In most areas of business and life, there need to be several points of failure rather than just one. In my current field, systems redundancy is the name of the game. There always needs to be a Plan B in case someone leaves the company, goes on vacation or takes a new job. Law schools are very good at presenting an illusion of the law degree as one that creates more options for graduates' careers. As the last three years of this website has shown you, that is a horrible lie. Law school reduces your career choices to just one.
The "JD Advantage" is a myth and part of the illusion being peddled by law schools today. Law schools tell students that JD Advantage jobs include such luminous roles as corporate executive, politician, and of course, law professor. In fact, the University of Chicago has a whole page telling prospective students how they can join the ranks of Legal academia. The truth is not so rosy. Most solo attorneys are not solo by choice. Do you want to know why so many new grads go solo? It's because they can't even get hired as paralegals. With law professors content to teach only the most obscure and arcane areas of law, the new graduate is ill equipped to even handle a speeding ticket. But law professors will not stoop to teaching such base and simple procedures unless forced. As long as pompous law professors are prowling the halls of law schools, students will remain a audience for their egos and passion projects. There is simply no reward, just risk.
Law schools know that the education they provide reduce students' options, which is why they engage in as much chicanery as they can get away with. Even with the new ABA disclosure requirements, many schools still massage employment data to the extent that it is useless as a tool for making an informed decision. But law schools can see the writing on the wall. That's why practice ready curriculums are the hot new thing. Law professors have no desire to teach their students how to be actual lawyers. Changing law school to make students "practice ready" will strip away the allure and mystique of law schools and reveal the administrators and professors as the charlatans they are. Once students see that most law practice is little more than a trade, like plumbing, they will not tolerate being taught only impractical and useless nonsense. Let's all work together to make that day arrive sooner rather than later.
The cockroaches love to chirp "One can do ANYTHING with a law degree!" Of course, for $ome rea$on, they leave out things such as being unemployed for large stretches of time; working in low-wage, dead-end, non-legal jobs; living at home when you're 30; etc.
ReplyDeleteAnother way to put it: if anything can happen, it usually does.
DeleteDon't you just love a chirpy cockroach? Great way to start the day.
Delete"they leave out things such as being unemployed for large stretches of time; working in low-wage, dead-end, non-legal jobs"
DeleteWell, yeah, lawyers can do those things.
But you can do them without a law degree, too.
Brian Leiter's guide to legal academia lists many distinguished Chicago graduates in academia and public service, but not a single one who graduated after 2002. Leiter arrived at Chicago in 2008, so he has never proven his ability to educate distinguished scholars. He also has little to no influence over the academic job market, so any prospective law student who wants to avoid legal practice should steer clear of Leiter's pretensions and promises.
ReplyDeleteThey're trying to convince lemmings to become law profs... in the face of rapidly declining law school enrollment, increasing reliance on adjuncts rather than tenure-track professors, the demographic fact that the age group likely to enroll in law school will be decreasing as a % of the population in the next 10 yrs or so, layoffs of experienced faculty [higher job market competition], and death grips on existing tenure-track jobs by all existing faculty [they know they have no better options and they are not going anywhere].
DeleteI guess these people are law profs, and not economists, for a reason.
Plus, law schools are less and less likely to consider faculty candidates with no legal practice experience. So, to get one of these faculty jobs, you have to win the law school lottery twice -- you have to get a Big Law job (or maybe a federal clerkship), and then you have to find an open faculty position.
Good luck with that! It sounds like a ridiculously slim shot to me.
Finally, you know who else is competing for the maybe 1-2 tenure track legal academic jobs that open up each year? Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford grads. Who aren't tainted with Leiter's reputation and burnt bridges. Good luck with that, Chicago grads.
Chicago's touting of the non-existent academic path resembles the PhD scam of the past quarter-century. Tenured professors know damn well that there are very few openings for professors, yet they continue to bring in graduate students like lambs to the slaughter. Cui bono?
DeleteOld Guy
You know what they say, Old Guy. Never pay for a PhD. While the general situation with regard to funding has gotten somewhat better recently, I suspect that New School and Catholic U are still collecting lots of loan-funded tuition from PhD students. In fact, heavily indebted PhD's from New School were prominent in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
DeleteThe job market for PhD's is bad enough. No one should try to face that market with a colossal load of debt that drains their energy, destroys their confidence, and distorts their career decisions.
PhD's are a colossal scam, UNLESS you earn a PhD in a physical science like pharmcology and be employed by a biotech firm. Law professorships are held by crusty old dinosaurs who will work the job til their 100.
DeleteAccording to Brian Leiter's academic guide, students who arrived at Chicago after him, and therefore graduated in 2012 or later, have obtained faculty positions at "Mississippi College" and "Jindal Global Law School." And nowhere else. That's the reality behind the academic fantasy that this charlatan tirelessly promotes on his law school blog.
ReplyDeleteI've got to believe that LawProfs, PhilosophyProfs, visiting judges, visiting Profs, etc. at U of C literally can't stand the guy. How many "Law and Nietzsche" professors does the world need, anyway? One, if that, is probably enough.
DeleteAfter the kerfluffle over the Philosophical Gourmet Report, apparantly scores and scores of Professors told him to take a flying leap. That many people can't be wrong.
Speaking of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, it appears to be falling apart, and its decline appears to predate Leiter's thuggish, unprovoked attack on Professor Jenkins. For his new round of rankings, Leiter was forced to enlist a buddy who specializes in "epistemology" to evaluate programs in Leiter's specialty, the philosophy of law. This guy apparently wasn't allowed to vote for his own school, but I'm sure he had no problem rating Chicago as a top legal philosophy program.
Delete"According to Brian Leiter's academic guide, students who arrived at Chicago after him, and therefore graduated in 2012 or later, have obtained faculty positions at "Mississippi College" and "Jindal Global Law School." And nowhere else. That's the reality behind the academic fantasy that this charlatan tirelessly promotes on his law school blog."
DeleteThat's because recent graduates are all still doing their prestigious clerkships and lucrative BigLaw associateships, prior to getting their cushy law professorships!
Actually, I thought it was interesting, even before the jobs dried up, how few of the placements were at top-tier institutions.
Since 2000, one hire by Harvard, none by Yale or Stanford, and even the Columbia and UCLA-level jobs are few and far between.
I guess the message is that even when there were jobs, you would be well-advised to go to HLS rather than Chicago.
It's clear that there's been a serious downturn in Chicago's academic placement. We still don't know how much of that is due to the recession, how much is due to declining enrollment at lower-tier law schools, and how much is a result of Leiter having permanently ruined Chicago's reputation. Next spring, his first cohort of new Chicago students will be five years past graduation. If Leiter hasn't placed any philosophy whiz kids by then, I suspect the blame will generally be assigned to him.
DeleteIt's too bad, really. I'm not a U of C alum, but U of C has always struck me as quality institution. While they can be a "PhD Factoy" of sorts, at least graduates went on to do actual work in a variety of fields, even in spite of the occasional U of C Leiter-esque faculty mis-hire.
DeleteIf even U of C grads are not getting "good" academic jobs now (or non-academic jobs, for that matter), the economy must really, really suck.
One admirable aspect of the U of Chicago is its refusal to join the tacky jingoist, male-chauvinist, quasi-pornographic world of commercialized spectator sports.
DeleteOn the other hand, it is the home of the reactionary "law and economics" movement…
Old Guy
I think that the Chicago hiring crisis is limited to academic jobs for their JD graduates since Leiter appeared at the law school. I was reading their philosophy department website recently, and apparently their Philosophy PhD placement is good. I'm sure the professors there are pleased that they never took the bait and made Leiter one of their colleagues. In spite of his grandiose pretensions, he's not even a professor of philosophy there.
DeleteResponding to both Duped and Old Guy, there's another admirable quality I find in the University of Chicago. Apparently some of their PhD programs are willing to give someone a chance who doesn't have perfect paper credentials, but nevertheless shows some creativity and intellectual promise.
DeleteOf course, I'm talking about funded programs with scholarships and stipends, not the law school with its inflated tuition and endless student debt.
I'm also talking here about potential students without much of a track record. As far as hiring their faculty, Chicago made a disastrous decision by hiring an individual they already knew to be unstable, malicious, and vindictive to be a professor of law, philosophy, and human values at the law school. Maybe one of those reactionary law and economics types could calculate the total value--to the university, the legal profession, and the human race--of paying him to go away and never come back.
"I'm sure the professors there are pleased that they never took the bait and made Leiter one of their colleagues. In spite of his grandiose pretensions, he's not even a professor of philosophy there."
DeleteLOL. I'm sure that Leiter's failure to secure a joint appointment in the philosophy department has been a source of continuing irritation to him since he came to Chicago.
As the recipient of an A.B. from that philosophy department, I must say that Leiter's continued failure in that regard gives me the warm fuzzies. And I HATED my time at U of C. : )
DeleteI really enjoyed Brian Leiter's thoughts on "Ranking Law Schools," which has been a lifelong obsession for him:
ReplyDelete"Are the faculty committed to being academics, or do many of them spend lots of time practicing law on the side?"
So if you want to be a law professor yourself, you need to avoid any professors who actually practice law. You also need to find an open position, and those are now scarcer than ever, but you can worry about that when you graduate with $150,000 in long-term debt. In the meantime, you get to pontificate in your jurisprudence and constitutional law and legal history seminars, and that makes you a scholar!
I remember when I read Brian Leiter's ridiculous guide to academic legal jobs a couple of weeks ago, that very same sentence jumped out out at me. Oh, the horror! "Professors" of law who are not content to simply be "academics," but who also want to sully their hands with the actual practice of law! Naturally, any aspiring law "professor" would want to give a school where the teachers actually practice law a wide berth. I love how in the original version on the website, Leiter places the words "on the side" in quotation marks, as if to impugn and deride the very idea of mixing academics and practice, and to belittle his colleagues who actually do engage the real world of legal practice. How revoltingly arrogant. And there is clearly an audience for ideas like his. The thought that some people enter law school with the hope of never actually practicing law in any capacity is beyond belief. The University of Chicago is really the paragon of ivory tower elitism, and the idea that "thinkers" are superior to "doers."
DeleteLaw professors don't know anything about speeding tickets or other types of everyday legal issues. If law schools suddenly adopted a "practice ready" curriculum, almost all the current law professors would be out of a job.
ReplyDeleteI actually have some experience with a school trying to be "practice ready." Temple University, my law school, once had this slogan "Real World Law" that it used in its advertising. Thus, this school (and I imagine some other schools too) attempted to invoke the idea of "practice ready" legal education long before the ABA was talking about it.
I hate to say it, but there really was nothing all that "practice ready" about Temple. They offered optional clinics, an optional year long trial advocacy program and an optional transactions workshop, but NONE of these programs really prepared students to go out there and practice. The environment was far too controlled. It felt more like a roleplaying game, rather than what the practice of law really looks like.
Note also that after three years at "Real World" Temple, I never once heard the words "Answers to Interrogatories" or "Notice of Motion" or "Order to Show Cause." I never once drafted a will or trust (albeit as an exercise), nor did I get any training on traffic court or municipal practice.
Point being, just because the ABA says they'll do a "practice ready" curriculum, doesn't mean the curriculum will actually be practice ready. At best, it will look like what I saw at Temple.
Frankly, the only way to really train law students to actually practice law is to have an apprenticeship after law school, which would be analogous to the residency doctors have to go through after medical school. This happens to be the way it is done in continental Europe: an apprenticeship for at least a year following law school, THEN you are allowed to sit for the bar.
Note: I don't mean to diss Temple Law school. There were many smart people there, and I certainly did appreciate their dirt cheap tuition. It's probably a far better school than some of the so called "Tier 1" schools, and its graduates do (or at least did do) reasonably well in the Philly area. It is, however, limited in the type of training that they can actually provide their students, given that it is only a school.
I really love the discussion of Brian Leiter, who got a free pass for so long but now finds himself under moral scrutiny by the people best qualified to perform it. However, there's a more general issue here. Does a law degree really open up career opportunities outside of legal practice? How about all those CEO's who started out with law degrees?
ReplyDeleteThe answer is that executive positions are not an option for new law graduates. Those who practice corporate law and meet lots of corporate executives may eventually be invited to join them. However, it takes a first-rate law degree and many years of practice to get to that level. Some of the worst law schools place exactly none of their graduates in big law firms, and should feel ashamed even to mention corporate law--let alone corporate executive jobs.
The JD acts as a scarlet letter for those looking for employment outside of law. That has been my experience and I have seen it happen to others.
ReplyDeleteI tried to find employment as an attorney after for two years after graduating law school. I tried to do all the right things in school to get a job (i.e., clinics in my field of law, applying for jobs fall 1L, trying to get part-time jobs in the school year, networking at bar events, etc, etc).
It didn't work out due to my advanced age (35) and my Toilet law degree. Eventually I took a haircut and got a job where the JD was not required.
What has not been mentioned is that family, work colleagues, etc look upon you as someone who couldn't "hack it" as a lawyer. They don't think that you tried to get a job as an attorney and look upon you as a failure. That can be distressing and hard to explain.
There's a malignant troll over at Nando's site, a real psychopath. He's obsessed with that line of argument...you losers don't even TRY to find jobs!!!
DeleteFrom what I know of projection, obsession, and delusion, that guy almost certainly doesn't have a job himself. The real losers are the ones trying to pick off the other losers.
My mother used to tell me I should go knocking on doors, from one law firm to another. By "knocking on doors" she literally meant it. I should put on a suit and just walk into law firms with a resume in hand. Luckily, I never had to do that.
DeleteFew years later when I did finally get a job, I actually witnessed someone walking into the office wearing a suit to offer his resume. It was very uncomfortable. Kudos to the secretary who handled it with class, and didn't make the poor guy look any more pathetic than he already did.
Yup, things are that bad for lawyers. People are trying all sorts of desperate things to find work. That troll on Nando's site should just shut-up.
No. That troll is an individual that is very anti Obama and very racist.
DeleteHe might work in the legal field, but he didn't know the difference between slander and libel.
So he is at the very least an ultra right wing conservative, and probably white, given his past comments about white people eventually going to be forced to live in gated communities and other such stuff.
That despicable racist troll at Nando's site also keeps hammering away on "MESSAGE DISCIPLINE!!!" Sounds kinky to me! With a wee little Nazi fetish added to attract his fellow psychopaths.
DeleteWell, my friend at 5:14, it's good that you know a racist when you see one. That malignant troll has made himself a social leper at several political and law school websites, and there's nothing we can do for him.
DeleteJust remember, please, that it's okay to be a "right-wing conservative." That is, as long as you don't support law schools cheating ignorant students out of their debt-funded tuition money. That's the acid test of whether conservatives actually believe in their own principles.
Is it impossible to find or at least stop a troll that uses proxy servers? His main strength.
DeleteA law degree provides a good background, solid even, for an alchemist. I have it on good authority that many of the "JD preferred" jobs are actually alchemists. Other "JD preferred" jobs include wheelwrights, rat catchers, resurrectionists, and phrenologists.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget dowsers. There's a real unmet need for dowsers in certain parts of the country.
DeleteA proper legal education teaches you to think like a phrenologist.
DeleteYou guys, we've been far too narrow-minded about career options for law graduates. I just looked in Wikipedia, and apparently 168 US Representatives and 57 US Senators have law degrees. That's 39% of the House and 57% of the Senate. And let us not forget the President and Vice-President of the United States, graduates of Harvard Law and Syracuse Law respectively.
ReplyDeleteThat must mean that a law degree is a great way to enter politics. Isn't that how things work nowadays? Wouldn't it be worth a cool quarter million to graduate from a top law school, if it took you to the highest levels of the United States government?
There's a Web site that touts the various fields in which prominent law-school graduates are found. One of them is royalty. The idea, presumably, is that a JD from Indiana Tech might help you to become queen or king of Belgium.
DeleteOf course, there are also people with law degrees who are homeless, who are chronically unemployed, who make the minimum wage or not much more, who are strung out on drugs, who rot in prison, who kill themselves. Funny, those people never seem to make the lists issued by law-skule touts and their lackeys.
Old Guy
That's a sobering thought, Old Guy.
DeleteFor those who may be believers, let us pray for those poor souls. As victims of pride and greed, sometimes even of their own making, they still deserve our memory, concern, and compassion.
Just a reminder here: I think we've entered the MLK weekend by now. I'd like to propose that all of us, regardless of political persuasion, spend at least some time reading and thinking about human rights, social change, respect for law, and universal values of all kinds. Historical figures like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Gandhi are worth our consideration as well. There's plenty of hypocrisy in the historical record, but also plenty of noble ideals and actions, nobly expressed.
ReplyDeleteIf more Americans really cared about the lives and dreams of their fellow Americans, the law school scam could never have gotten off the ground. The reality is that it could yet prove fatal to justice, liberty, and opportunity in this country.
Or instead of reading and thinking, you could make up 500 lunches and go into inner city areas where day laborers and homeless can be found, and tent cities, and pass them out.
DeleteWe also had used clothing, especially socks, sweatshirts, and gloves.
Dude, I've actually been a day laborer. After a hard day of work, the last thing I wanted was a free lunch.
DeleteWhy don't you think about this stuff before you post it? Or if you're not willing to think, you could just go to an inner city area and try to pass out 500 jobs.
We're not doing this after a day of work; it's before. We start prep around 6 and hit the streets by 8 or so.
DeleteAnd whether or not you would have been grateful for a lunch in no way takes away from the fact that several hundred laborers each day are very, very happy to get them. Many of them don't have breakfast or lunch.
I find that this does a little more for people, concretely, than does "thinking about" them.
And if I had 500 jobs to pass out, I'd do that, too.
So, in any event, sorry that you seem to take offense.
But I'll put at least some action to help feed and clothe people ahead of happy thoughts and wishful thinking any day of the week.
Good luck to you.
Jesse Ventura became governor_of Minnesota and he never went to law school. I don't even think he attended college. And Arnold Swarznegger because governor of California and never went to college. You should watch them cage fight to the death in the movie RUNNING MAN and see how remember these 2 guys fighting like Buffoons got further than 99% of law graduates can ever get in government. Steroid pumpers that are described as meatheads are better off than law school waterheads and dolts.
ReplyDelete