Let's take a quick detour, move away from the facts and figures about student debt, false employment statistics, "professors" who have never practiced law, and misery of the profession as a whole. Let's take a huge step back and look at law school from a more philosophical perspective.
Pretend for a moment that you’ve just won the lottery or inherited a large sum from a long-lost relative. You buy a beautiful old farm in Kentucky and you build some stables and training facilities to realize your dream of working with horses and perhaps breeding some champions.
You raise all the horses, feed them hay or oats, let them run and play in the fields, and see over time which ones respond best to more intensive training on the track. Most will never make much of an impact on the racing world. They’ll be sold off as horses for riding schools or to private owners, but will still lead happy horse lives. Some will get injured, become sick, or just have bad temperaments or genetics and end up being sent to the glue factory. But a few will succeed and do well as racehorses after all those years of hard work. They’ll be strong and resilient, maybe win a few races or place in others, and they’ll win money and eventually be sold for a sizable profit to wealthy individuals. Now, I’m no horse racing expert, but that sounds about right for how these kinds of stables work.
But what kind of business would you be running if one day you decided that instead of using some of the finest horses for racing, you put some of them on the truck to the glue factory along with the feeblest nags? Just throw them out, pretend that they don't exist. Stupid, right?
Let’s try another example. You inherit a vineyard, and you decide to continue the wine making business. You pick all the grapes, sort them according to quality, taste, sweetness, whatever. The worst grapes are sent to a jelly factory, or to a juice factory, or end up being turned into raisins. You keep the good and the best grapes to use to make wine. The good grapes will be turned into average wine, but the very best will be turned into a delicious, complex, expensive tipple that will win many awards.
This year, out of the thousand or so crates of grapes harvested, half are sub par and will be sent to make juice, just under the remaining half are better and will be turned into reasonable wine, but you have twenty crates of absolutely perfect grapes, the best of the best, enough for a small batch of premium wine. These grapes have been lovingly nurtured over time, and their deliciousness is a result of genetics and hard work. But instead of turning all twenty crates into the finest wine you can make, you take a few of the crates and just toss them out with the nasty ones that will get turned into fruit juice or raisins or wherever the bad grapes go. Madness, no?
Let’s try a third scenario. A society spends the best part of two decades educating its youth. Elementary school, middle school, high school, then college. Most students are average and will go on to normal careers. Some will not succeed for a variety of reasons, and they end up in jail or digging ditches or living under bridges, often being a huge drain on society. But the very top students, those who work the hardest and who have the finest minds the education system can produce, will go to medical schools and graduate programs or work as engineers, teachers, military officers, scientists, and so forth, and will eventually become tomorrow's leaders, innovators and success stories.
Yet this society is content with taking a portion of those top students, some of the best, and throwing them out with the failures. They get sucked into law school, which produces no leaders or innovators, no benefit to society whatsoever, and there are no jobs waiting at the end. They become debtors, tax burdens, unemployed, homeless, mentally ill from the stress of failure, too broken financially to ever do much of anything. A handful get lucky and escape, but work in law jobs that have a negative effect on society – ambulance chasers, class action trolls, divorce lawyers and so on, all of whom have the goal of generating legal fees and profiting from the misfortunes of others.
Hopefully, the point is clear. Law is an extraordinary waste of great minds.
Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”. He can be contacted at charlescooperauthor@gmail.com.
Pretend for a moment that you’ve just won the lottery or inherited a large sum from a long-lost relative. You buy a beautiful old farm in Kentucky and you build some stables and training facilities to realize your dream of working with horses and perhaps breeding some champions.
You raise all the horses, feed them hay or oats, let them run and play in the fields, and see over time which ones respond best to more intensive training on the track. Most will never make much of an impact on the racing world. They’ll be sold off as horses for riding schools or to private owners, but will still lead happy horse lives. Some will get injured, become sick, or just have bad temperaments or genetics and end up being sent to the glue factory. But a few will succeed and do well as racehorses after all those years of hard work. They’ll be strong and resilient, maybe win a few races or place in others, and they’ll win money and eventually be sold for a sizable profit to wealthy individuals. Now, I’m no horse racing expert, but that sounds about right for how these kinds of stables work.
But what kind of business would you be running if one day you decided that instead of using some of the finest horses for racing, you put some of them on the truck to the glue factory along with the feeblest nags? Just throw them out, pretend that they don't exist. Stupid, right?
Let’s try another example. You inherit a vineyard, and you decide to continue the wine making business. You pick all the grapes, sort them according to quality, taste, sweetness, whatever. The worst grapes are sent to a jelly factory, or to a juice factory, or end up being turned into raisins. You keep the good and the best grapes to use to make wine. The good grapes will be turned into average wine, but the very best will be turned into a delicious, complex, expensive tipple that will win many awards.
This year, out of the thousand or so crates of grapes harvested, half are sub par and will be sent to make juice, just under the remaining half are better and will be turned into reasonable wine, but you have twenty crates of absolutely perfect grapes, the best of the best, enough for a small batch of premium wine. These grapes have been lovingly nurtured over time, and their deliciousness is a result of genetics and hard work. But instead of turning all twenty crates into the finest wine you can make, you take a few of the crates and just toss them out with the nasty ones that will get turned into fruit juice or raisins or wherever the bad grapes go. Madness, no?
Let’s try a third scenario. A society spends the best part of two decades educating its youth. Elementary school, middle school, high school, then college. Most students are average and will go on to normal careers. Some will not succeed for a variety of reasons, and they end up in jail or digging ditches or living under bridges, often being a huge drain on society. But the very top students, those who work the hardest and who have the finest minds the education system can produce, will go to medical schools and graduate programs or work as engineers, teachers, military officers, scientists, and so forth, and will eventually become tomorrow's leaders, innovators and success stories.
Yet this society is content with taking a portion of those top students, some of the best, and throwing them out with the failures. They get sucked into law school, which produces no leaders or innovators, no benefit to society whatsoever, and there are no jobs waiting at the end. They become debtors, tax burdens, unemployed, homeless, mentally ill from the stress of failure, too broken financially to ever do much of anything. A handful get lucky and escape, but work in law jobs that have a negative effect on society – ambulance chasers, class action trolls, divorce lawyers and so on, all of whom have the goal of generating legal fees and profiting from the misfortunes of others.
Hopefully, the point is clear. Law is an extraordinary waste of great minds.
Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”. He can be contacted at charlescooperauthor@gmail.com.
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