, it is because our idealistic views about the law which then played out over the ensuing years that we can get where we are.  Of course, then we confronted the reality of individuals who were obviously guilty going free because of what is now known as a "technicality" that we are in second phase.

So maybe having those who float above the real world of legal realities but who have an impact upon those legal realistites is a good thing as long as they float there in a disciplined and thoughtful manner.

by Another Trope 11/27/2011 - 12:39 am (re: Articleman)

The exclusionary rule (barring the use of improperly obtained evidence) has been the source of lots of blowback since it first developed, and it is the source of many of the "technicality"-based victories you cite.  But you don't see people arguing for its repeal much.

by Articleman 11/27/2011 - 1:42 am (re: Another Trope)

It's great that this piece has now been picked up at reddit.com, where it is now competing against (though losing to) Here Is a Picture of a Cow Licking a Sheep.

by Articleman 11/27/2011 - 12:23 am

Y'know, I could substitute the word architecture for law in this article, change a few other words, and some of it would still be fairly accurate.

Most schools focus on the art of architectural design and the science of building. How much of each varies a lot, but my school focused on design. I had one tedious course regarding professional practice - the guy read AIA documents to us - and none concerning the business aspects. I did have instructors that were professional architects, but even they seemed to subsume their practical experience in favor of determining whether you could be creative. Every now and then practicality would shine through. Some people would hang their work for a jury and be cut to ribbons with practical objections that hadn't been mentioned by the design instructor.

by Donal 11/27/2011 - 6:58 pm

While I did a subpar job in responding to Peter's comment above, I think the answer is to blend the two.  Creativity and abstract thinking are goods.  But they have to be put together with the practical.  That's what I'm arguing for, or at least what I think would be best.

by Articleman 11/27/2011 - 7:27 pm (re: Donal)

Thank you Articleman for putting this out and all the comments everyone made are really great. I just graduated from an ABA Law School with a Paralegal Certificate and have been thinking of going to law school. I did my undergraduate study over 30 years ago. So the prospect of taking on the mounting cost in my 40s is not one I take lightly. Over and over I heard from professors in the Paralegal Program we were learning the practical side of how to help lawyers and apply knowledge in the field and the law not theory and that law school does not teach you how to be a lawyer.

However as has been indicated, success of employment and salary after graduation tends to be inflated. So this same law school is one I am not sure I would apply to that boasts a 93% bar passage rate and 90% employment rate. The law school is stronger and better than the Paralegal program of course. The jobs for Paralegal are scarce and starting pay is a joke. I refuse to work for $11 an hour or $15 to be consider high. Not after paying $12,000 for what was supposed to be a great program with a job placement program which basically is a job posting board. It scares me to think what the law school does in light of their promises or trust any law school.

However, there is a lot you can do with a law degree. Corporate, government that is not necessarily in a firm. Compliance is big. So I am considering going through the process and seeing what happens and then making a final decision. But it may be better to seek something else out. This blog article has really helped. thank you.

by Anonymous (not verified) 11/29/2011 - 8:01 am (re: Articleman)
It is remarkable how much competition there is for support positions in law firms. There are some tremendous people working as not only paralegals but paralegal assistants. More and more the paralegal certificate is required. Secretaries can make almost as much with less credentialing and education. The important thing is to be alert to the reality of the job market and to make clear-eyed decisions. While there is a lot to do with a law degree, government still has many opportunities, companies far less so. As the market as contracted, companies have tons of seasoned out-of-work and otherwise employed folk to choose from for their small number of vacancies. Best of luck with all of it, 2011 is a tough time for all of this.
by Articleman 11/29/2011 - 10:49 am (re: Anonymous)

Not sure how this adds or subtracts, but...

Back when I knew a lot of lawyers, it seemed that relatively few became lawyers to practice law. They saw it as a foundational credential that made it possible or easier to do other things. Lawyer + X = Y. Y being what they really wanted to do.

If they were business oriented, it gave them a command of the legal issues their business would face. If they were social justice oriented, it allowed them to understand the legal aspects of the issues they cared about and design legal remedies or create programs that would inevitably have legal implications.

by Peter Schwartz 11/30/2011 - 5:06 pm

Given what Articleman has written, I'm curious to know whether your friends decided in the end that law school actually helped them to become Y. (Of course, I note that you don't say "law school" but talk about becoming a lawyer.)

by Verified Atheist 11/30/2011 - 5:14 pm (re: Peter Schwartz)

They all went to law school, and some to very prestigious ones, like Yale.

This was back in the late 60s.

Some did practice law, but mostly for the government and one for the NLRB.

They seemed more interested in working on specific issues, e.g., affordable housing, rather than in practicing law, if that makes sense. The law entered into working on the issue and, I guess, it did give them a credential when they went job hunting.

This was Washington, D.C., so their preferences made more sense than if we'd been living somewhere else. Working for the government in some way or on social justice issues was the biggest reason to come to D.C. in the first place.

I guess it helped...not sure. Not everyone in my little group became a lawyer. Not sure I can answer your question exactly. It probably helped. Didn't hurt is probably a better way to put it.

My wife tried to switch careers from consulting (where she'd had a national reputation) to a non-profit cause where she could do good. She found that she was consigned to doing menial tasks because she didn't have a higher degree--despite decades of high-level work experience. She'd never rise in the organization to do the work she wanted to do without some kind of higher degree. Being a lawyer would probably have helped her get a job in that milieu.

Hope that helps!

I will say this: I seemed to me then that a law degree was very flexible in terms of what it helped you do afterward. You didn't have to practice law, whereas doctors tended to practice medicine. You needed a Ph.D., I think, to do medical research.

But all kinds of organizations use lawyers because the law impacts virtually every aspect of our lives. It also complements other kinds of specialties in a way that, say, a medical degree doesn't so much. For example, if you always wanted to be in the arts or music, but didn't have the talent, you could become an entertainment lawyer and get to hang out with musicians and go to rock concerts free.

by Peter Schwartz 12/1/2011 - 4:00 pm (re: Verified Atheist)

What I'm hearing you say was that the law degree was useful as a credential, but that law school itself might not have been very useful (or if it was, the primary usefulness was it proving the credentialing degree).

You didn't have to practice law, whereas doctors tended to practice medicine. You needed a Ph.D., I think, to do medical research.

I think it's possible to do medical research with just an M.D., but I do believe that most medical researchers have the M.D./Ph.D. combo. It's worth noting that pursuing an M.D./Ph.D. combo will provide an avenue for a "free" degree, at least that's true at the University of Virginia. (It's "free" if you go through the usual Ph.D. track of being an RA/TA. Considering the price of pursuing a self-funded M.D., that's a very attractive option.) 

by Verified Atheist 12/1/2011 - 4:39 pm (re: Peter Schwartz)

A nice NYT piece on how ABA accreditation figures into law school cost and culture:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/business/for-law-schools-a-price-to-play-the-abas-way.html?pagewanted=1

by Articleman 12/18/2011 - 7:19 pm

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