Cardozo quote outside of Boalt Hall
There’s an assumption that law school has to teach you how to be a lawyer. It’s a reasonable assumption. Law school is a professional school, ergo you should be learning the skills you need to succeed in a profession. There’s a substantial investment of time and money, so the thought is that for that investment you should get something valuable in return, preferably something immediately valuable, like the skills to get hired.
But that assumption isn’t correct. It’s not an irrefutable truth that law schools have to teach practical legal skills. Where law schools fail is in selling that they teach practical legal skills and a quick path to a secure, well-paying job, while they don’t actually focus on the former and while the latter aren’t as commonplace as once believed.
That’s why the questions that Above the Law asks of law schools aren’t quite the right ones. Kashmir Hill’s basic argument is that if law firms are going to be lowering the starting salaries and increasing the training of junior associates, then there should be less law school, both in terms of the length of the education and the price paid for it. To put it in Hill’s words, law schools should be “sharing in the pain.”
I agree 100% on the cost issue. Law school has gotten so astronomically expensive that many newly-minted J.D.s will need a $160K starting salary to live comfortably. Programs like income-based repayment and public service loan forgiveness are helpful, but don’t fight the basic problem that law schools require students to assume a tremendous debt burden, even temporarily. If access to a legal education for all people is important (and the Supreme Court said so in Grutter v. Bollinger) then asking a student to assume $150-200K in debt doesn’t work.
But as far as the length of law school, that simply assumes that the end goal of law school is to produce trained practicing attorneys. That’s one goal a law school could have, but it’s not the only one. There is a place for a legal education that doesn’t necessarily lead to practice. There’s a place to give people the soft skills that law school teaches without teaching them to interact with clients, take depositions, and connect with a jury.
Law schools are suffering a PR nightmare right now because their students and graduates don’t believe that what they learned in law school is valuable without a job practicing law. Quite the opposite, the current state of legal education means that the training is general and theoretical enough that it can be easily adapted to many different careers.
So to answer the question in the title, the answer is no, but the caveat is to remember what a law school’s job actually is. Just because a law school didn’t teach you every little thing you need to start billing hours on day one doesn’t mean the law school automatically failed you. To answer Hill’s question, law schools should share in the pain, but right now they aren’t feeling much pain. As long as they are beating off applicants with a stick, there’s little incentive for law schools to change.
However, there is incentive in a boom time for law schools to not repeat the same mistakes law firms made over the last few years. That means assuming that students won’t always be fleeing to law school because they need to find themselves or because the economy is scarier than 1L. So yes, the ABA and law schools should explore a shortened or accelerated curriculum as an alternative to, but not a replacement for the current three year track. There isn’t a set amount of legal training that has to be given. And just because firms are going to provide more doesn’t mean that law schools can’t try to sell the same amount.
Photo by indridtaylar
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }