To study medicine, one must first pass a range of difficult courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as an exam (the MCAT) that covers substantive material in all of these fields and in medicine itself. One must also complete a stint of volunteer work in a medical setting, typically a hospital. All of this is required for admission to medical school.
To study law, by contrast, one need only complete a bachelor's degree in any field, even underwater basketweaving. Not a single course is required. Nor is any work in a legal setting, and most law students have no such experience. Traditionally the LSAT—a mere test of logical reasoning and reading ability, unrelated to the substance of law—was required for admission, but recent years have seen it pushed to the side, with the possibility of substituting the GRE or another test of questionable relevance. And even the bachelor's degree isn't necessary in some places: the state of Michigan, for instance, accepts two years of university (a fact exploited by Cooley).
Do not suppose that completing the requirements will get you into a medical school. Admission is highly competitive, with many being turned away everywhere. Practically nobody, however, fails to get into a law school. Many law schools draw most of their students from the bottom 50% on the LSAT, and it is not unknown for a person with a score in the bottom 10% to get in. Indeed, a score below the fiftieth percentile may well attract a "scholarship" (a discount on tuition) at a number of predatory law schools.
Once admitted, medical students must complete a challenging program of study and pass various exams; they can be expelled for failure. The courses are almost all directed at practical needs. Training in the practice of medicine is an essential component of the program. Almost all professors are practicing physicians.
Law students are lucky to get a glimpse at practice, which professors disdain. They take a few basic courses on contracts, constitutional law, criminal law, torts, and the like, all of them based on some appellate cases that come up over and over again. After those courses, which occupy the first year, they take two years of electives that may well have no meaningful application, such as "Law and Popular Culture", "Critical Legal Pluralism", and "Hip-Hop and the US Constitution". Professors use this fluff to burnish their alleged intellectual credentials, and in many cases as cover for their lack of competence as practitioners. Rare indeed is the law professor who practices law; many are not lawyers at all.
Medical graduates are not yet ready for practice: they must still complete a residency and possibly more training in a specialty before they can become qualified as physicians. Law graduates, however, can go straight into practice after passing a fairly easy exam, even though they have never seen the practice of law before and have not even studied it. Most of them, including those from élite schools, freely admit that they do not know what they are doing as junior lawyers.
Good jobs for medical graduates are abundant: everyone who is serious and not too particular or demanding can get a well-paying job as a physician. Graduates of law schools face a very different reality: many cannot find work as lawyers ever, even if they are admitted to a bar, or get only short-term or low-paying (or even unpaid) work. The law-school scam promotes "JD-advantage" jobs as an alleged consolation prize for the many whose JD is not needed. Few lawyers make anything like the income of a physician, though the handful at the top garner the bulk of the attention.
Physicians tend to stay in medicine; lawyers tend to leave law, with most lasting less than five years. Many physicians teach medicine part time, but lawyers are ordinarily excluded from the academic ranks, which are peopled with young aristocrats with academic doctorates and little to no experience in the practice of law. A practicing lawyer cannot expect to get more than a position as an adjunct, teaching a single class for some such payment as $3000—perhaps enough to cover the cost of travel, with no office or secretarial support or even access to the law school's library. This sort of work is done as a labor of love, because the paltry fee is around the minimum wage.
This little exercise should show the folly of comparing law to medicine nowadays.
If medical school followed the law school paradigm then students graduating with an MD wouldn't know how to even put on a band-aid properly.
ReplyDeleteI think that, in the US, a century ago doctors and lawyer may have been quite comparable. Only approximately 10% of US high school graduates even attended any college, at all, in those days, and most did not get degrees. So, the very small percentage of people who 1) graduated from college and 2) went on to graduate from Medical School and get and M.D. or from law school, earning a J.D. may have been comparable, with similar prestige and earnings. In fact, I would bet that an associate at the Cravath law firm in 1925 probably earned more--perhaps considerably more--than the average doctor of that era. When you factor in a few more things, like the use of Latin in law and medicine, standard licensing exams, meaning a State Bar Exam for lawyers and various licensing exams for doctors, the comparison makes sense. Today, though, I do not think that they are comparable at all. It is exceedingly difficult to get into a US Medical school (hence the rise of Medical school in the Caribbean, and the accompanying scorn for graduates of those schools) whereas, with about a dozen law school in one state (Florida) it is very, very easy to get into a law school. Note that I said "a law school", it was difficult to get into a top law school in 1925, and it remains so today. But other than that, the two professions, law and medicine, are utterly incomparable. There are tens of thousands of people with nothing more than a high school diploma, some trade school, and a good work ethic who earn far more than most lawyers, whereas a salary of $400,000 to half-a-million or more is not uncommon for a Doctor, particularly in certain fields, like surgery or Anesthesiology.
ReplyDeleteOn top of that, most of the US public did not have access to high school a hundred years ago. A high-school diploma back then was a good way into the middle class. Around 1980, it came to be required for much blue-collar work. Now one may need a BA just to pour coffee.
DeleteRight, so what I am saying is there was a time, in not terribly long past history, where lawyers and doctors were seen as people who had a similar level of education/pay/prestige. I would very much like to know how much a lawyer who worked at a top-tier law firm, like Cravath, earned compared to a run-of-the-mill doctor in that era. I would suspect that the lawyer in that position earned more, and perhaps had more "prestige". That said, times changed, and people need to should their perceptions and understanding. The problem, to me, is that TV and Hollywood and bad legal thrillers continue to portray lawyers as wealthy, powerful, beautiful people, as opposed to the reality that most lawyers face. Where I practice, lawyers fight for "panel cases" from the Public Defender's Office paying, I believe, $60 per hour, pre-tax, with strict limits on hours billed per case.
DeleteIt's been known for years-and Hollywood has repeatedly presented it-that the legal profession has little or no "prestige". A great example is The Postman Always Rings Twice from 1946; Hume Cronyn played a wonderfully sleazy lawyer.
DeleteAnd in the 1980s there was a hit show called Cheers; one of the barflies was a guy named Tim. He was the bartender's gardener...and also his lawyer.
Many people go to law school simply because it's something to do when they can't do anything else. And that's because, with so many trash law schools, the barrier to entry is nonexistent. Many a liberal artist, with no job prospects, suddenly decides that they love the law. None decide they want to be an organic chemist. That, after all, would require actual credentials.
@1-4-25 11:03 am: Medical school was attended directly after high school until the 1950's. No bachelor's degree was required.
DeleteThe scam was already emerging in the 1980s and there was already a surplus of lawyers developing. There was always the image of the sleazy lawyer. The Three Stooges had the law firm Dewey, Cheetham and Howe. But the difference was that law school itself wasn't considered a path to unemployment.
DeleteBecoming a master plumber is more difficult than becoming a toilet trained lawyer.
ReplyDeleteI have wondered why it wouldn’t be reasonable to establish a set of pre-law “pre-requisites” (even 2 or 3 at the very least) that model the format of law school so that prospective students can at least have a better idea of what they’re getting into. One of the good things about the so called “weedout” premed courses is that their rigor really forces students to think deeply about how committed they are. I have a friend who was lucky enough that his institution allowed undergrads to take a 1L course at the university’s law school, and the experience of Contracts was enough for him to decide on an alternative career path.
ReplyDeleteThe premise of this article isn't wrong, but it's giving medicine too much credit:
ReplyDelete1. The amount of fat, professor vanity projects (think in-house and mini-boards with poorly correlative overlapping study), scut work in the hospital, poor lectures and add-on sociology is about half of the curriculum in and out of the hospital.
2. The 'teaching' that goes on in the clinical years is 'pimping,' that is MDs will ask random questions about patients. There is no teaching.
The easiest thing about medical school is getting in. I rate two-point-five trimesters as equivalent to four years of pre-med.
Most people have a breakdown during the ordeal and can barely function by the end, which is why most people settle for primary care.
Unlike going to Iwo Jima, it's not something you can do more than once.
You better have no other interests, no desire for fun, an incel or part of a strict, social determined culture, like Asia, India, Israel.
Sorry, but nobody wants to go into primary care; the fight after graduation is for all the sub-specialty slots and big money specialties like derm and optho...and of course ortho.
DeleteEvery year at the match the only residencies going begging-relatively speaking-are primary care, which is where you find the FMGs.
And with the current administration's crackdown on immigration, it's likely there will now be a shortage of primary care doctors.
Interesting. I will note that medical school and residency isn't that hard for everyone. My brother and his wife sailed through this period pretty easily. Although my other friend said it was very hard.
DeleteThe biggest difference between the two is that doctors have a professional organization willing to limit the supply of labor and lawyers don't.
ReplyDeleteThrough the 80s, doctors and lawyers were fairly comparable from a salary standpoint, with both being respected careers that easily opened doors to the upper-middle class. What caused the divergence since then? The AMA stepped in and got Congress to freeze medical residency slots, gradually reducing the number of doctors per capita in this country. They also aggressively regulated medical schools, refused to accredit new ones that would have been toilets, and for the most part stood firm against reducing admissions standards, some problems with affirmative action aside.
In contrast, the ABA is more than happy to put its seal of accreditation on any fly-by-night predatory school out there, encourages schools to enroll more and more students, and is actively trying to water down the admissions standards and the bar exam, all in the name of creating more lawyers to solve the "access to justice" problem. Producing tens of thousands of more lawyers each year won't help anyone in these allegedly under-served communities when they are too incompetent to do legal work, are saddled with onerous amounts of student debt to the point they can't possibly take these jobs, and the salaries being offered only continue to decline because of the overproduction of lawyers.
Even the worst medical schools have professional licensing pass rates in the mid-90s on their graduates' first attempts. There are law schools where less than half their graduates can say the same.
And to add insult to injury, nine states require bar members to report annual pro bono work, and one-NY-requires 50 hours as a condition of getting your law license in that state(in addition to the other requirements).
DeleteNo state requires pro bono medical work.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/student-college-loan-changes-53d489c5?mod=mhp
ReplyDeleteFinally, a President willing to attack the federal loan spigot. Obama Biden Bush wouldn’t dream of doing this.
I believe that the toilet equivalent medical schools are the schools located in the Caribbean. Like toilet law schools, these medical schools will accept anyone who is willing to pay. Many of these people have no business being in medical school. These type of medical schools often fail around half their class. People who finish these medical schools often have difficulty obtaining residencies and have to be willing to go anywhere that takes them. The reason these types of medical schools operate in offshore locations in the Caribbean is because these medical schools would not be allowed to operate in the United States with their business model.
ReplyDeleteThe business model of Caribbean medical schools is pretty similar to trash law schools-take everyone first year and then flunk a large percentage of them out after getting their tuition $$$.
DeleteEmployment rates are also (somewhat) similar; for 2025, US IMGs had an "active placement rate"(in a residency) of 73.5%...so 26.5% didn't get a residency om the USA.
And most US IMGs get residency slots in primary care, which after residency is at the low end of physician salaries. That said, once residency is done, they'll get a job as a physician.
Thing is, 8:38, even the Carib schools (the big 4 caribs, at least) are vastly better than all but the top law schools. Compare the OCI offer rate at a law school with the match rate at a medical school.
DeleteAt all but the top 14-ish law schools, the OCI offer rate is well under 50% and toilets drop to the single digits. By contrast, the lowest match rate at a big 4 Caribbean school is about 95%. And even though they are easier to get into than US medical schools, you still need a mile-long list of undergrad hard science prerequisites to even apply.
Now granted, the Caribs do have higher attrition and people who don't graduate or don't pass USMLE step 1 don't make it into the data, and more people than at a US school do fail to match. But that isn't what's LIKELY TO HAPPEN as long as they're realistic and stick to IM/FM/psych/peds. And while those aren't the highest paid specialties, no one who is board certified in anything is in poverty or unemployed, either.
At the vast majority of law schools, however, failing to get an offer at OCI GENERALLY means practicing either not at all or for a very small firm where their actual salary won't even match a medical resident's stipend, much less the MD's potential once boarded.
In short: There are exceptions everywhere. But the most LIKELY outcome on average is way better for caribbean MD than for any middle of the class JD even from most "good" law schools.
The different between medicine and law is that the average physician salary has fallen by around 15% inflation adjusted since 1970, while the average lawyer salary has managed to stay flat. How was the above possible if law is a terrible career?
ReplyDeleteDo you have a source for this information? It seems hard to believe.
DeleteFurthermore, the average salary for lawyers does not tell us much about lawyers' incomes. A few lawyers have very high incomes indeed; many have respectable incomes that are far from glorious; plenty make so little that they have to find other sources of income, such as moonlighting. Also, attrition in law is high: most lawyers don't last five years.
Right OG, if he truly means an average then averages are pretty worthless because of biglaw skewing them. What you need is median and when you do that, you actually end up with two bell curves: Biglaw and everything else, like a double-humped camel.
DeleteThis is referred to as the "bimodal salary distribution." Because those two markets (biglaw and "other") aren't even on the same curve, or in the same market. They aren't even really the same profession.
No other industry is like that, but you basically have to exclude anyone working at firms of 100+ lawyers to get a real salary analysis of the prospects of someone without a top school and/or friends in high places.
And as OG has highlighted previously, no medical school anywhere brags about "MD preferred" jobs.
DeleteMeasures of central distribution have to be chosen appropriately. As 9:50 observed, the bimodal distribution of salaries in the law does not lend itself to the use of the mean, which can be expected to lie in the vast valley between the peaks.
DeleteFields such as music and drama may be even more skewed, with a handful of very rich people and a lot of starving wannabes. It makes no sense to talk about the average income when a few people are opening at La Scala and scads of others are passing the hat at some little café.
Sorry, I meant measures of central tendency.
DeleteYou are, of course, 100% correct. Comparing the salary of a person making a quarter-million dollars a year in a large law firm with a hapless soul doing "temporary document review projects" for $23 per hour is idiotic. That said, a lot people going to law school will just give you a stupid grin and say "I'm bad at math" and believe that there is some magical job with a salary perched right between those two wildly different incomes. I'm good at math--and just about every single other academic subject I ever studied--which is why I crushed the LSAT, was admitted to the best law school in my state, and now earn $1,500 in ten minutes or so (on a slow day). And no, that's not "Well I keep 2/3 of it after taxes" that's one thousand five hundred dollars. I might, eventually, pay 10 percent or so of it in taxes to avoid an audit. You can't fix stupid. Stupid people go to low-ranked law schools for stupid reasons, and, while many will never pass the Bar Exam in the first place, the ones who do aren't going to make a good living practicing law. When you set up 11 law schools in one state (Florida) you guarantee that dim bulbs will go to terrible law schools and have terrible outcomes. As long as the student loan racket keeps going, the scam will roll along. It now appears that most of the Federal Budget, and most state budgets, go to Fraud/Waste/Abuse, this is just one more example of it.
Delete@11:47 but MD is a preferred JD job.
Delete"I'm bad at math" and "I can't stand the sight of blood" just mean "I had to go into law because I couldn't make it in medicine". Old Guy certainly could have made it in medicine but stupidly went into law instead.
DeleteLaw has somehow been framed as an all-purpose high-paying line of work for anyone who managed to get a Mickey Mouse BA in communications or underwater basketweaving. It's so heavily oversubscribed that there isn't space for all of the capable graduates, let alone the knuckle-dragging nincompoops that make up the bulk of the law "students" nowadays.
This is the most succinct-and accurate-assessment of the legal profession; ever 0L ought to be required to read it before applying to law school:
Delete"Law has somehow been framed as an all-purpose high-paying line of work for anyone who managed to get a Mickey Mouse BA in communications or underwater basketweaving. It's so heavily oversubscribed that there isn't space for all of the capable graduates, let alone the knuckle-dragging nincompoops that make up the bulk of the law "students" nowadays."
The Louisiana Bar recently informed me I can't stop paying for CLE at 65- it's now 75. As they explain it:
ReplyDelete"The change, effective January 1, 2026, reflects the reality that many attorneys are practicing well past traditional retirement age."
Greedy assholes.
DeleteOf course. And what does that tell you? "Retirement" is no longer a reality. You will work until you die. And the State Bar associations know this and want the money. All about the money, always.
DeleteIN fairness though, 9:37, those old lawyers have another option: They can go on emeritus status or inactive status which as I understand it, means they can either only practice pro bono (emeritus) or not at all (inactive).
DeleteI've seen this before. Really old lawyers I know who keep their licenses fully "active" purely as a point of pride or because they believe they might still take a case one day despite not having done so in many years.
To me, a rule like this just forces them to actually declare themselves retired if they want to save the money. My bar has never had anything like an automatic exception for CLE just for being over a certain age. If your license is active, it's active. If you don't want to pay for it but don't want to officially surrender it either, that's what inactive/retired/emeritus/whatever is for. You can always reactivate it if the need arises.