Thursday, July 25, 2013

Abolish the Law Schools.

The New Republic recently featured a mini-symposium on "how to fix law school."  However, I wonder if the thing should be repaired at all, as opposed to being consigned to the junkyard. Why not consider the benefits of eliminating almost all non T13 law schools, and returning to some version of the apprenticeship model of legal education, appropriately modified and updated for these more complicated times? The apprenticeship model produced Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, and Justice Robert Jackson, so maybe there are few things to learn from the 19th/early 20th centuries.

The model would work something like this: Following a bar-review-like crash course to teach core doctrine fast, law students would undergo a two year long structured series of apprenticeships and clinics to train them to try a case, handle an appeal, and represent clients in a couple of practice areas of their choice. The supervisors would be successful local practitioners and, maybe, public sector agencies. Not six-figure-salaried pedagogues who haven't seen the inside of a courtroom in many years, if ever.  
 
There would be no more hide-the-ball classroom bullying sessions, the core of the prevailing method of legal education. This method sometimes goes by the name "Socratic," but is really just the practice of self-interested law professors, who are either lazy or do not know much about legal practice, of stretching out a few months worth of doctrine to fill three long years, thereby draining their students of three years of tuition.
 
The costs of an apprenticeship education would be considerably less than the current black hole of law school debt. There would be no need for 90 million dollar "state of the art" School of Law buildings, no need for $500,000+/yr. law school deans,  and no need for faculties filled with dozens of six-figure-salaried academics who, over and above their salaries and benefits and summer research stipends, expect to be subsidized to travel to luxury resorts in Florida and Hawaii for, uh, academic conferences. As well, there would be no need to hire a bunch of do-nothing career services employees. Moreover, for apprenticeship supervisors, tuition would merely be a supplement to their salaries or income, not the whole thing.

Because lawyers should, indeed, have highly developed critical thinking and writing skills, a prerequisite for admission to a law apprenticeship program could be a year or more of grad school, plus excellent grades in college, plus a high score on the LSAT or some other standardized test or tests designed to measure critical thinking skills.
 
The practicing bar, which would accredit apprenticeship programs, and monitor them for quality, would be unlikely to follow the example of law schools, and allow training programs to flood the market. Practitioners have an interest in keeping the number of bar admissions down, whereas law schools have little stake in the legal profession, and must extract enormous sums of money, mostly from students, just to meet expenses.

Students would complete their apprenticeship program with the confidence, experience, and local contacts to practice law and make money, even if, sometimes, not enough to sustain an entire legal career.  And, being practice-ready and far less indebted, recent grads would be able to take many more low bono cases, thereby actually advancing justice by meeting the unmet legal services needs of the working poor. Under the current system, by contrast, newly minted JDs are rarely practice-ready, and their hideously expensive legal educations are frequently a total loss, especially as document review dries up
 
Futhermore, I believe that nonlaw white collar employers would not despise a practical legal education, as they currently despise JDs. To many such employers, a JD represents a bundle of elite expectations, rather than a bundle of actual skills. It is a degree that screams: entitled asshole. By contrast, an apprenticeship law degree/license would signify skills rather than entitlement. Nobody despises skills even if they are not immediately useable.

What about legal scholarship? Much of that could be done over on the undergrad campus, in philosophy, history, sociology, poli-sci, or cultural studies departments, which is where many of the "Law and __" or "Critical-This-or-That-Theory" law professors belong. (Though, unfortunately, many such law school professors are just overpaid dilettantes, and would find the transition to scholarly rigor and peer review to be a trying experience). The best of the "Law and __" professors would land in the T13 law schools, which would continue to provide havens for scholars and valuable credentials for well-bred overachievers. There should also be foundations to subsidize select practicing lawyers of a scholarly bent to take one or two year leaves of absence from their jobs in order to write academic-style articles.
 
There are a handful of law professor critics who have truly honored their moral obligations to their students (and who are far braver and smarter than I am). I would hate to see these professors hurt in any way by the collapse of the system, and so I hope they succeed in reforming the current system from within somehow. I don't think that is possible anymore, and so my proposed solution is Ecrasez l'infame.

17 comments:

  1. Well said. I especially liked this observation:

    "Futhermore, I believe that nonlaw white collar employers would not despise a practical legal education, as they currently despise JDs. To many such employers, a JD represents a bundle of elite expectations, rather than a bundle of actual skills. It is a degree that screams: entitled asshole. By contrast, an apprenticeship law degree/license would signify skills rather than entitlement. Nobody despises skills even if they are not immediately useable."

    I ran into this time and time again with my oh-so-lauded JD, and it is a real, valid concern because many grads will be clamoring for those so-called "JD-Advantage" positions as fewer and fewer can land full-time "real" lawyer jobs.

    Speaking personally, in my interviews after Law School people were much more interested in my STEM degree/experience, and you could just see the question marks popping over their head concerning my JD. In 2004. With consulting companies that were expert witnesses for litigation, no less.

    Skillz matter. Pomp and circumstance don't, at least for the super-majority. But don't try to tell that to the law schools.



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  2. On the money again, as usual D-Dawg. Perfectly sensible solutions to the problems, but nobody in the system will listen. It's "not that simple" - although it is "that simple" in real life.

    I want the entire system to just implode and collapse. My life has since I graduated from law school. Fuck them. Let them have their hundred million dollar buildings and tenure and six figure salaries and law reviews and sabbaticals. And let those golden treasures drag them to the bottom of the fucking ocean.

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  3. Nice theory, but the problem is anti-trust. Anti-trust laws presuppose that flooding the market with lawyers will drive down costs to consumers, but most Americans still cannot afford a lawyer because there is a floor beneath which a lawyer cannot make a living and a lawyer swamped by competition will try to get as much as possible out of each file.

    Anti-trust works well when writ large. When I was a child we waited until after a certain time to call Grandma on her birthday because long distance was cheaper at night. Nowadays it is always dirt cheap, and a lot of big companies like MCI went under to get us there. When American Motors went under Chrysler got the lucrative Jeep brand because government regulators didn't want GM or Ford to have too much market share.

    But in the legal profession the consequences do not fall on large corporations where the loss is shared by hundreds of thousands of shareholders. The losses fall on individuals.

    I like the old model of bar admission but I don't think it will work until the ant-trust issues have been resolved.

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    1. Anonymous-7:55AM, the second sentence of your first paragraph, notably "there is a floor beneath which a lawyer cannot make a living and a lawyer swamped by competition will try to get as much as possible out of each file" is a brilliant pithy take on why solos are on every street corner but prices do not go low enough for people to afford/want to pay. Your comment is great food for thought.

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    2. 7:55AM here again. About 20 years ago a friend who is a solo in Chicago told me that another friend of his who was a solo in a thinly settled county in downstate Illinois was getting $2K for a residential closing while Chicago lawyers were getting $500. This made no sense until he explained. His country lawyer friend was lucky if she got ten closings a year. She had to make more per file or she'd be out of business, along with every other lawyer in her county. The clients had to deal with it because if they didn't pay those rates there'd be no lawyers in the county and they'd be driving six hours round trip for legal services.

      But what if a young lawyer with massive student loan debt shows up and is willing to earn a lot less in order to poach business? If he starts doing closings for $1,500 hoping to steal work from everyone else in the county then what?

      Most solos operate with a baseline of fixed fee work - residential real estate, wills, plain vanilla divorces, misdemeanor defense - and look for chances to make a bigger score when they can. But competition for the fixed fee stuff has kept the fees flat for years and the bigger scores are getting harder to come by. Sooner or later they will succumb to the strategy of trying to charge the clients they have less even more.

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  4. "There would be no more hide-the-ball classroom bullying sessions, the core of the prevailing method of legal education. This method sometimes goes by the name "Socratic," but is really just the practice of self-interested law professors, who are either lazy or do not know much about legal practice, of stretching out a few months worth of doctrine to fill three long years, thereby draining their students of three years of tuition."

    The lazy bastards need to justify their high salary, by extending garbage that could be covered effectively in a few months. Hell, as other observers have noted, you could put doctrinal classes on Youtube or audio discs. As long as bar exams are in place, then you don't need to worry about people ignoring the videos and jumping into the practice of law. Hell, countless law students shop online for shoes, play chess and Solitaire, and read news articles on their laptop while the "professor" is boring the class to death.

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    1. Quite true. And the only reason this pseudo-"Socratic" method exists is due to historical caprice, namely the ridiculous notion of Harvard Law Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell. This jackass determined that he alone "knew" that the close study of appellate court opinions would mystically enable the student to intuit the "eternal principles" of the Common Law. And this inanity was first promulgated 125 or more years ago! So much for the industry's propaganda touting their "innovative " and "cutting edge" curricula.

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  5. Law schools have wrecked more young people's lives in the last 10 years than all the drug dealers in America.

    The combination of non-dischargable debt and sky-rocketing tuition is a killer, literally. And law schools know it.

    They, as institutions, deserve to die for the evil they have knowingly done.

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    1. a little perspective please. less than 500,000 people went to law school over ten years, a percentage of which are doing ok to great. drug dealers do a lot more damage than that.

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    2. You can recover from a drug problem - you can't get away from non-dischargable debt.

      When student loans became non-dischargable, law schools should have cut their tuition, not raised it through the roof. But raise it they did.

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    3. you can recover from a drug problem, unless you die from od.

      I wouldn't wish either on anyone

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  6. So much on focus on law schools but not enough on student loans.

    The high interest rates, profiteering of fed gov, asshole collectors, constantly changing rules.

    I have accept my responsibility for my bad decisions and I would rather my loans but with the high interests rates I just can't dig into principle.

    I feel like that 3% I could pay them off (150K law+undergrad+interests 6mo after graduation) but at 7.2 avg I am just fighting to stay afloat. 45K (33K clean). I live on about 14k a year, 2k above fed poverty level. I live with my gf so I save some there. Some month I come up short and my parents throw me few hundred just so I can stay on the 10 year plan. The moment you step away from 10 year plan might as well stop paying all together and they understand that.

    I feel disgraced because of my lifestyle, I don't know how long my gf will stay with me. It is taking a toll on our relationship (my inability to make more, income being unstable, most of my money going to pay for my stupidity). She has loans but hers are only 60K and she has a job making 55K. She pays more then she needs and will be done in about 6 years.

    More and more I find myself abstaining from regular activities that we enjoyed when we were in school. No more going out to eat, no more pints with friends, I haven't bought clothes in 2 years. She is able to do those things to a degree and she does, I just stay at home.

    I just wish the gov was not turning profit on this situation.

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    1. the government profits from student loans are helping pay obamacare. keep paying, people are depending on it.

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  7. I like it. Though I wonder what, if any, funding model you'd propose. Sure, if the answer is "none," the number of new lawyers would be no more than could be supported--at least by deep-pocketed BigLaw firms. (Though I wonder what would happen to their doc review billing model without a reserve army of labor.)

    My question is whether midlaw and small law firms or solos would have the resources (money but also time) to train apprentices.

    On the flip side, if funding were made available in the form of, say, apprenticeship loans, it's obvious that practicing lawyers would be just as eager to abuse public monies as the "lawyers" that run law schools have been.

    So, yes, I agree with the general maxim lex schola delenda est. I disagree with an apprenticeship program. What needs to be done is to empower the DoE, both in legal and all higher education, to match funds to expected demand. Quasi-private actors and stupid children are incapable of acting in the greater good, so their discretion must be curbed.

    As that's politically impossible, I am also open to the possibility of complete market liberalization and an end to subsidization. Sure, that would be worse for everybody than the ideal, but better than the current situation, and would at least reach the same end of destroying the vast number of non-performing educational programs that for some reason we still pay for.

    In the latter case, catch-as-catch-can apprenticeships sound fine.

    Neither is likely to happen, I'm afraid.

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    1. Though I wonder what would happen to their doc review billing model without a reserve army of labor.)

      Nigeria. India.

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    2. Split between that and HAL 9000, probably.

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  8. .....and the cattle say "ABOLISH THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE!". And yet the blood continues to flow.

    The scammed law school grads say "ABOLISH THE LAW SCHOOLS!"

    A very noble sentiment. But it won't even come close to happening. Not through the powers of the government, anyway.

    Haven't you noticed that the USA is run for the benefit of commerce and business and investors? Law school is all about commerce and business and investors. The chances of law school being abolished is zero. The chances of the government acting to shut down law schools is zero.

    The people have no power over this american government.

    The ABA will do nothing. It is a bought and paid for corrupt entity.

    NOTHING WILL CHANGE. Unless we make it so. And that avenue of change is going to arrive via spreading knowledge of the law school scam on the internet and in the media. We are having an effect. We forced cooley to change its name. We are about to close Thomas Jefferson via a lawsuit and impending judgement/settlement. We forced the sale of texas weslayan to Texas A&M.

    Work. Wait. Abide.

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