Law School Graduation Day: You won't remember it fondly.

Law School Commencement Day ceremonies have now, uh, commenced. Graduates and friends, please be seated.

To begin. A few brief remarks by a Madoffian fundraiser par excellence, called a Chancellor or a University President, or by an authority-loving monster called a trustee, whose idea of community or alumni service is voting to increase tuition. Repeatedly. This distinguished person wears a big medallion around his or her neck, called the "chains of office," symbolizing pretty much the same thing as the chain necklaces favored by gangsters.

 

Then a scamming fool, called the Dean, speaks at greater length, praising the stellar education that the graduates have just received. When you think about it, the Dean's effusive praise is more for him or herself and for other faculty than it is for the graduates. A couple of dozen academic blowhards, silent for once, sit behind the Dean, and gaze with blank expressions at the kids whose misplaced trust made them rich. The grads sit in the audience in their own regalia, waiting for the procession to the stage. Their temporarily proud family members sit somewhere behind, snapping pictures.

More speeches. A student speaker bids a fond and slightly goofy farewell to dear old schooldays just past. A judge, or some other bigwig, speaks of career and personal obstacles overcome, and predicts that the graduates, too, will pursue their calling with honor. Then the rest: rollcall, handshake, diploma, and we are done. Tradition.

To me, there is something wrong with this scene. Well, not wrong-- just ridiculous and misplaced. Do lawyers, of all people, really need or want this kind of pageantry and airy rhetoric? It is a profession for realists, for cynics. Lawyers earn their living by representing people and companies on their mercenary, sordid, and petty disputes or problems. Which is what these graduates will be doing one year after graduation. Or, rather, what half of them will be doing. The other half will be "temping"-- i.e. electronically sorting documents according to a protocol on short-term projects, work that any semiliterate person could do just as well. Or they will be preparing cappuccinos at coffeehouse jobs they were only able to acquire by leaving their JDs off their resumes. If any of these fledgling lawyers goes back and listens to the graduation day speeches one year later, his or her emotional response is likely to be something other than nostalgia.

 

I suppose all the fuss leading up to graduation day at least has the effect of pushing the graduates’ sense of being scammed temporarily into the outskirts of their consciousness, where it will hopefully remain until they leave campus. Can’t let those sweet souls, the 2Ls and 1Ls, get too strong a whiff of 3L anger and desperation. And the ceremony, with its great solemnity and afterglow of accomplishment, will surely make mom and dad happy. And that has value, because there will be some very sad and embarrassing family moments when they realize, later on, that their bright and promising kid’s staggeringly expensive degree does not translate to a good job and social status, as it did a generation ago. When they realize that law school is a scam.

 

Lawyers don’t need graduation day ceremonies because they don’t need law schools. Law schools, the overwhelming majority of them anyway, should be eliminated and replaced by an apprenticeship model of legal education. Following a bar-review-like crash course to teach core doctrine fast, there should be a structured series of clinics and externships to train students to try a case, write an appeal, and represent clients in a couple of practice areas of their choice. These clinics and externships should be supervised by successful local practitioners, not by professors who haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom in fifteen years, if ever. Given the job market, approved apprenticeship programs would have to be few in number and highly selective, and I think they would be-- the practicing bar has no incentive to flood our own profession with newbie grads, whereas the academic scammers do have such an incentive, and many could not know or care less about actual lawyering.

 

But won’t new lawyers miss the rite of passage represented by graduation day pomp? I doubt it. The drink my colleagues bought me when I won a particular case, early in my career, meant infinitely more to me than all that graduation day yapping, a day when I transitioned in status from student to unemployed, a day when I looked at the word "Doctor"– Doctor of Laws– on my diploma and felt nauseous.