On top of that, the accession process for public interest is full of uncertainty. Law firms, as private entities, can structure their recruiting process however they like; and the common practice is for a 2L summer job to turn into a full-time offer. But federal agencies (and typically state agencies) are required to go through the government hiring process; and non-profits typically don't have the budgetary margin to make offers a year in advance. Even the DOJ Honors Program, specifically designed for recruiting directly from law schools, is only open to graduating law students; you can't compete as a 2L and then get a full-time offer at the end of your 2L summer.
I applaud this student for writing about their experience, but at the end of this coming summer, when facing down the barrel of $300,000 in debt and no immediately apparent way to pay it, their perspective may change. If it does, it will likely be for far more compelling reasons than a Paul Weiss hoodie.
Out of interest, how much of that is caused by the law degree being (as far as I understand it) a postgraduate degree in the US? Here in the UK you can just go straight to law school if you want without a first degree.
It has rather more to do with the degree bearing the string "Harvard".
There are low-cost law schools in the US. What you'll find, however, is that big-name law firms, Supreme Court clerkships, and other prestigious (and well-compensated) opportunities tend not to hire from them.
If you're looking to go into private practice or are targeting a less-ambitious role, or get lucky with a roll of the dice / spin of the wheel, they might work out fine.
Searching for "low cost law school" will come up with various listings. The top options on this list appear to run about 1/20th the cost of Harvard (I'm presuming that the tuition figure is for a full three-year programme, not on a per-year basis, the text makes this ... less than clear).
> The top options on this list appear to run about 1/20th the cost of Harvard (I'm presuming that the tuition figure is for a full three-year programme, not on a per-year basis, the text makes this ... less than clear).
"1/20th the cost of Harvard" is in the ballpark of what a super affordable undergraduate program at a US public university goes for.
To be sure, your cite lists annual cost of tuition as clarified in Methodology section language.
Their "average program cost" metric is also pretty meaningless; you either pay in-state or out-of-state rates---not some arbitrary arithmetic mean---so ~3x for a rough lower bound of what tuition alone will run you, and that assumes the unlikely scenario of no tuition increases during subsequent years of study.
Thanks, I missed that on tuition reading a bit sloppily.
There's also the mention that law school is not necessarily required to join the bar, as addressed in the FAQ "Do You Have to go to Law School in Order to Become a Lawyer?":
To begin, 99 percent of lawyers who earn their license will have completed a law school program. This is for a very good reason: there are only four states in the United States that enable potential lawyers to sit for the bar exam without having completed law school. Those states are California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. In these states, less than one-quarter of the professionals without a law degree passed the bar exam and won the right to practice law. In fact, all four states are in the top 20 hardest bar exams, with California leading the pack at a pass rate of 54.3 percent.
Arguably three of those are nontrivial states for the practice of law.
Point remains however that $300k tuition is not strictly required to join the bar in the US, though it may offer a substantial selection advantage for prime opportunities.
Yeah, we don't have the barrister-solicitor distinction, just licensed attorneys who may specialize in different areas of law, or of handling a case. When you "pass the bar" or "are admitted to the bar" in American legal parlance, it means you have passed the state bar exam and obtained your license to practice law.
> Out of interest, how much of that is caused by the law degree being (as far as I understand it) a postgraduate degree in the US?
At face value, the sticker price of grad school will always be more expensive, however, UF[1], UNC Chapel Hill[2], UT Austin[3], etc. are just a few reputable public universities with relatively affordable law programs, in particular, for in-state residents with enough grit to skip on-campus housing.
> Here in the UK you can just go straight to law school if you want without a first degree.
The higher the monetary barrier to entry to a profession the greater the rents that accrue to those who can afford to get in. Requiring seven years of college means that very few people who were not born to the bourgeoisie or higher can join, which makes the profession more pleasant for lawyers, who have always been bourgeois. Making a first undergraduate degree mandatory means your colleagues will be more well rounded, interesting people, which makes the profession more pleasant for lawyers.
As it is, there isn't much of a general barrier to getting a law degree/any law degree to the point where the typical lawyer isn't really making a lot of money. The big bucks are going to white shoe law firms in big cities to lawyers who went to top schools (including Harvard) and landed federal court clerkships.
While there are respectable salaries among the others, there are also a lot of lawyers doing real estate law in shopping malls that are just getting by.
Apparently (or so I read) there is an over-supply of law school graduates in the US despite the gatekeeping requirements. The only alternative is to raise the difficulty of the bar exam but that might make it difficult for shopping malls to find affordable lawyers...
A lot of lawyers would probably argue that the bar already doesn't have a whole lot to do with practicing law.
What I see among friends with liberal arts degrees from Ivies and adjacent is that, while a few were probably already destined to be lawyers like three previous generations of their family, for most it's something they sort of fell into because they graduated with a classics major and now what? Many never even ended up practicing law--at least not for long.
> Why? Just seems like a barrier to entry to me for no good reason?
The ABA considered the appropriateness in 1964 without a dissenting vote and raised the standard in 1965[1]:
WHEREAS, There is a lack of uniformity among the law schools approved
by The American Bar Association as to the name of the first degree in law
awarded to successful applicants; and
WHEREAS, Confusion has arisen in the minds of the public as to the dif-
ference, if any, between the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree and the Juris
Doctor (J.D.) degree; and
WHEREAS, Both of these degrees normally signify a first professional de-
gree in law; and
WHEREAS, Graduation from an approved law school requires the successful
completion of a course of study substantially above and beyond that re-
quired for the bachelor's degree in the Arts or Sciences: and
WHEREAS, The course of study in an approved law school is comparable to
or more demanding than other professional courses of study in which the
professional doctor's degree is awarded; and
WHEREAS, It is deemed to be in the best interest of the public and of the
legal profession that this confusion in terminology be eliminated and that
the high standards of professional training and the competency of graduates
of approved law schools be recognized by a uniform practice with respect to
the title of the first degree in law.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT: The Section of Legal Edu-
cation and Admissions to the Bar of The American Bar Association recom-
mends for all approved law schools favorable consideration of the con-
ferring of the degree of Juris Doctor (J.D.) by such schools on those students
who successfully complete the program leading to the first professional de-
gree in law.
You can do a law degree in the UK, but it doesn't give you the right to practice without undertaking additional courses and training. Becoming a solicitor in the UK is a 7 year ordeal. I assume becoming a barrister is similar.
Actually it can be five years if you already have a degree - which used to be the "traditional" approach but seems to have been replaced by people doing a first degree in law.
NB Given the multiple legal systems in the UK there will be a lot of variations - e.g. to become an advocate here in Scotland (our equivalent of barristers) I think you could do that in 4 years: 2 year LLB, 1 year training in a law firm and then one year devilling (where you are an Advocate's Devil!).
Edit: Might be out of date - its a while since my wife did her 2 year LLB and then qualified and became an advocate.
Has it changed in Scotland - used to be get a LLB (2 or 4 years) then 1 year Postgrad and then two years training?
Edit: Relatively few people (I think) do a first degree and then immediately go to law school - most people I knew who did that were changing to law after some other career and had a degree in something unrelated.
From what I’ve heard if you get accepted to Harvard then the endowment ensures your financial situation does not factor into your decision to attend. Does that only apply to undergraduates? Or is that just a myth entirely?
> When I wear mine around campus, I feel like a walking billboard advertisement for corporate law.
I never understood the appeal of free swag. Here we have someone who feels like a walking billboard yet still decides to wear them. I get it if purchasing a $20 non-ad-supported t-shirt poses a significant financial burden, but most students aren’t in that position. Why would you choose to be a frigging ad then? Especially for questionable companies, say Palantir, which IIRC used to be quiet a common sight on Stanford campus.
Depends on where you get the swag. I associate my Hacktoberfest T-shirts with good memories, despite the branding on the sleeves.
> law students can now sip out of their Wilke water bottles months later in memory of the big law networking event that stood as the celebration of our first year of learning how to conduct legal research.
This is barely ever the case anymore but the quality can be very high. Especially if the people who are eligible to receive it is restricted. If you take the view that the value of standing out and snagging a top student is somewhere in the 6-7 figures, spending $100 a head on swag isn't at all unreasonable - most companies just don't see it that way.
As a STEM PhD student I felt a bit jealous reading this. Then I remembered that law students pay tuition while many PhD projects are funded by companies in industry, often at a somewhat dubious value proposition. There is at least a mild expectation you would consider working for the project sponsor after graduation.
There is a lot of money being thrown around towards recruitment in many fields. Tuition is worth a whole lot of free food and branded swag.
You should feel jealous. STEM PhD candidates get a bad deal. They’re already skilled enough to earn a good living, and they provide labor for their managers to the benefit of their employers as any other employees do.
In any other job, on-the-job-training is compensated as work, even if it takes a while to complete, even if the employer provides training or seminars to clients as part of its business. (Yes, a school is a business. If one wants to say that it isn’t, it should stop charging money for its services first.)
Job applicants in other sectors are warned that it’s the red flag of a scam to pay an employer for a chance at an offer or promotion. By normal standards, an employee paying their employer is bonkers.
Your scenario is enlightening. If paying a student’s tuition benefits the university and the student’s manager more than the student, what access or benefit might the corporate sponsor be able to derive from inducing a favorable bias in the teacher or school? Could we end up with a situation where Java, of all things, is taught to impressionable undergraduate students across the country? An obvious answer would be to secure a recruiting channel. The things researchers write can also be important to industry sponsors, and the opportunity to bias those exists as well.
A very large number of STEM PhDs are entirely publicly funded, with no relationship with or obligation to industry whatsoever. In my discipline, close to 100% of PhD students are sponsored through normal research grants and it pays for the entirety of their graduate education.
Maybe. There's a lot of scholarship money available at elite law schools. For those paying something close to sticker price, Big Law summer associates make good money.
Dunno if it was Harvard as a whole, but a couple of years ago I read a rapport that Harvard feeds roughly 66% of all their grads into Finance, Management Consulting, Big Law, and Tech - basically elite white-collar jobs - despite only around 25% of their student mass studying anything related to those fields.
I guess most Harvard grads go where the money is.
EDIT: But a bit more related to the OP, when I studied EE (undergrad) in a college with close ties to the oil and gas industry, we were all wined and dined by big oil for the last 2 years.
During one of those dinner events, hosted by a big service company, they told us to just sign our names and major on a form they passed around - if we did that, we'd get a job offer in the mail a week later. Some of the larger oil (production) companies guaranteed free housing for the first two years, and they'd cover 50% of the mortgage for 5 years if we decided to purchase a house. That was on top of a high starting salary w/annual bonuses.
Should be mentioned that this was during the height of a boom cycle.
Some things are more important than money. Studying at Harvard can offer a lot more than a good ROI on your degree -- including the opportunity to work and get to know some very smart people.
Lots of people graduated from Harvard to go on to make very little money but large contributions e.g. Richard Stallman is the parsimonious example that comes to mind. Noam Chomsky and other top academics probably aren't rolling around in cash either.
It may not be Big Tech/Law/etc. type money, but tenured professors at elite schools have a pretty comfortable lifestyle--assuming of course that academia is your thing. (And, of course, depending on a lot of specifics like ability to consult, write books, get paid speaking engagements, etc.)
The one that really puzzles me is management consulting. Finance, law, and tech are at least intellectually extremely engaging, as well as well-paid. Isn't management consulting just running round showing people bullshit powerpoints?
It has this reputation but it doesn't match my 2nd hand experience.
Dated two management consultants in my life. One was deeply involved in deciding the next CEO of Disney after a few years out of college, as an example. The other reported being basically in charge of a turnaround effort at a fortune 500 company.
Both examples required them to deeply understand the situation and the options and then to advocate for the path they have chosen.
// anything more than assistants to the real decision makers.
Of course but it's the same thing.
Executives and the board make the decisions and take responsibility for them. But generally they make these decisions based on the framing and options presented to them by people who work for them.
As a consultant, you get to decide what dimensions matter to the decisions, gather data and arguments, and present the executive with a choice.
The executive skill is to have oriented you around the right topics, deciding whether to trust you and your analysis, and ability to stand behind the decision made.
The "assistants" do the work to enable this. It's a big deal.
Consulting is great if you really don't know what you want to do, but need to join the workforce.
Pay is seemingly great, you get to travel a lot, you're exposed to a bunch of different industries and companies from the highest level. The McKinsey/Bain/BCG prestige factor can open a lot of doors down the road, and you probably get a solid network of future titans of industry.
I haven't worked as a consultant, but that was the sales pitch we got.
And I've at least noticed that a many startups tend to have ex-consultants onboard as founders or executives.
Yale Undergrad,then Teach For America for 5 years. I felt it was my moral imperative to actually help people, in particular, because I eas well served by the public shool system where I gre up.
It seems "only" 5 US presidents were Harvard graduates[1]. Harvard, Yale and Princeton (colloquially known as HYP[2]) can lay claim to 10 US presidents, or 22% of the 46 US presidents.
I agree with you but also want to share this anecdote.
I went undergrad to a state school, studied CS and graduated to a great tech/finance job. But something I recognize in retrospect I never got in college was "being challenged by my peers."
I didn't really get this until I started doing recruiting for my company. I would go to career fairs at most colleges and the kids would remind me of kids I went to school with. Then I'd visit a "top" school and the kids blew me away: they were mature, articulate, focused and ambitious. It came through in how they talked about their careers.
The student body at a top school makes it harder for you to coast as an unfocused mushmouth. So you have 4 years of being shaped by the environment and challenged by your peers. I didn't get that until after I graduated and lucked out into a company that gave me such an environment.
same here, when you are surrounded by high achievers, it kinda wants to make you achieve and push your limits and boundaries, not to mention the many learning opportunities from the peer group.
Yes, and I think it just changes your own idea of what's acceptable.
In my college, I probably ranked pretty high on "articulate and driven" so there was no motivation to elevate that. At MIT, I would have probably been below average on these categories, and you don't want to be below average so you naturally do it more and better.
It’s one of the dumbest speeches I’ve ever heard, but what made it especially delicious was knowing that 2/3 of the kids she was talking to apparently were “finding their bliss” working for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.
I draw a somewhat different conclusion from all this. Folks who go to Harvard Law are mostly the children of elites (major or minor) who are destined to pull the oars of the ship that is corporate America. That’s Harvard Law’s social and economic function, just as it was in 1950 or for that matter 1850.
However these kids are socialized in at least superficially left wing undergraduate environments. So the kids destined to work for a big law firm defending tobacco corporations for trying to get kids hooked on cigarettes can’t embrace their role and function in society. That’s how you get, as the article observes, 50% of first year students saying they want to work in public interest law.
But of course by 3L the reality sets in. There are few jobs in public interest law and none pay off the debt of a Harvard Law education. Meanwhile corporate America can always use bodies. So you end up with only 2% actually going into public interest law. But law students are smart kids, they knew what they were signing up to do.
The operation of this cognitive dissonance is very interesting to me as a foreigner. As far as I can tell, most Americans are loathe to believe in social and economic roles. “I’m not a cog in a machine with a specific function and purpose, I’m an individual with agency who can change the world.” What does that belief system do to someone who literally functions as a cog in the machine? (Don’t feel bad for them, they make a lot of money doing it.)
it's just a numbers game, for every 1000 kids that grow up with the "change the world", "do good" mantra, one might actually have the conviction and talent required to do it. As opposed to in other parts of the world, where idealism is mocked, all 1000 kids will pretty much become cogs in the machine. I know what kind of society i'd like to live in.
I highly recommend reading The Code of Capital by Katharina Pistor. The book does a good job explaining the essential aspect of law in codifying assets into capital. Wealth is impossible to own and maintain without legal support.
Law student doesn’t see the bigger picture. Guess what, most of those 3Ls who go to work for Big Law burn out after a few years and go do something else - like help the little guy.
Being married to a Big Law partner, I hear constant griping about how it seems like all they’re doing is training associates to go work somewhere else.
The issue at HLS, based on my passing first-hand experience, is the truly nihlistic viewpoint foisted by its faculty on students. That is, in the main, the faculty appear to deny the very existence of good and evil (as judged by the practice of their former students). While this makes for interesting legal argument, it does real social harm. When you remove all morality and extrinsic ethical considerations, what's left is bloodsport for a lawyer's personal enrichment. The author describes the symptoms and, in the third semester, this person has not yet identified the disease.
The rebuttal should be that counsel acting for an organization is somewhat like a teacher to students. Putting such people in positions of authority in corporate America is a "win" for justice to the extent they can effectively guide more, and more influential, people to the ends of justice and fair play. Maybe that's an ideal, but unfortunately from my own experience it's just not what HLS has taught its students in recent years to do, and I hold the faculty responsible.
That’s a totally mistaken understanding of lawyers’ roles. We are highly trusted components of a system for resolving disputes and governing society. That system isn’t for us. It’s for everyone else. Our only job is to ensure that the system operates according to the specification.
It’s not our job to leverage our trusted position in the system to advance our personal view of morality or ethics. Society doesn’t need us to be its conscience. Indeed, that destroys the very system we are supposed to serve.
No, but if they find themselves picking a career track where they solely treat murderers so that they can go on to murder more people without consequence, maybe the doctors should look to reform the system? And maybe doctors should not encourage that kind of ethos in med school?
I would much rather live in a world where punishment is reserved for the judicial system - where, thanks to lawyers, everyone gets a chance to a proper defense - than your intended alternative.
Can you describe my intended alternative with some detail?
I don't see how it conflicts with "everyone gets a chance to a proper defense" (at least as much as "everyone gets a chance to a proper defense" is true in the current system), so there might be some misunderstanding here.
This viewpoint leads to an irresolvable contradiction, in the U.S. at least, as another user pointed out:
> The US enshrined in the Constitution that every single person, no matter what they did, will have the right to a legal defense. If that is the case, how would morality play a role here? Are you suggesting that we should teach lawyers to only represent clients they think are good people?
If lawyers exercised their own independent views of morality and ethics that would imply the possibility that very odious people can be left without any legal representation. Which is contrary to the constitution.
100%. James B Donovan[1] was (in)famously admonished for defending a Soviet spy (as dramatized in the Spielberg film Bridge of Spies), but that's what set us apart from the rest of the world.
If the relative amorality of upholding The Law is unpalatable for some, then maybe they aren't cut out to practice law. Perhaps being made of sterner stuff is a key prerequisite, not too different from practicing medicine, where the hippocratic oath obliges one to medically serve even the most repugnant criminals.
Thanks for the link and example. There's a certain generosity of spirit and heart needed to maintain such a belief in spite of external pressures, especially in the 60s.
So lawyers shouldn't vote? Shouldn't lobby for changes in law? Shouldn't encourage each other to take up fields to help those with legal recourse (ex: public defenders)? Shouldn't discourage lawyers from going into money-making schemes that effectively exploit those without money to defend themselves?
There's a lot of room between "lawyers have no responsibility for remedying injustice in the current system" and "lawyers should just decide who's guilty and refuse to deal with them".
Just as I think Nazis should have the right to free speech, someone accused of the most heinous crime imaginable should also have the right to a legal defense and for that defense to advocate in the best interests of the defendant, even if that legal team is fully aware that they did the thing they are accused of doing.
IMO (and IANAL), I think that the ethics of the situation demand that lawyers represent the best interests of their clients in civil and criminal matters.
It's ironic that you reference Nuremberg, because the Nuremberg trials actually make exactly the opposite point.
> The future will never have to ask with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will show that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man. But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute to our strength. . . . The United States has no interest which would be advanced by the conviction of any defendant if we have not proved him guilty on at least one of the counts charged against him in the Indictment. Any result that the calm and critical judgment of posterity would pronounce unjust, would not be a victory for any of the countries associated in this prosecution.
You want to compare ensuring a fair trial to the Nazis "just following orders"? Okay. What is your alternative, then, other than unfair trials? How is that justice?
I'm not sure how you got "I think that lawyers should rig trials" from "I think lawyers should recognize injustice in the system and work to reform it instead of claiming that they have no responsibility for the way the system functions."
I never said anything about rigging trials, and you know I didn't. Ensuring a fair trial goes way beyond simply not rigging it. Hyperbole and dishonesty don't make for good discussion. If you want to learn more about the ethics of being a lawyer and the fundamental principles underlying the fair administration of justice, I encourage you to listen to the experts in that field rather than propagating snark.
Do you take issue with: "I think lawyers should recognize injustice in the system and work to reform it instead of claiming that they have no responsibility for the way the system functions?"
Well, if it brings you any solace, all I'm doing is echoing the thoughts of some of the lawyers I've had the good fortune to talk to. I'll be sure to let them know of their ignorance and disinterest in ethics, and that they should take some refresher classes.
Otherwise, seems we've reached an impasse, so I'll just take my leave.
This seems remarkably close to those instances where someone describes a problem and then a respondent just repeats the problem back as if to frame it as an argument when it's really just an empty response. Viz:
> [We only] ensure that the system operates according to the specification
Another way to look at this is the "goodness conservation" law: if you enable some lawyers to be agents of good, you'll also enable some lawyers to be agents of evil; you can't empower just one side. The alternative is when everyone is neutral.
This is the attorney equivalent of "I was just following orders", which has been rejected many times as a defense against war crimes...
While your viewpoint is a reasonable interpretation of "the law", it completely ignores the higher-order responsibility for "justice" to serve as a moral compass and balance of power.
It’s not my “interpretation of the ‘law’” but rather the philosophical underpinning of how our legal system fits into our system of democracy. Lawyers have tremendous power over how the legal system operates. If they substitute their “moral compass” for that of the public, that undermines both the rule of law and democracy.
Your comparison to “following orders” is specious. Lawyers are bound by criminal laws the same as soldiers are bound by the laws of war. “Following orders” isn’t a defense in either case. But soldiers aren’t expected to independently apply their moral judgment. “War crimes” are defined by international consensus. And soldiers are bound to “follow orders” when they’re not being asked to commit war crimes.
Well put. Lawyers are like referees to ensure a legal contest followed the rules. Everyone wants guilty villains to end up in jail, but if the villain is tried in a biased and unruly proceeding then the villain’s sentence can be overturned. Giving even the most obviously guilty villain a competent defense ensures there’s no mistrial loophole in the process. Focusing on good and evil helps write laws, but in legal trial proceeding prosecutors and defenders need to proceed with nearly pure objective focus on facts and proof of intentional violations of written laws.
It's a strange day when I see a rayiner post I completely agree with, but... people just don't understand that not only is this how most lawyers view their role, but it is absolutely critical that they do so in order for our society to function as designed. Even the relatively more activist lawyers I know would agree at least in principle to some version of the thought process articulated above. They have to!
In fact, attorneys typically hold themselves to extremely high standards of ethics - just not the ethics people think of. I'm sure they exist, but out of all the many lawyers I've met, I have never met one who did not take things like attorney-client privilege, being an officer of the court, or duties surrounding disclosure and discovery and conflicts of interest extremely seriously. It's very much a case of "orange and blue morality"[0]: It's not that the rules they follow aren't taken seriously, it's that those rules are not the rules most people imagine.
So, the idea that attorneys should abandon the principles of the system they've dedicated their life to because some layperson's sense of ethics demands it is foolish, in that even if it might produce a "better" result to your sensibilities or mine, it's simply not going to happen, not because attorneys are amoral, but precisely the opposite: Because they are moral according to the morality of their system.
Look: People don't like the justice system because it doesn't always produce results that they agree with. They don't like or understand its convoluted, highly layered, self-referential sets of ever-shifting, multi-faceted rules and tests and interpretations and arguments about the technicalities of meanings of words. And that's fine. But a system of justice based on even the most altruistic "X seems right to me" is going to be an order of magnitude worse for at least some people, and I have yet to hear an idea for replacing our current system that doesn't boil down to either that or our current system, but it somehow magically always makes the decisions people personally want.
The US enshrined in the Constitution that every single person, no matter what they did, will have the right to a legal defense. If that is the case, how would morality play a role here? Are you suggesting that we should teach lawyers to only represent clients they think are good people?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadOn top of that, the accession process for public interest is full of uncertainty. Law firms, as private entities, can structure their recruiting process however they like; and the common practice is for a 2L summer job to turn into a full-time offer. But federal agencies (and typically state agencies) are required to go through the government hiring process; and non-profits typically don't have the budgetary margin to make offers a year in advance. Even the DOJ Honors Program, specifically designed for recruiting directly from law schools, is only open to graduating law students; you can't compete as a 2L and then get a full-time offer at the end of your 2L summer.
I applaud this student for writing about their experience, but at the end of this coming summer, when facing down the barrel of $300,000 in debt and no immediately apparent way to pay it, their perspective may change. If it does, it will likely be for far more compelling reasons than a Paul Weiss hoodie.
Out of interest, how much of that is caused by the law degree being (as far as I understand it) a postgraduate degree in the US? Here in the UK you can just go straight to law school if you want without a first degree.
There are low-cost law schools in the US. What you'll find, however, is that big-name law firms, Supreme Court clerkships, and other prestigious (and well-compensated) opportunities tend not to hire from them.
If you're looking to go into private practice or are targeting a less-ambitious role, or get lucky with a roll of the dice / spin of the wheel, they might work out fine.
Searching for "low cost law school" will come up with various listings. The top options on this list appear to run about 1/20th the cost of Harvard (I'm presuming that the tuition figure is for a full three-year programme, not on a per-year basis, the text makes this ... less than clear).
<https://affordableschools.net/the-10-most-affordable-law-sch...>
"1/20th the cost of Harvard" is in the ballpark of what a super affordable undergraduate program at a US public university goes for.
To be sure, your cite lists annual cost of tuition as clarified in Methodology section language.
Their "average program cost" metric is also pretty meaningless; you either pay in-state or out-of-state rates---not some arbitrary arithmetic mean---so ~3x for a rough lower bound of what tuition alone will run you, and that assumes the unlikely scenario of no tuition increases during subsequent years of study.
There's also the mention that law school is not necessarily required to join the bar, as addressed in the FAQ "Do You Have to go to Law School in Order to Become a Lawyer?":
To begin, 99 percent of lawyers who earn their license will have completed a law school program. This is for a very good reason: there are only four states in the United States that enable potential lawyers to sit for the bar exam without having completed law school. Those states are California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. In these states, less than one-quarter of the professionals without a law degree passed the bar exam and won the right to practice law. In fact, all four states are in the top 20 hardest bar exams, with California leading the pack at a pass rate of 54.3 percent.
Arguably three of those are nontrivial states for the practice of law.
Point remains however that $300k tuition is not strictly required to join the bar in the US, though it may offer a substantial selection advantage for prime opportunities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_to_the_bar
At face value, the sticker price of grad school will always be more expensive, however, UF[1], UNC Chapel Hill[2], UT Austin[3], etc. are just a few reputable public universities with relatively affordable law programs, in particular, for in-state residents with enough grit to skip on-campus housing.
> Here in the UK you can just go straight to law school if you want without a first degree.
Hasn't been a thing in the US for decades[4].
[1] https://www.law.ufl.edu/admissions/costs-and-financial-aid
[2] https://law.unc.edu/admissions/financing-your-legal-educatio...
[3] https://law.utexas.edu/admissions/tuition-fees-and-expenses/
[4] https://asklib.law.harvard.edu/faq/115308
Why? Just seems like a barrier to entry to me for no good reason?
Seeing a trend here?
While there are respectable salaries among the others, there are also a lot of lawyers doing real estate law in shopping malls that are just getting by.
What I see among friends with liberal arts degrees from Ivies and adjacent is that, while a few were probably already destined to be lawyers like three previous generations of their family, for most it's something they sort of fell into because they graduated with a classics major and now what? Many never even ended up practicing law--at least not for long.
The ABA considered the appropriateness in 1964 without a dissenting vote and raised the standard in 1965[1]:
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/mis...NB Given the multiple legal systems in the UK there will be a lot of variations - e.g. to become an advocate here in Scotland (our equivalent of barristers) I think you could do that in 4 years: 2 year LLB, 1 year training in a law firm and then one year devilling (where you are an Advocate's Devil!).
Edit: Might be out of date - its a while since my wife did her 2 year LLB and then qualified and became an advocate.
3 year (or more) undergrad, plus 5 years becoming a lawyer.
Or, in Scotland, typically 4 years undergrad (it can be 3y), plus 4 years.
Or the 7 years the parent comment said.
Edit: Relatively few people (I think) do a first degree and then immediately go to law school - most people I knew who did that were changing to law after some other career and had a degree in something unrelated.
I never understood the appeal of free swag. Here we have someone who feels like a walking billboard yet still decides to wear them. I get it if purchasing a $20 non-ad-supported t-shirt poses a significant financial burden, but most students aren’t in that position. Why would you choose to be a frigging ad then? Especially for questionable companies, say Palantir, which IIRC used to be quiet a common sight on Stanford campus.
> law students can now sip out of their Wilke water bottles months later in memory of the big law networking event that stood as the celebration of our first year of learning how to conduct legal research.
There is a lot of money being thrown around towards recruitment in many fields. Tuition is worth a whole lot of free food and branded swag.
In any other job, on-the-job-training is compensated as work, even if it takes a while to complete, even if the employer provides training or seminars to clients as part of its business. (Yes, a school is a business. If one wants to say that it isn’t, it should stop charging money for its services first.)
Job applicants in other sectors are warned that it’s the red flag of a scam to pay an employer for a chance at an offer or promotion. By normal standards, an employee paying their employer is bonkers.
Your scenario is enlightening. If paying a student’s tuition benefits the university and the student’s manager more than the student, what access or benefit might the corporate sponsor be able to derive from inducing a favorable bias in the teacher or school? Could we end up with a situation where Java, of all things, is taught to impressionable undergraduate students across the country? An obvious answer would be to secure a recruiting channel. The things researchers write can also be important to industry sponsors, and the opportunity to bias those exists as well.
Maybe. There's a lot of scholarship money available at elite law schools. For those paying something close to sticker price, Big Law summer associates make good money.
I guess most Harvard grads go where the money is.
EDIT: But a bit more related to the OP, when I studied EE (undergrad) in a college with close ties to the oil and gas industry, we were all wined and dined by big oil for the last 2 years.
During one of those dinner events, hosted by a big service company, they told us to just sign our names and major on a form they passed around - if we did that, we'd get a job offer in the mail a week later. Some of the larger oil (production) companies guaranteed free housing for the first two years, and they'd cover 50% of the mortgage for 5 years if we decided to purchase a house. That was on top of a high starting salary w/annual bonuses.
Should be mentioned that this was during the height of a boom cycle.
Lots of people graduated from Harvard to go on to make very little money but large contributions e.g. Richard Stallman is the parsimonious example that comes to mind. Noam Chomsky and other top academics probably aren't rolling around in cash either.
Dated two management consultants in my life. One was deeply involved in deciding the next CEO of Disney after a few years out of college, as an example. The other reported being basically in charge of a turnaround effort at a fortune 500 company.
Both examples required them to deeply understand the situation and the options and then to advocate for the path they have chosen.
Seemed fun and impactful.
It's difficult to imagine they would be anything more than assistants to the real decision makers.
Of course but it's the same thing.
Executives and the board make the decisions and take responsibility for them. But generally they make these decisions based on the framing and options presented to them by people who work for them.
As a consultant, you get to decide what dimensions matter to the decisions, gather data and arguments, and present the executive with a choice.
The executive skill is to have oriented you around the right topics, deciding whether to trust you and your analysis, and ability to stand behind the decision made.
The "assistants" do the work to enable this. It's a big deal.
Anyone can do that, it's Bob Iger.
Pay is seemingly great, you get to travel a lot, you're exposed to a bunch of different industries and companies from the highest level. The McKinsey/Bain/BCG prestige factor can open a lot of doors down the road, and you probably get a solid network of future titans of industry.
I haven't worked as a consultant, but that was the sales pitch we got.
And I've at least noticed that a many startups tend to have ex-consultants onboard as founders or executives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(colleges)
I went undergrad to a state school, studied CS and graduated to a great tech/finance job. But something I recognize in retrospect I never got in college was "being challenged by my peers."
I didn't really get this until I started doing recruiting for my company. I would go to career fairs at most colleges and the kids would remind me of kids I went to school with. Then I'd visit a "top" school and the kids blew me away: they were mature, articulate, focused and ambitious. It came through in how they talked about their careers.
The student body at a top school makes it harder for you to coast as an unfocused mushmouth. So you have 4 years of being shaped by the environment and challenged by your peers. I didn't get that until after I graduated and lucked out into a company that gave me such an environment.
In my college, I probably ranked pretty high on "articulate and driven" so there was no motivation to elevate that. At MIT, I would have probably been below average on these categories, and you don't want to be below average so you naturally do it more and better.
It’s one of the dumbest speeches I’ve ever heard, but what made it especially delicious was knowing that 2/3 of the kids she was talking to apparently were “finding their bliss” working for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.
However these kids are socialized in at least superficially left wing undergraduate environments. So the kids destined to work for a big law firm defending tobacco corporations for trying to get kids hooked on cigarettes can’t embrace their role and function in society. That’s how you get, as the article observes, 50% of first year students saying they want to work in public interest law.
But of course by 3L the reality sets in. There are few jobs in public interest law and none pay off the debt of a Harvard Law education. Meanwhile corporate America can always use bodies. So you end up with only 2% actually going into public interest law. But law students are smart kids, they knew what they were signing up to do.
The operation of this cognitive dissonance is very interesting to me as a foreigner. As far as I can tell, most Americans are loathe to believe in social and economic roles. “I’m not a cog in a machine with a specific function and purpose, I’m an individual with agency who can change the world.” What does that belief system do to someone who literally functions as a cog in the machine? (Don’t feel bad for them, they make a lot of money doing it.)
By that standard the vast vast majority of people are 'cogs' since very few people have any observable effect on the direction of mankind.
Being married to a Big Law partner, I hear constant griping about how it seems like all they’re doing is training associates to go work somewhere else.
The rebuttal should be that counsel acting for an organization is somewhat like a teacher to students. Putting such people in positions of authority in corporate America is a "win" for justice to the extent they can effectively guide more, and more influential, people to the ends of justice and fair play. Maybe that's an ideal, but unfortunately from my own experience it's just not what HLS has taught its students in recent years to do, and I hold the faculty responsible.
It’s not our job to leverage our trusted position in the system to advance our personal view of morality or ethics. Society doesn’t need us to be its conscience. Indeed, that destroys the very system we are supposed to serve.
I don't see how it conflicts with "everyone gets a chance to a proper defense" (at least as much as "everyone gets a chance to a proper defense" is true in the current system), so there might be some misunderstanding here.
I can't. That makes two of us.
> The US enshrined in the Constitution that every single person, no matter what they did, will have the right to a legal defense. If that is the case, how would morality play a role here? Are you suggesting that we should teach lawyers to only represent clients they think are good people?
If lawyers exercised their own independent views of morality and ethics that would imply the possibility that very odious people can be left without any legal representation. Which is contrary to the constitution.
If the relative amorality of upholding The Law is unpalatable for some, then maybe they aren't cut out to practice law. Perhaps being made of sterner stuff is a key prerequisite, not too different from practicing medicine, where the hippocratic oath obliges one to medically serve even the most repugnant criminals.
[1] https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/metadiplomat-the-r...
There's a lot of room between "lawyers have no responsibility for remedying injustice in the current system" and "lawyers should just decide who's guilty and refuse to deal with them".
- Deciding what kind of case law they specialize in
- Deciding where to work
- Deciding how the work should be done
This whole article is about how Harvard is encouraging lawyers to ignore any professional responsibility in favour of monetary compensation.
These are 100%, or close to it, personal decisions.
The other decisions all involve, in some portion, personal views as to what's right and wrong.
IMO (and IANAL), I think that the ethics of the situation demand that lawyers represent the best interests of their clients in civil and criminal matters.
> The future will never have to ask with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will show that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man. But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute to our strength. . . . The United States has no interest which would be advanced by the conviction of any defendant if we have not proved him guilty on at least one of the counts charged against him in the Indictment. Any result that the calm and critical judgment of posterity would pronounce unjust, would not be a victory for any of the countries associated in this prosecution.
You want to compare ensuring a fair trial to the Nazis "just following orders"? Okay. What is your alternative, then, other than unfair trials? How is that justice?
Do you take issue with the latter?
It's a simple question.
It's a nonsensical platitude, spoken by someone who neither knows, nor is interested in knowing, the subject matter.
If you want to be taken seriously, learn something about the systems you're trying to reform before telling other people how to do their jobs.
Otherwise, seems we've reached an impasse, so I'll just take my leave.
> [We only] ensure that the system operates according to the specification
Right. That's the substance of the complaint.
While your viewpoint is a reasonable interpretation of "the law", it completely ignores the higher-order responsibility for "justice" to serve as a moral compass and balance of power.
Your comparison to “following orders” is specious. Lawyers are bound by criminal laws the same as soldiers are bound by the laws of war. “Following orders” isn’t a defense in either case. But soldiers aren’t expected to independently apply their moral judgment. “War crimes” are defined by international consensus. And soldiers are bound to “follow orders” when they’re not being asked to commit war crimes.
In fact, attorneys typically hold themselves to extremely high standards of ethics - just not the ethics people think of. I'm sure they exist, but out of all the many lawyers I've met, I have never met one who did not take things like attorney-client privilege, being an officer of the court, or duties surrounding disclosure and discovery and conflicts of interest extremely seriously. It's very much a case of "orange and blue morality"[0]: It's not that the rules they follow aren't taken seriously, it's that those rules are not the rules most people imagine.
So, the idea that attorneys should abandon the principles of the system they've dedicated their life to because some layperson's sense of ethics demands it is foolish, in that even if it might produce a "better" result to your sensibilities or mine, it's simply not going to happen, not because attorneys are amoral, but precisely the opposite: Because they are moral according to the morality of their system.
Look: People don't like the justice system because it doesn't always produce results that they agree with. They don't like or understand its convoluted, highly layered, self-referential sets of ever-shifting, multi-faceted rules and tests and interpretations and arguments about the technicalities of meanings of words. And that's fine. But a system of justice based on even the most altruistic "X seems right to me" is going to be an order of magnitude worse for at least some people, and I have yet to hear an idea for replacing our current system that doesn't boil down to either that or our current system, but it somehow magically always makes the decisions people personally want.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMor...
Since when are lawyers anything other than mercenaries?
They are hired to win an adversarial game, not to decide what is moral or not.