Pace Law School Asst. Dean of Career and Professional Development Jill Backer asserts that 25 U.S. Presidents will vouch for JD versatility.

Pace Law School has recently imposed some cutbacks in an effort to address its five million dollar deficit. These cutbacks reportedly include the elimination of all sabbaticals and all research stipends, a 5% salary cut for senior staff, and a 10% salary cut for all faculty. Perhaps more detailed information would be available but for Dean David Yassky’s decision to place a secret watermark on material distributed to faculty.

 

Yassky may be trying to discourage public discussions of Pace’s weak financial position, but really, these cutbacks are nothing to be ashamed of. I think that Pace Law’s website ought to feature banner articles describing, with pride, each and every defunded professorial perk. Pace could say that with the profession in crisis, the school has higher priorities than indulging its faculty with research stipends (aka well-funded summer staycations) or sending them off to expense-paid conferences in exotic resort locales (aka vacations).

 

What Pace Law should be ashamed of, however, is the recent editorial in the New York Law Journal by Jill Backer, Pace’s Assistant Dean of Career and Professional Development, criticizing the "sharp delineation" between law jobs and JD-Advantage jobs in the mandatory annual job placement survey. Here is the most remarkable quote from the article: 

 

"[I]t has long been acknowledged that practicing law is only one way to utilize a law degree. Indeed, a J.D. is a versatile degree, just ask 25 of 44 U.S. Presidents how they used theirs. So, why are the various regulators and reviewers of law schools making a sharp delineation between those graduates that are practicing law in the traditional sense which requires the Bar exam and those graduates using their degree in other ways?"

http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/id=1202723607549/JD-Advantage-Versus-JD-Required-The-Old-Rules-No-Longer-Apply#ixzz3aMY3l700

 

Is the annual 10-month-after-graduation employment survey of law grads misleading due to the segmentation of law and non-law jobs? Wouldn't it be better instead to do a 239-year-after-independence survey of Electoral College (I mean, Electoral Law School) victors? Skeptical of authority I may be, but if 25 U.S. Presidents are prepared to vouch for JD Advantage I just might have to do a rethink. So, with the assistance of google and a book by Robert Stevens called Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, here is a Presidential legal education survey-- OTLSS’s contribution to employment transparency in the manner recommended by Pace.

The first finding of the survey is that most of these allegedly JD-Advantaged U.S. Presidents probably never heard of a J.D. degree, to say nothing of its famous versatility, since the degree was only invented around 1900. Law was an undergraduate degree before that, and remained so for a long time after in all but a very few schools.  For  most of U.S. history, academic study was  not a requirement for admission to the bar. Indeed, well into the 20th century, an LL.B and/or a law office apprenticeship remained viable options, and the JD did not become the universal law degree until the early 1960s, at the behest of the ABA. But such pendantry should hardly concern someone who works in academia. Why let historical trivia interfere with entertaining hype, such as the mythical tale of the 25 JD-Advantaged Chief Executives?

 

Furthermore, almost all of the 26 (not 25) Presidents who were admitted to the bar actually practiced law, at least for a time. (Clinton seems to be the sole modern exception– he did not practice law after graduating from Yale Law. Rather, he became a law professor, the ultimate JD-Advantage position). Thus, in Backer terms, these future Presidents did indeed "practice law in the traditional sense," as distinct from, say, the many law grads at Pace and other lower-tier law schools who are unable to find bar-required jobs, and may not even have the Presidency to fall back on.

Granted, a few of the Presidents, mainly very early ones, seem to have chosen law primarily to bolster their social standing and political influence. However, then as now, becoming a lawyer because of law’s prestige value is advisable only if you are already rich.

Here are some other results from the Presidential survey.

*     Presidents who became lawyers without ever attending law school, but who qualified for admission to the bar by "reading law" and serving as apprentices or clerks in law offices: 15

*     Presidents who briefly attended law school, but did most of their legal studies as apprentices prior to admission to the bar: 1 (In 1826, Franklin Pierce attended some law lectures for a semester at Northampton Law School, one of the few law schools then in existence)

*     Presidents who dropped out of law school as 2Ls or 3Ls, but still qualified under state admissions rules to take the bar exam and become lawyers: 2 (Wilson, FDR)

*     Presidents who graduated from Harvard Law with a JD, but who have publicly advocated eliminating the third year of law school: 1 (Barack Obama preached what FDR practiced)

*     Presidents who graduated From Yale Law School with a JD.  2

*     Presidents who graduated from Duke Law School with a JD.: 1 (Ah, Tricky Dick, you would have made a fine law school dean or AALS honcho).

*     Presidents who graduated Harvard Law with an LL.B: 1 (Hayes)

*     Presidents who graduated from all other law schools prior to the invention of the JD: 3 (Arthur, Taft, and McKinley) (I will generously give Albany Law credit for McKinley, since this ancient marshmallow-loving palace of legal learning has few other points of positive distinction. However, I could not pin down whether McKinley actually completed a course of study at Albany, or simply attended some law lectures there during his single year of matriculation, in 1867).

*    Presidents who dropped out of law school and did not become lawyers: 3 (No, Columbia, giving Teddy Roosevelt a posthumous JD does not count. Truman and Johnson also belong in the category of "JD-Dropout-Advantage.")

*    Devious New York politcos who became Dean of Pace Law School-- which may not exactly have the grandeur and power of the Presidency, but at least is a high-profile executive position that provides the incumbent with opportunities to preach optimism to the gullible, exacerbate the middle class debt trap, and punish leakers of classified info: 1

*    Persons who graduated from law school, but who were never elected President of the United States:  A few million.

 

A brazen law school flack may be able to fool some of the lemmings some of time, but the heavily marketed mirage of JD-Advantage fails to withstand impeachment. Our Presidential poll does not support the notion that there are high-and-mighty nonlaw jobs out there for lower-tier law grads or that law school surveys should discontinue the practice of delineating law and nonlaw jobs. However, it does provide a timely reminder that earlier generations of Americans trained lawyers in a radically different way, which deemphasized academia in favor of self-study, apprenticeships, and law office training.