Con Law - a second opinion

With all deference to Adam B yesterday, I'd like to offer my own opinion about Con Law. Here goes...

Six stars. Seriously. Five stars really doesn’t do this book justice. This book delivers a hard punch squarely to the face where others have just raised their fists or voices. And it’s time the gloves came off because for the past few years law schools just haven’t got the message.

The book is split into two sections, the first of which trashes law schools and exposes them for the scams that they are (and they are scams!) This first section contains nothing particularly new but does a fine job of rehashing and explaining the tricks of the trade for newbies in great detail. Nobody should be oblivious to the sales techniques and scams that law schools play anymore but repeating the information is no bad thing and the book does a reasonable job of collating all of this information into one place, from admissions tricks to rankings tricks to the charlatans who are involved in the admissions process to the charlatans who grace the classrooms of law schools. For readers of this blog it's not headline news but it's a good and detailed overview.


The value of the book lies in its second section which trashes the legal profession. You spend three years in law school but you spend thirty years in a career. And for all the books written about law school (10% of your legal life) there are very few that shed much light on the other 90% of your legal life which is your “career”.  Nobody has really taken down the legal profession in quite a splendid manner before. Without throwing the baby out with the bathwater (because there are some nice law jobs out there for the 1% of grads who are lucky), the second half of the book explains in great detail the truly awful existence of modern lawyers - the types of “opportunities”, the depressing realities, the fact that there are few places in the entire legal profession that offer anything worthwhile from a career standpoint. The profession is a dirty, filthy, foul mess, and this book does a fine job of exposing the disgusting, shameful, embarrassing, unfulfilling and vile lives that most lawyers ultimately live.

It’s not a blanket “law is bad!” book. The book is smart enough to acknowledge that we do need some lawyers, that there are some good opportunities to be had, and it lays out exactly how to get those opportunities and when to quit when those opportunities are taken off the table. But not in a way that encourages unsuitable applicants to attend law school. It does not say that you can make your dreams come true. It does not say that if you work hard enough you’ll succeed, because you won’t. It tells you how miserable your life will be as a low end lawyer with huge debt and it tells you that unless you're literally one of the 1% you will be destined for the legal trash heap. It’s a disturbing read for those who are used to the Disney outlook on life where success lies within everyone’s grasp if only they dream big enough and wish upon a star. If you don’t come away from this book feeling dirty and discouraged then you’re either someone who has been admitted to Harvard Law or you’re an idiot.

The highlight of the book for me was the descriptions of the types of clients you’ll end up working with. It made my skin crawl because it’s true. Once you get through law school you have a whole career to look forward to (if you’re lucky) representing some of the most distasteful people and corporations you can imagine in some of the most distasteful and disgusting matters. By attending law school you’re paying a huge sum for the opportunity to represent people who repulse you, who disgust you, and who you literally hate, and your job is now to help them do things that make you sick. No other law books to my knowledge have ever gone into so much detail about how entirely revolting being a lawyer is. There are no celebrity clients, no rich clients, no clients who are happy paying bills, no honest clients, no clients who won’t stab you in the back given half the chance, no interesting legal problems to be solved. The book exposes law for what it is – a profession that claims it is prestigious but in reality rubs shoulders with the most mundane and nastiest parts of human existence and society.

This book is a huge milestone in breaking the law school scam although it's by no means the silver bullet - we need many more silver bullets and people willing to pull the trigger (Campos was a great example, but we need all those anonymous commenters who have clout but who are unwilling to step out of the shadows). It does it without pulling punches but also without jumping the shark and claiming that every single law school is a scam. And it does it without vengeance and without malice, and in plain language that regular readers can understand and digest. It’s not a treatise on the matter nor a hardcore piece of investigative journalism. It’s a book that should make you think and should make you second guess your decision to go to law school. It's thought provoking rather than something that will be quoted but we need more things that provoke thoughts and less crap that people dismiss as academic nonsense. And it recognizes that the scam doesn’t begin and end with law school and that the profession as a whole is just as culpable.  Just a clear, experienced, first-hand view of the ins and outs of law school today, the legal profession today, and how to succeed if you decide to pursue law as a career – although success is highly unlikely!

I can’t wait until Brian Leiter reads this!

(Note that this is my own opinion and not the opinion of this site or other authors on this site. I am not endorsing this book on behalf of the blog, just on behalf of me.)

Update - I hope I did not step on Adam's toes by writing this. We remain a united blog against law school and our internal differences of opinion and different approaches are not a sign that we are not all working towards the same goal.