The Criminal Lawyer

We have more and more college graduates these days, but is it doing any good?

On our first day of college, at UVA back in the late summer of ’87, we didn’t feel the usual nervous excitement one gets from moving away from home, meeting new roommates, trudging through the various long lines to register for classes and get ID cards etc., and hearing the old “look to your left, look to your right” speech. We didn’t feel that way partly because we’d already been there and done that and more at military school, but mostly because we were feeling another emotion entirely that completely overpowered all the rest. It’s an emotion we can’t quite name, though there’s probably a great name for it in German — a great hopeful sensation of “at last, it’s about time!”

We were stoked to finally start getting an education. After years and years of schooling, we were ready to get learning. College for us wasn’t a prerequisite for getting a job or anything like that — it was a chance to gain as much knowledge about as many different subjects as we could cram into four (ultimately five) years. A chance, moreover, to learn how to use that knowledge and apply it and, maybe, start contributing to it. A truly liberal education that would prepare us for pretty much any future by preparing us to think critically and analytically and have the basic underlying data to do it well.

Back in 1987, most of our friends thought we were out of our mind. Most of them were there to get ready for a career, whether it be in engineering, business, architecture, teaching, or the arts. Or a career yet to be determined once they found the right major. Going to college was mainly about getting a good job after graduation.

Now in 2011, that seems even more the case than ever. College is seen as a prerequisite for a good job, period. Many kids are told this from kindergarten through high school, but it’s such an implicit societal assumption these days, that even if it wasn’t drilled into them they’ve picked it up by osmosis.

The problem is, college these days is not something you can rely on to prepare you for a job, unless you’re pursuing a technical degree in the soft or applied sciences.

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Here’s how education is supposed to (more…)



Hey. Gen-X lawyer here. Could those of you whining about your law schools and sucky job market please shut up? Thanks.

There’s something about the gripes of new and rising JDs that’s not unlike the same bleats we’re hearing from many “Occupy Wall Street” types: It’s the complaint that they did everything they were supposed to, and now instead of getting a living they’re getting fucked. They went to school, took out loans to pay for it, in the expectation that the payoff would be worth it. That there would be a job out there — more than a job, a lifelong career path. A secure income. But that’s not what they’re finding in the real world. The dream jobs aren’t out there — at least not for them. They’re starting their adult lives with an insane amount of debt, and no conceivable way to pay it off. They feel betrayed. They were promised all this, they did their part, and now society isn’t doing it’s part. So they rant online, some take to the streets to complain, and a few have even sued to enforce the deal they thought they’d made.

This is nothing new to those of our generation. When we graduated from college, the job market sucked big time — only the engineering students seemed to be in high demand, much to the chagrin of those of us with History (cough), Art and Philosophy majors. It was pretty bad when we graduated from law school, too — we knew many bright, talented young JDs who had to work as bartenders, online marketers, and the like before landing a lawyer job (and the ones who persisted, by the way, did wind up getting cool law jobs and are doing quite well).

It sucked, but we knew it was coming. We had no illusions about the economy. We didn’t expect Social Security to even be around any more by the time we’d reach retirement. The Baby Boom generation had spent their lives focusing on how awesome they were, and fucking things up for the rest of us, and we knew it very well. A Washington Post article from 1991 began:

Now adulthood looms, like a cookie jar that somebody else already picked clean. Will the busters [the phrase "Generation X" had yet to be coined, we were called lots of things] ever be able to match their parents’ standard of living? The cost of starting out in life — college and a first house — has been racing ahead of inflation and wages ever since they were born. Meantime, adults have rung up nearly $3 trillion in national debt in the busters’ brief lifetimes, virtually all of it on consumption for themselves. The busters will get stuck with the tab.”

Another article from the Atlantic in 1992 (calling us the “thirteeners” — the 13th generation of U.S. history) described us thus:

After graduation they’re the ones with big loans who were supposed to graduate into jobs and move out of the house but didn’t, and who seem to get poorer the longer they’ve been away from home — unlike their parents at that age, who seemed to get richer. …

In them lies much of the doubt, distress and endangered dream of late twentieth-century America. As a group they aren’t what older people ever wanted but rather what they themselves know they need to be: pragmatic, quick, sharp-eyed, able to step outside themselves and understand how the world really works. From the Thirteener vantage point, America’s greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again.  Others don’t yet see it, but today’s young people are beginning to realize that their upbringing has endowed them with a street sense and pragmatism their elders lack. Many admit they are a bad generation — but so, too, do they suspect that they are a necessary generation for a society in dire need of survival lessons.

When they look into the future, they see a much bleaker vision than any of today’s older generations ever saw in their own youth. Polls show that Thirteeners believe it will be much harder for them to get ahead than it was for their parents — and that they are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the long-term fate of their generation and nation. They sense that they’re the clean-up crew, that their role in history will be sacrificial — that whatever comeuppance America has to face, they’ll bear more than their share of the burden. It’s a new twist, and not a happy one, on the American Dream.”

And you know what we think when we hear Millenials whining? The children of those self-absorbed Boomers, who gave them awards just for showing up, who slathered them with praise and “self-esteem” without actually making them do anything to earn it? (more…)

On the New York Times op-ed page today, Clifford Winston asks the question “Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?” The writer, an economist with the left-ish Brookings Institution think tank, answers with a resounding “no.” They only increase the cost of entry into the profession — and thus the cost of legal services — while doing nothing to ensure the quality, honesty and accountability of the lawyers performing said services.

His diagnosis is on the nose, but his prescription is bad. He is right that simply graduating from an ABA-accredited law school and passing the bar are not sufficient quality control. But his solution — eliminating such barriers to entry — is the exact wrong approach. If anything, the barriers to entry need to be higher.

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Law school, as experienced by most law students, is an enormous investment with little application to the actual practice of law. The first year is great for teaching how to spot issues and do the necessary legal research to answer questions, and for instilling core principles that underlie our jurisprudence. But beyond that first year, the time spent in class after class could be better spent in an apprenticeship where one learns how the law is actually practiced — and more importantly, acquiring the experience and judgment required to advise and deal with clients. Apart from the exceptional few who truly get a lot out of their continuing studies as preparation for real life — in particular, those who take advantage of clinical programs — law school after year 1 is a bit of a wasted opportunity for the run-of-the-mill students

The cost of law school is staggering, but only in part because of the requirements of maintaining ABA accreditation. These costs could be trimmed. The law library is the single greatest mandatory expense, what with the required accumulation of endless paper volumes of statutes, regulations, case law, treatises and their myriad pocket parts and updates. It’s a required expense, but not a necessary one, especially as everything’s been available digitally since forever.

Most of the cost of law school is not mandated, but the result of simple supply-and-demand. Tons of people want to go to law school, either to fulfill a calling or to make money or get status or just kill time until they find themselves. The demand drives up tuitions. Add to that the subsidy of student loans, and the price gets driven ever higher. Costs, on the other hand, remain fairly low. Staffing is not an enormous cost, considering. The ratio of students to professors is huge. When you figure 400 students in a section, each paying however many tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, the salaries of the handful of professors teaching them account for a minor fraction of it. Because of this, and the apparently endless supply of prospective students, law schools are a veritable cash cow — which is why so many have popped into existence in recent decades.

One byproduct of all these new law schools is a dilution of the quality of legal education, and thus the quality of many graduates with a JD. This is not to denigrate those with degrees from lower-tier schools, many of whom provide better services than some top-tier grads after gaining greater experience in the trenches. But whenever someone complains about “too many lawyers,” what they’re really complaining about is “too many bad lawyers.” Making it harder to get into law school, and then making it harder to actually get one of those JDs once there, would weed out many of the incompetent and misguided before they can do any damage to a real client.

The solution is not to abolish law school, but to make it harder and more relevant. Change the accreditation standards away from expense for its own sake (which, like several other such ABA standards like those for evening students, are actually holdovers from an earlier time when they existed to discourage minorities and those who needed to work for a living from joining the profession), and instead make the accreditation turn on selectivity of admissions and the quality of education provided. Require clinical courses (another astronomical expense, but one which makes sense). Require a uniform grade curve, so that performance can be measured accurately across multiple schools. Require practical courses alongside the general and theoretical, especially in the second and third years. Require more rigorous training in practical ethics, not just the bare-minimum survey everyone’s been doing since the ’70s.

Don’t eliminate the barrier; make it meaningful.

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With respect to the bar exam, as we’ve said before, nobody in their right mind believes (more…)

Courthouse News reports that “a $200 million class action claims the New York Law School misrepresents post-graduate opportunities for lawyers and subjects ‘the overwhelming majority’ of its graduates to ‘years of indentured servitude’ after ‘saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt that will take literally decades to pay off.’ ”  The plaintiffs accuse their school of ”a systemic, ongoing fraud that is ubiquitous in the legal education industry and threatens to leave a generation of law students in dire financial straits.”

Oh, for crying out loud.  This again?

Look.  Nobody forced you to go to law school; it was your own choice.  Nobody forced you to go to that particular school; it was your own choice.  Nobody forced you to take on more debt than you could reasonably afford; it was your own choice.  After your first year, and it became clear that someone with your grades from your school wasn’t likely to be making the big bucks, nobody forced you to keep going and to take on even more crippling debt.  It was your own choice.  You were a college graduate, an adult, presumably capable of making your own life decisions.

The school did not “saddle” you with debt.  You did it to yourself.  And now you regret it.  Frantically trying to blame anybody besides yourself for your own foolish decisions only makes you look… well… foolish, at best.  At worst, it’s almost like the girl who regrets her drunken orgy and accuses her fellow partiers of gang rape.  Either way, you certainly don’t come off as someone with the requisite judgment and brainpower to make it as a lawyer.  Are you sure it’s the school’s fault you’re not making it on the outside?

Here’s some more from the complaint:

[The] school consigns the overwhelming majority of them to years of indentured servitude, saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt that will take literally decades to pay off. New York Law has done this while blatantly misrepresenting and manipulating its employment statistics to prospective students, employing the type of ‘Enron-style’ accounting techniques that would leave most for-profit companies facing the long barrel of a government investigation and the prospect of paying a substantial civil fine. These deceptions are perpetuated so as to prevent prospective students from realizing the obvious – that attending NYLS and forking over nearly $150,000 in tuition payments is a terrible investment which makes little economic sense and, most likely, will never pay off.

Specifically, NYLS, through both its print and internet marketing materials, commits two basic written, uniform misrepresentations. First, the school during the class period claims that the overwhelming majority of its graduates – roughly between 90 and 95 percent – secure employment within nine months of graduation. However, the reality of the situation is that these seemingly robust numbers include any type of employment, including jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with the legal industry, do not require a JD degree or are temporary or part-time in nature….

Second, NYLS grossly inflates its graduates’ reported mean salaries, by calculating them based on a small, mostly self-selected subset of graduates who actually submit their salary information….

There are so many things wrong with this.

The biggest problem is that, if you really were defrauded, then you had to be basing your decision on whether to go to this particular law school based in large part on how much money its graduates make.  If that’s not true, then none of this is material enough to be fraudulent.  Fraud basically means that, but for the misrepresentation, you wouldn’t have spent the cash.  If that is true, then you have no business being a lawyer in the first place.  You’re in it for the money, and don’t belong here.  You selected this law school not because you thought it would help prepare you for a life of service, but because you thought you’d be able to get “a job” and make “good money.”  Those are the wrong reasons, entirely.

Even if one were to concede that these were material considerations to the plaintiffs in this case, it is hard to imagine that anyone would have thought they really were all that material.  Would law schools really think their students are so mercenary that the main reason why they chose one school over another was the average alumnus salary?  That’s absurd on its face.  But it’s a prerequisite of the complaint.

And where is the deception, in the first place?  The complaint does not say that the school made up numbers out of thin air.  They only allege that the school honestly reported information which the plaintiffs then misconstrued.  Perhaps one could throw the plaintiffs a bone and say post-graduation employment figures would reasonably be expected to refer to legal employment.  But the salary information was what was reported.  There is no deception in reporting the numbers they got.  The school did not “inflate its graduates’ reported mean salaries” — it simply revealed them.

From what’s been reported — here and elsewhere — there just doesn’t seem to be any merit to this case.  We don’t see how it could possibly survive a motion for summary judgment.

As a work of chutzpah, however, it’s pretty good.  It’s not the same as killing your parents then seeking mercy because you’re an orphan, but saying your school owes you a fortune because you shouldn’t have chosen to go there?  It’s up there.

Okay, see that XKCD cartoon up there?

That’s not how law-school academia works.

Law school academia is more like this:

It’s not exactly news that law review articles don’t carry the same weight in their relevant field as, say, scientific papers published in a peer-reviewed journal.  Ask any practicing lawyer how many law reviews he subscribes to, and the answer is likely to be “zero.”  Ask any practicing lawyer how often he cites law review articles in his motions or briefs, and you are likely to hear either “seldom” or “never.”  Ask any practicing lawyer the effect that law review articles have on the practice of law and the advancement of jurisprudence, and he is likely to laugh condescendingly.

It’s not exactly news, but it’s something people have been talking about this summer, after Chief Justice Roberts disparaged the usefulness of legal scholarship at this year’s Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference.

Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.

Law professors, of course, rushed to defend the relevance of their articles.  But pointing out that occasionally a law review article might actually get cited in a footnote, to support an argument that was already being made, isn’t quite the strongest defense of relevance.

And it’s foolish for legal academics to make such a defense.  Nobody expects them to believe their articles are relevant to actual legal practice any more than one would expect a postmodernist paper in an academic literature journal to be relevant to the publishing industry.  Academia and the real life it studies are rarely the same thing.

And it’s foolish for legal academics to even imply that their writings ought to be useful to practicing lawyers.  There are only two kinds of law review articles that are of any use whatsoever to lawyers and judges:  One is the summary or survey of an area of law as it actually is right now this very moment.  The American Criminal Law Review‘s annual survey on white-collar crime is a good example, and there are a fair number of brief summaries of more discrete areas of law as well.  The most useful of these are the ones that deal with areas of law that are in flux, describing recent changes, which can help the practitioner or judge test the wind to see which way things are trending.

The second kind of useful law review article is the kind that doesn’t so much restate the law as explain why it is the way it is.  These are more rare, but can be very valuable for those trying to make a policy-based argument.  A well-done article of this kind takes all the disparate decisions out there and tries to provide an underlying policy that explains most of them.  Such a thesis is useful when dealing with an area of the law that is changing, or that one is arguing ought to change.

These useful articles are not useful as something one would cite as part of one’s primary argument.  If cited at all, it would be in a footnote.  Their value is not as an authority to be cited, but as a guide to help focus or expand one’s own thoughts.

But such articles are few and far between.  The overwhelming bulk of law review publications are of little to no use to anyone besides the author.

This is because law review publication does not serve the same purpose as other kinds of academic publication.

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Law reviews serve two purposes: One is to provide an outlet for career academics to publish something — anything — in order to achieve tenure.  It’s a pointless exercise, as the quality of one’s articles is of no importance; it is the fact of publication that is important.  Having been published often, and recently, is all that is needed to put a check mark in the right box.

The fact of publication is itself no guarantee of the quality of scholarship, that’s for sure.  That’s because of purpose number two: To give better law students a way to further distinguish themselves.  We do that by having law students pretty much run the show.  Students select which articles are published.  Students do the fact-checking, making sure the cited sources actually say what the author claims.  Students check the grammar, spelling and bluebooking.  It’s a lot of work, and shows that one has the ability to juggle responsibilities beyond one’s caseload, and shows an aptitude for the kind of work often assigned to young associates, so it’s fairly prestigious and rightly so.  But it is not peer review, and it is no guarantee that the articles themselves are any good.  Grammar and cite-checking are not the same as substance.

Neither of these purposes is to provide a useful product for practicing lawyers and judges.  So because it is not their purpose, it doesn’t really make sense to knock them when they fail to do it.

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Still, wouldn’t it be nice?  You know, if legal scholars were given tenure based on actually contributing something to our jurisprudence?  If it was the rule, rather than the exception, for law-review articles to be useful summaries of the law or explanations of the unnoticed policies that explain why the law is and where it is likely to go?  Then perhaps one might see them being cited a little more often.  Being read by someone not involved in the publication process.  Making a difference.

Don’t you want to make a difference?

Because we were bored out of our skull this afternoon, we checked this blog’s stats on Google Analytics.  Browsing through the various keywords people have used to find this blog over the past year, all we can say is “The hell is wrong with you people?”

Leaving aside the freaks and weirdos (and possibly some of their clients), however, it seems that most people find this blog by asking Google the same handful of questions.  The number one search engine query that get people here, every month this year, is something along the lines of “why become a lawyer.”  Number two includes variations on a theme of “can a cop lie about whether he’s a cop.”  The top five are rounded out by queries about what crimes Goldman Sachs may have committed, connections between Adam Smith and insider trading, and what one should say to a judge at sentencing.

We’re not sure that we’ve actually discussed all of these topics here.  Then again, we might have, and just forgot it (which is a distinct possibility — these posts are all written in a single pass, without any real editing, and usually are not given another thought once they’re posted.  If you ever wondered what “ephemera” meant, you’re looking at it right now.)

Still, in the interests of alleviating our boredom public service, here are some quick answers to our readers’ most pressing questions:

1. Why Should You Become a Lawyer?

Because you feel a calling to serve others.  Because you want to make a difference in the lives of others.  Because you are genuinely interested in the rules by which human society functions, why people behave the way they do, and the policies and interests underlying it all.  If those are your reasons, then you belong.

Not because you want to (more…)

Where did all the law jobs go?  And are they coming back?

Good questions.  More on that in a second.  But first, we have to say that we’re frankly tired of hearing law students and newish JDs moaning about the dearth of lawyer jobs to be had.  Particularly grating are the complaints that it’s somehow somebody else’s fault that they’ve got all this debt and no six-figure job to show for it.  Most of these put the blame on law schools for hoodwinking them into thinking the job market for attorneys was awesome.  We don’t get that — people who go to law school are grownups, adults with college degrees, but these ones are acting like they’re still kids.  Come on, at some point you have to be responsible for your own decisions.  Childhood ended a long time ago.  Anyway, one would think that someone intending to become a lawyer would have had the basic ability to research what the real job market was like.  A simple Google search would have turned up a plethora of articles and discussions about it, going back to mid-2008.  If they really had no clue what they were getting into, then they really need to re-think whether they’re in the right profession.

And if they’d bothered to research just a tad more, they’d have found that this ain’t the first time law jobs have been harder to come by.  This kind of thing happens every now and then.  It’s cyclical, just like anything else.  Demographics, economic cycles, and the coming and going of fads have all affected whether there’s enough hiring going on.

One need not understand why it was happening.  But for college-graduate adults to not even know that it was happening?  And to make life-changing, debt-incurring decisions based on law schools saying their graduates had good-paying jobs?  (Or worse yet, based on a fantasy that has never been true, that anyone but the top grads from the top schools would be making the big bucks right out of law school?)  That’s just idiotic.  Such complaints call into question the very ability of the complainer to have practiced law in the first place.  It makes you sort of glad they didn’t find a job, kinda.

Although one need not understand why it was happening, however, it’s still worthwhile asking the question.  We’ve had our own theories, but they’re based more on intuition and anecdote than on any rigorous analysis.  So it’s good when, from time to time, someone pops up with an explanation.

With respect to the latest turndown, our basic understanding was always (more…)

The law is an amazing profession, but it’s not for everyone.  In fact, it’s not for the vast majority of people.  And when it’s not a good fit, the downside is awful.  Mismatched lawyers are miserable.  Their lives can really suck.  They may be very good at what they do, but it’s not particularly fulfilling.  Or it’s too time-consuming, preventing them from doing the other stuff that would be fulfilling.  Maybe they can’t stand dealing with other lawyers.  And if they’re not very good at what they do, their clients can suffer far far worse.

But for those who belong here, the law is a wonderful place to be.  It challenges the intellect, inspires ideas, and gives you a chance to really make a difference.  And that is huge.  It doesn’t matter what kind of law you practice; you’re dealing with real people, with real lives, and you’re helping them with a real need.  A life in the law is deeply fulfilling, and a life well spent.

Unfortunately, most mismatched lawyers don’t figure it out (if ever) until far too late, when they’re already practicing.  Some cut their losses and start a new career.  But most don’t.  Maybe they’re in a large law firm and just hate it, but can’t leave the paycheck.  Maybe they feel they’ve invested too much of their lives in law school and advancing through the profession, and so are unwilling to chuck it all and start over doing something else.  Maybe they sincerely can’t think of anything else to do.  And they wind up getting more and more miserable.  It’s no wonder that alcoholism, depression and divorce are rampant among lawyers.

The best time to figure it out, of course, is before going to law school.  Some people wisely drop out (or, thankfully, wash out), but that’s rare.  No, once a mismatched lawyer is admitted to law school, the odds are they’re going to stick it out and become a sinkhole of misery.  Far better to have turned away and pursued a more fulfilling life before ever going to law school in the first place.

But how can you tell if the law’s going to be a good fit for you?  It’s tough, if you haven’t tried it out first.  Whether you’d be happy or not is all hypothetical until you start working.

Fortunately, you know yourself pretty well.  Nothing hypothetical there.  If you’re honest with yourself, you know what traits you have and don’t have.

And fortunately, we’ve known plenty of other happy lawyers, and had the chance to observe what traits we all seem to share.

So if you’re wondering whether you ought to go to law school, you might want to ask yourself a few very simple questions:

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1.  Do you want to be a lawyer?

If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t go to law school.  Sure, lots of people say it prepares you for other kinds of work, and trains your brain to do marvelous things.  But if that’s all you want out of it, go take some continuing ed courses in History, Philosophy and Economics.  A rigorous study of History will give you the same issue-spotting, researching and detail-checking that you’d get from law school — probably better.  Philosophy will certainly give you a better grounding in logic, analysis, and reasoned argument.  And Economics, along with the other two, will give you enough grounding in how people actually work, and why they do what they do.  There is nothing else that law school teaches if you’re not planning to be a lawyer.

Law school serves a single function: it is a (more…)

In today’s environment, where law schools are churning out way more lawyers than the market really wants, plenty of law students and recent grads are wondering if it’s really worth it.

We’re asked this question, in various forms, all the time.  And we see it asked every day on various internet fora.

Our answer is always a resounding YES! …if you’re going into law for the right reasons.  It’s worth it.  Oh yes, it surely is worth it.

Now, if you’re going into law just for a nice paycheck and some prestige, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.  And it’s probably not worth it unless you’re so smart and accomplished that you can be hired by a big firm (and yet not quite bright enough to figure out that, except for a few awesome firms, doing so is essentially trading your life for a living, and putting off any further accomplishments for the next several years).  If you’re not already a superstar at what you’ve been doing with your life thus far, odds are you’re not going to morph into one during law school.

And if you’re doing it because you can’t think of anything else to do, it’s so obvious that you’re doing it for the wrong reasons that it’s a waste of space to even explain it here.

So what are the right reasons?

It’s going to be different for each person, because the right reasons are always personal.  It’s something about you, who you are, what purpose you want your life to have.  But if you’re doing it for the right reasons, you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room.  You don’t have to graduate in the top third of your class at a top-tier school.  All you need to do is bust your ass in school to master the material and learn how to think like a lawyer, then bust your ass once you’ve got that JD and make sure you goddamn well fulfill your purpose.

Again, the reasons are going to be different for each person.  We can’t describe what the right reasons for you might be.  But we can tell you what our reasons were.  Maybe that will help illustrate what we’re talking about.

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Why did we go to law school?

Two words: Frank Johnson.

Most of you have never heard of the guy.  He’s not in the (more…)

For a while there, it seemed like not a day went by without us reading of some firm or other laying off a mess of lawyers.  Things have changed.  Now, it seems as if not a day goes by without us reading of some law student getting upset at the dearth of law jobs out there.  It was bad enough hearing about the lawyers losing their jobs, but the students’ complaints are somehow more upsetting.  And not for the reasons they probably think.

Reading about the firm layoffs, day after day and month after month, evoked some real sympathy for our (mostly) transactional colleagues whose niche was no longer in so much demand.  But it wasn’t all that distressing.  The positions being eliminated had been created to satisfy the needs of a ballooning financial industry, and when the balloon popped, the elimination of those jobs was a rational correction.  Not pleasant, but not distressing.

What is distressing is reading the law students’ lament that there are no jobs waiting for them, that the jobs out there don’t pay enough, that they got saddled with all this debt with no way to pay it off, that the lives of young lawyers are miserable, and somebody (besides the students themselves, of course) must be to blame.  It’s upsetting — not to hear how bad they have it — but to think that so many of these people are getting ready to enter our profession.

To put it bluntly: they are not wanted here.  It only takes a moment’s thought to realize that, if they were wanted, then there would be a place for them.  But the ones complaining loudest seem to be the one who did the least research before deciding on law school, so perhaps they haven’t done this bit of thinking either.

They are not wanted here, because there is no (more…)

Note to incoming first-year law students:  The law itself is not terribly difficult.

We lecture to schoolkids from time to time, and they seem to get the concept pretty easily when we explain that the law is nothing more than the rulebook for how to play the game of real life.  It’s not much different from the rules of Monopoly or Sorry or Candyland — there’s just more of them.  Rules can sometimes be stupid or unfair, but they’re still there, and you still have to play the right way.  To learn the law adequately, all one needs to do is learn the rules for a given subset of human behavior, and that’s pretty much it.  If you want to learn the law really well, you also learn the policies behind the rules, so you can  better understand what a given rule is trying to do, and better predict how the rules might change.  The role of a good law professor is not only to teach you what the law is right now, but why it is that way, and what policy seems to explain all those seemingly varying cases out there.

And though the law can be an ass, for the most part it’s straightforward common sense.  Don’t hurt someone else for no good reason.  If you want to drive a car, you have to have some basic abilities before you’re allowed on the public roads.  If you want an enforceable security interest, you need to do the civilized thing and file your lien so the rest of us know about it.  It really is basic.

And most of the time, the policies behind the law are the same ones we learned from our parents.  Take self defense — our folks taught us the same lesson that generations of parents have taught their kids about what to do if a big kid’s trying to hurt you:  First, tell the kid to knock it off.  If that doesn’t work, leave.  If that doesn’t work, get a grownup.  If nothing works, however, hit the kid back… and don’t stop hitting till he can’t hit you any more.  None of our forebears had any legal training, but that’s pretty much what the law says too.  It’s just common sense.  Don’t make a bad situation worse if you can avoid the situation in the first place, but you’re allowed to protect yourself and eliminate the threat if it can’t be avoided.

So the law isn’t very difficult.  It can be complex, and it can be voluminous, but that only makes learning it time-consuming.  Time-consuming is not the same as hard.

We noticed this in law school.  The students who did best were not necessarily the brightest, but were instead (more…)

So we’ve been hearing about this new blog, “UnemployedJD.com,” where some guy named Ethan is documenting his hunger strike “to bring awareness to the concerns of [his] classmates. Their primary concerns are inaccurate employment statistics, ineffective career counseling, and rising tuition costs. [His] intention is to have these concerns addressed by law school administrators.”

Really?  A hunger strike?  Because most law students aren’t guaranteed a high-paying job on graduation?  We figured it had to be a joke.  Some hipster irony, or an Onion article being taken seriously, or something like that.  But no, it turns out this kid is totally serious.  (Well, not totally.  He’s letting himself drink juice.)

Putting aside his sincerity, it’s a stupid tactic.  It’s not as if awareness needs to be raised — the news has been saturated for a couple of years now with stories of law firms cutting back, not hiring, and law schools continuing to pump out graduates without jobs.  And it’s not a problem that law school administrators can fix, much less one that they ought to fix.  It’s up to the students, not the school, to make sure they’ve built the necessary transcript and resume to get the job they want.  The school can provide the opportunity, but only the student can do the work.  It’s not the school’s fault if the student didn’t do what had to be done.

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Here’s the deal: High-paying entry-level law jobs are extremely rare.  They are offered to the top sliver of students from the top sliver of “national” law schools.  Top students from regional schools will be in the running for local firms, but not for firms in other parts of the country.  And if you’re not a top student from a top school, you can forget about getting a big-money job.  Period.

Of course, if you’re going into the law for the money, you don’t belong in the law.  There’s nothing wrong with making a good living as a lawyer, but if that is the reason for wanting to be lawyer you simply don’t belong in the profession.  People who are going into law school because it seems like a meal ticket are doing it for the wrong reasons.  Ditto for people who go to law school by default, because it seems like a safe placeholder until they figure out what they want to do with their lives or until the economy picks up again.  They’re wasting all that time and money on law school, for all the wrong reasons.

And if you’re going to a lesser law school, in order to make the big bucks when you get out, you’re not just wrongheaded but stupid.  The school you go to really does matter to what kind of job you get on graduation.  If you weren’t good enough to even get into a top school, what makes you think you can compete with those who not only got in, but outperformed everyone else who also got in?  To think that somehow you’re entitled to a high-paying job after graduating in the bottom of your class from a second- or third-tier school… that’s beyond unrealistic.

Apart from the money, nobody has ever guaranteed (more…)

Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Prof. Ilya Somin has a good post today on whether the bar exam ought to be abolished.  He agrees with Elizabeth Wurtzel that the exam “is primarily a test of memorization,” the bulk of which will be irrelevant to any given lawyer’s actual practice.  We are not fans of the bar exam, either, but we think the solution is not to abolish the exam, but more and better bar exams.

Nobody in their right mind believes that the bar exam is a reliable indicator of who is going to make a good lawyer.  It doesn’t test judgment, reasoning or understanding.  More importantly, it doesn’t test actual skills that lawyers need to know — it doesn’t test to see if a transactional lawyer can put together a contract that does the job, or to see if a trial lawyer knows how to get his evidence admitted, or to see if an estate lawyer can craft a plan that will carry out the client’s wishes with a minimum of fuss.

We remember Prof. Whitebread’s lecture from our Bar/Bri course back in ’97, where he admonished us not to seek a perfect score on the bar exam.  “You only need a passing grade,” he said.  “You don’t need to get them all right; you only need… a gracious plenty.”  And he was right.  The bar is not all that high.  As a barrier to entry, the bar exam doesn’t really do a whole lot.

Prof. Somin would abolish the bar exam, he says, because it keeps out too many lawyers.  “The high salaries of lawyers combined with the high cost of even very basic legal services show that we have too few lawyers rather than too many.”  He is wrong.  The bar exam hardly keeps anybody out.  The profession does not have too few lawyers; it has too few good lawyers.

We usually argue the point from the other angle, when it comes up in conversation.  “It’s not that there are too many lawyers,” we say, “but that there are too many bad ones.”  And it’s true.  The profession has a glut of licensed practicing lawyers who are not terribly good at what they do.  We encounter them on a daily basis.  They’re out there, they’re all over the place, and they make the rest of us look bad.

All they had to do was stick out a few years of some law school and get a barely passing grade, then memorize some of this and some of that and barely pass the bar.  For the rest of their careers, these lawyers will never again have to demonstrate any actual competence in anything in order to remain licensed practicing lawyers.

This is where the bar exam needs to change.  We should definitely abolish the one we’ve got.  It’s just a holdover from the bad old days when (more…)

There’s an article over on the ABA Journal’s website today called “How Law Schools Can Produce Happier Students and Satisfied Lawyers.”  We recommend reading through the comments section.  It’s a good glimpse at one of the biggest problems with the legal profession today — namely, that there are too many lawyers who don’t belong here.

Far too many people go to law school who shouldn’t.  Plenty go into the law who shouldn’t.  Is it any wonder that they wind up unhappy and dissatisfied? 

If you’re going to law school by default, because you can’t think of what else to do with your life, then please don’t.  Anybody who spends a hundred grand (or gets that much into debt) just to “find himself” has seriously bad judgment.  And judgment is sort of a basic prerequisite to the practice of law.  It’s one of the most important things any legal employer is looking for.  Please go away. Now.

If you’re not doing well in law school, then get out.  Seriously.  Your first job is going to depend hugely on your grades.  And your subsequent jobs will depend on that first job.  And legal employers do care about your grades, even decades later, believe it or not.  You’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of minimal job satisfaction.  Also, contrary to popular belief, law school actually is a good preparation for the practice of law.  The kinds of questions you’re flubbing on your exams require precisely the kind of issue-spotting and thoughtful analysis that you’re going to have to do every time a new matter crosses your desk.  You’re actually going to have to continue learning and applying new areas of law constantly, throughout your career.  If you haven’t figured it out by the end of your 1L year, then save yourself the money and a lot of frustration and find something else to do with your life.

If you find law school too stressful, then get out.  Law school is stressful for everyone, that’s normal.  But if you’re finding (more…)

The LSAT is essentially the law school entrance exam in the United States. One’s score on that test is a big factor in determining which law school one will get to attend (if any). The law school one attends has an enormous influence on what sort of jobs will be available on graduation, and thus one’s entire career. So the LSAT is kind of a big deal, if one is considering a career in the law.

The college students most likely to be considering a legal career, of course, are those majoring in “Pre-Law.” So one would expect that, after four years of undergraduate preparation, they’re the most likely to ace that LSAT.

But as it turns out, Pre-Law and Criminal Justice students have the worst average scores out of 29 college majors. The students with the best scores? Math majors, Economics majors, and Philosophy majors.

The data has recently been published in a study by Michael Nieswiadomy, an Econ professor at the University of North Texas. The study, “LSAT Scores of Economics Majors: The 2008-2009 Class Update,” can be downloaded here.

Here’s what’s going on: The LSAT is mainly a logic test, with some reading comprehension thrown in. The logic problems aren’t terribly challenging — the logic puzzles one finds in the supermarket checkout line are much harder. But to answer them correctly, one needs to have an analytically-trained mind.

This is precisely the kind of mind that Math majors, Econ majors and Philosophy majors have formed during their four years of undergrad. (Physics is lumped in with Math because that’s all Physics is any more.) Philosophy is all logic and reasoning. These majors, in fact, essentially teach students how to think.

And that is precisely what law school does. Law school doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer, but how to think and reason like one.

So really, it’s hardly surprising that the LSAT scores are distributed this way.

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College students have often asked us what courses they ought to take, to best prepare themselves for law school. Our answer has always been “History, Philosophy and Economics.” History, because that teaches you to analyze your sources and root out details, and also because the common law is nothing but history. Philosophy, because it teaches you to think and analyze and reason out an argument. And Econ, because half of the legal principles out there these days come from Economics, whether you realize it or not. All three of these, if mastered reasonably well, provide a rock-solid foudnation for the practice of law at the highest levels, as taught in the finest schools.

And apparently, they help you get in, too.

(Hat tip: TaxProf Blog)