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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 21, 1986)
Bad Reasons to Study Law Why do people attend law school? Often for things which have little to do with legal study or practice BY ADAM LIPTAK People go to law school for a lot of different rea sons—and many of these are foolish I should know My rationale for entering the study of the law has little to do with why I now consider it worthwhile Knowing what I know now, and think ing back to what I thought then. I’m moved to help prospec tive law students make their decisions on a sound basis. In particular I want to clarify the misconceptions which lie behind four very popular and bud reasons for attending law school While, certainly, these may be valid for some people, to a large extent they represent a willful blindness to the central fact of law school: it is a trade school, and the trade itself can be esoteric, dull and of questionable utility. Bmmm yw got la. The law-school applications process has an inexorable quality, like the gradual escalation of Ameri can involvement in Vietnam. You decide to take the I<SAT —I>aw School Aptitude Test—because it can't hurt and, if you do well, it might expand vour options. You do well So, you apply to law schools as a lark, figuring that if you get in you don’t have to go and that it might be fun to tell people you turned down Harvard Law. You get in. And even if you defer and get a job, the job you get is, by definition, entry level In addition to not making much money compared to your parents, you get little responsibil ity and less respect. You find yourself daydreaming ut your desk about your undergraduate days and, the next thing you know, it’s September and you're taking torts. This ugly sequence can be nipped in the bud by sitting in on torts—or better, civil procedure—while still in college. He. ruHy. tht law It fasdMtiag. What you do in law school is read cases, which are the published decisions of judges You read hundreds and hundreds of these each semester. You learn that judges write remarkably poorly. In most cases, judges need give little more than a yes or no answer, but they devote thousands of words in each instance trying to sound reasonable and consistent From all their verbiage, you are supposed to glean a pattern and pretend it consti tutes a set of legal rules. What law professors do is reveal the twisted reasoning employed by all judges, excepting perhaps the one for whom they clerked This mode of pedagogy does have its appeal: students are invited to feel superior to the nation’s jurists, who are made to seem at best ignorant buffoons and at worst heartless manipulators of doctrine. Surprisingly, you learn a lot about the premises and methodology of the law by reading and discussing cases, but this is not the kind of truth which sets you free This is the kind of truth that makes you cynical. "The Paper ('hase" to the contrary, law school is no more demanding than other forms of graduate school, except inasmuch as law students can work themselves into a frenzy ofcom pet it ion The reasonably diligent student with a modi cum of self-confidence and a good memory ought to have no problem In fact, law school isn’t especially challenging or stimulating. Better, if you can afford it, to lie low for seven or eight years getting a Ph D. in something harmless—with the added benefit that you don’t end up a lawyer. k law dsgree Is a great credential tor anything (iod knows I hope so, but I think the bitter truth is that if you want to do something else you should do something else. I keep a mental list of writers I admire who got admitted to law school It’s a short list: seven names if you include Bob Woodward, who got in but didn't go. In some cases, I guess, law school may help you write about the law and some aspects of policy. But a list as short as mine doesn’t support the proposition that you can do anything with a law degree. It supports the proposition that some people can find gainful employment as writers despite the careful attention of a battery of professionals bent on ruining their prose. I’ve run into a number of people in law school who keep similarmental lists of peoplewithlawdegreeswhoworkina nonlegal field they’d prefer to work in. This is a bad sign. The ugly truth is that almost everyone who goes to law school becomes a lawyer. Because law school teaches you a particular trade, you’re morely likely to practice it. The best ploy, although still a disenchanting one, is to take a legal job in-house at a company in the field you prefer and look on wistfully as people nearby do the sexy stuff. You can make a lot of money Doing a lawyer. .Now you re talking sense. The latest round of salary increases at the big New York firms has boosted first-year associate salaries to $65,000 That’s a fortune, of course, but the funny thing is that lawyers don’t make much compared to investment bankers. And the salaries of associates carry fringe benefits like 100-hour weeks, constant pressure and slim chances of becoming a partner in the firm. The net result may be not having enough time to spend the money you make and being miserable in the process. Consider also that it’s very hard to land such a high paying job. As everyone knows, there is a glut of lawyers, which means that there are unemployed and underem ployed lawyers all over the place, and plenty are making perfectly ordinary salaries. In order to get at the big salary numbers you have to get into a top law school and push your way toward the top of your class while there Law school is not for the dilettante Business school is for the dilettante If you need somewhere to lie low for a couple of years and get a degree with no content but plenty of "credent ial,” and get a crack at the really big money besides, repeat after me: M B A. Then why did 1 choose to study law? These same reasons, of course. But, as it happens, and for no good reason, I count myself umong the sizable number of people who are relative ly content learning the law, even though it’s like doing a very large Sunday crossword for three years straight. Even if 1 begin to hyperventilate at the likely prospect of working at a law firm once 1 graduate, for the time being I’m not unhappy working through the intricate and decidedly mi nor charms of a legal education. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it all over again. But I would not lie to myself about the glory days to come. Adam Liptak is a second-year student at Yale Law School.
