Law school is more than test preparation and rote memorization. It should emphasize educated citizenship.
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The Case Against Law School
Should the standard three years of law school, followed by the bar exam, be the only path to a legal career?
It's Not a Trade School
Updated July 21, 2011, 08:50 PM
Kevin Noble Maillard is a law professor at Syracuse University and the co-editor of the forthcoming “Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex and Marriage.”
Law school is not a trade school. In that narrow model, a legal education would prepare students for one single thing: a job as a lawyer. But people go to law school, pay tuition and graduate to become many things: educators, business leaders, politicians and, yes, attorneys. Shortening the curriculum to cut costs mistakenly assumes that one model fits for everyone.
At the risk of sounding “liberal artsy,” law school should emphasize educated citizenship. It prepares people to become leaders in our society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as thinkers. They will become stewards of policies that affect our everyday lives: in our schools, our jobs and our families. All of this responsibility, in diverse fields, comes from legal education. As Chris Judge, my student at Syracuse, reminds me, “there are many paths toward becoming a lawyer,” and students and administrators should reject the customer-provider model of education.
Philistine critics of this warrior-citizen approach will argue that legal education today fails to prepare students for the “real world.” A similar argument follows that classes should only focus on subjects related to the bar exam. Any other classes, like “law and literature” or “human rights,” are only side orders for the curricular entrées like "evidence" or "federal courts." By trimming the fat, critics say, we save students money. This is a cheap answer to a larger problem.
The crude model of a legal trade school is a disservice to students. Law school is more than test preparation and rote memorization. Gone are the days of the gold watch at retirement or the lifelong stint with a single employer. In today’s “real world,” people change jobs, careers and fields. Training students for a specific job may work for the immediate future, but certainly not for a career of service.
The challenge is to look beyond a one-year window of employment to think about the enduring return on students’ investments. Sure, schools can focus on employment, but it takes a bolder institution to worry more about education.
Debaters
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Reduce Credit Requirements
David Van Zandt, president, The New School
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Allow Anyone to Take the Bar
George Leef, Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
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It's Not a Trade School
Kevin Noble Maillard, law professor, Syracuse University
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Improving, Not Overhauling
Rose Cuison Villazor, Hofstra University Law School
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Bring Back Apprenticeships
David Lat, editor, Above the Law
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Learning to Think Like a Lawyer
Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago Law School
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A Priceless Degree
Linda Greene, law professor, University of Wisconsin
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Three Years, Better Spent
Bryan A. Garner, editor in chief, “Black’s Law Dictionary"
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22 Readers' Comments
Post a comment »In a very real sense the trouble with law school is that it produces lawyers.
The truth is that we have a literally grotesque oversupply of lawyers and we need to radically reduce their power in society. Let's start by decimating the law schools.
Few would object to the claim that it is imperative that law students be rigorously trained as thinkers. There is a myth in law schools, however, that such training takes three years. I learned more in one undergrad Philosophy class in logic and critical reasoning than I did in three years of law school. In fact, law schools don't even offer such courses. Yet they claim to produce thinkers...
The problem with law school (and I went to a T5 school, not an institution that barely scraped into the top 100) is that it's charging enormous sums to qualify students for jobs that are in extremely short supply. There weren't enough private jobs for every student with crushing debt at my top ranked school, and we were offer central compared to lower ranked schools (and we had guaranteed loan repayment for those in public interest careers, which most schools can't afford to provide). Of my many law friends who went to lower first tier institutions ranked higher than Syracuse, only one is employed after graduation. Schools dangle 160k salaries in front of gullible undergraduates knowing that those jobs exist only for a tiny percentage of law graduates. They force three years of rote learning at prices few students can afford, then hang them out to dry once the last tuition payment has been received. And then they justify it by pretending it's about education and leadership.
I'm not speaking from personal bitterness. I never had debt, I received plenty of offers. But I had many friends at lesser schools who didn't. They're sinking in debt they took out to pay for a worthless degree, not becoming leaders in society.
Doctors have been decimated by HMO's
and these are worthy professions that add something of vital importance to the built and human environment!
Retail accountants like H and R Bloch can do your taxes for a few hundred dollars.
And poor vitally important pharmacists are stuck under flourescent lights and economized air-conditioning in the back of Walmart!
Yet we are left with the very worse - the lawyers - with their price fixing intact. Outrageous. Whatever it takes to bust this cartel - lets do it!
With law professors like this, no wonder their students are unemployed and unemployable.
If law school is the path to an educated citizenship free to choose its path forward, then the high cost and long tenure required to complete it serve to limit those to whom the fruits are available to the relatively wealthy. Is this the objective? But it is not at all obvious – and frankly rather self-serving to assert – that it is attending law school above all other means of spending one’s time that will deliver this elevated effect. And if it is law schools, is it really law schools are currently constituted?
Professor Maillard’s comments gloss over a significant anti-democratic effect of the high cost of legal education: no matter what high ideals students bring with them upon enrollment, the crushing debt they take on to attend law school (unless they are wealthy to begin with) substantially limits their choice of employment to high-paying jobs (if they can get one), which almost always represent corporate interests.
In stating that, "(3 years of expensive law school) prepares people to become leaders in our society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as thinkers.", I must wonder if this does not mean that we are limiting ourselves in this country to those who are allowed to govern or direct this country, to teach, to think, and yes, to litigate, to only the richer percentile. That thought, in itself, should actually make law education a pre-requisite for just getting out of high school. This would lead to the 'better thinkers' spoken of.
Or, if law being an elective, it should be in the reduced form of education as to allow more to follow the path; equal opportunity, as it were, on a comparative basis with other professions. Should a person decide to be an educator, business leader, or politician, then let them follow a greater path of education when the more efficient bar has been reached, that is to pass the bar in a cost effective way. For the fact is, law governs our everyday lives in all things we do. Should we all not be aware of the rules we must live by, and how they apply? (It is said ignorance of the law is no defense, yet many of us can't afford to learn the rules or how they apply.)
In short, 'educated citizenship' should be a cost effective right to all; one gained by simply reading proficiently, even vociferously, and not just for those who have gained some greater form of monetary wealth or created undo monetary burden on themselves.
The JD (juris doctor) degree is a farce next to the PhD and MD.
The overwhelming of broader intellectual pursuits, of engagement with the world beyond career, given the demands of acquiring complex skills, is a hazard of both professions. The school admissions committees know this, and look for diversity of interest and experience in their applicants. They're oft derided for being 'politically correct' or for indulging in racism in the guise of affirmative action for doing this. But both physicians and lawyers must be connected to the larger world. Otherwise, the technical problems, rather than the patient/client and his/her life and social context, become the focus. Look around, and see if this is a trivial problem. It isn't. And the huge debt loads--over $150,000 on average--militate against service and for overvaluation of remuneration and careerism.
I agree that college is a great time for intellectual exploration. But college, too, is frightfully expensive and increasingly careerist. And premedical classes, in particular, are demanding and require attention which diverts from broader education in the sciences and liberal arts, to the detriment of personal development. One man's opinion who's been there done that.
While we're at it, how about looking at dentistry. In England, dentists are called Mr., and have less expensive training. All of this expense of training has to be passed off on the purchaser or the public at some point. So, how much are we going to overtrain and pay for?
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