How to Fix Law School
Alright kiddies, going to keep this one short and sweet:
Require law schools to sign as guarantors for all federal loans their students receive.
Boom. Done.
Alright kiddies, going to keep this one short and sweet:
Require law schools to sign as guarantors for all federal loans their students receive.
Boom. Done.
How about making law an undergraduate degree?
I agree completely with Christine.
I’m a patent attorney and have studied both engineering and law. Engineering was harder. In what meaningful sense is law a “graduate degree”.
Law IS an undergraduate degree with a 4 year barrier to entry tacked on at the beginning. This is not a result of any intellectual prerequisites.
A law degree is not like a PhD in physics. The only intellectual prerequisite to be in law school is to be able to read and write in English. It should be high school to law school, maybe with advanced degrees for people who want to do sophisticated BigLaw areas like securities or IP.
Any profession with sufficient market power can pull the tricks that the legal industry had. If teacher’s unions (or accountants or engineers) were powerful enough they’d say “you need a broad liberal arts education in order to be intellectually prepared for the rigors of an education (or accounting or engineering) degree.
You scamm blogers rag on the ABA too much. It’s already performed a market protecting coup by sticking a pointless 4 year barier to entry to the de facto bachelors degree that is a JD.
Can you expand on this? I would like to hear how this could be applied in practical ways. But I agree with the other comments… the Educational Industrial Complex has jam packed our education with tons of bullshit that doesn’t matter in light of the internet and world travel. In Europe, my cousin is in law school and she’s only 20. She’s well rounded because she’s well travelled and bright. What purpose did it serve for me to take chemistry in college? Every class that I took that doesn’t apply to my daily life was a waste of time. It only helped me define my interests. I’m interested in History and I figured that out in college, but it doesn’t actually apply to my real life. So sick of this bullshit. We need schools that train us for careers, not thinking.
On reflection, a law degree is even more ridiculous than I wrote in my last post. When you get an accounting or engineering degree, at least you learn how to calculate profit-loss and how to build circuits or engines. Law school is 3 years of socratic bullshit. If they shortened it to 1 year (you do legitimately learn legal reasoning as well as important concepts like duty, breach, consideration, holding, etc. as a 1L) nothing would change.
You learn the real black letter law in BARBRI and how to really practice law after working for a few years. So a legal education is 7 years: 4 years of any irrelevant shit just to satisfy a barrier to entry, 1 year of actually learning the basics, followed by 2 more pointless years. So out of 7 years, you actually have 1 year of solid learning.
Angel the Lawyer:
This is how it can be applied in a practical way. BTW, I don’t advocate actually doing this. Now that I’m a lawyer, I personally benefit from the pointless barrier to entry and its in my interest to keep them.
Some law school should anounce that they are accepting 1Ls directly from high school. When the ABA tries to unaccredit that law school, someone should file an antitrust suit.
We should open up a law school on every street corner. Make them as ubiquitous as gas stations. McDonald’s can hand out JD’s along with their happy meals.
Maybe then, people will realize what a joke the law degree is. Law school tuition rates will plummet and law school deans will see their salaries plummet to a mere 200k.
At one time all law degrees were Bachelor of Laws (abbreviated LL.B., LLB, or rarely, Ll.B.) is an undergraduate, or bachelor, degree in law (or a first professional degree in law, depending on jurisdiction) originating in England and offered in most common law countries as the primary law degree. I remember when an old time partner was contacted by his alma mata to turn in his sheepskin for a JD.
I thoroughly disagree with the idea that the bachelor’s degree requirement should be removed. At the very least, as Dave noted, getting a law degree is already too easy, and already too many people have one or are getting one. Practically, such a move would make the world a far worse place.
I would submit several changes that should be made, of course. Law school should be only two years, and the third year should be a full year clerkship. Accreditation requirements should be made more stringent, so that only the top third of the current law schools make the cut. Finally, the bar exam requirement should be removed entirely, as the guarantee of graduate quality would be the JD, not passing the bar.
Returning to BL1Y’s post, I think its an interesting idea–but it doesn’t guarantee anything for the students. If I fail the bar next week, I have sworn to myself that I will become a police officer (something I probably should have done anyway). My modest student loans will still be paid off eventually, without any thanks to my law school, which would have failed me miserably. The point is that most unemployed lawyers won’t wait sufficiently long to find other jobs as to have their loans default–they will simply find whatever jobs they can, and be saddled with terrible debt, and increasing interest and fees on their loans.
Finding whatever job you can might still mean defaulting on your loans. If you have $1500 a month in payments, default is still a possibility. What makes you so certain you’ll get a job as a cop? A lot of cities have hiring freezes.
And, you’d probably see an increase in defaults since defaulting would actually get you out of something, as opposed to just ruining your credit and still being stuck with the loans because they can’t be discharged.
But, I think most importantly, the guarantee would help change the mindset of law schools. They should think of themselves as being there to provide a service to the students, instead of existing to generate funding for professors’ research projects.
I see your point. Your solution would help keep costs down, thereby helping students to default less (and all of the other benefits that come with a lower debt load). It probably would reduce the interest rate of law school loans, as well.
I suppose there is a real need to reduce costs, because the nature of competition between law schools has nothing to do with cost. Very few students really pay attention to the costs when choosing a school, assuming they will be able to pay off whatever loans they get. Instead, they choose a school based upon rankings or family connections, neither of which are any indicator of value. Consequently, law schools make little effort to keep costs down, because students considering the school only see the fancy library, not the $3,000 per semester surcharge for it.
Law school prices will keep going up because (a) 0Ls don’t know any better, and (b) law schools don’t give two shits about the welfare of their graduates.
All these schools claim to have a commitment to the public interest and pro bono work. But, look at how many deans make $300-500k. If they each took a 50% pay cut they’d still be making multiples of what their graduates earn, and could fund probably a dozen Innocence Projects.
I’m not sure I would want a law degree to be an undergraduate degree. But, I suppose that all comes down to what you think a student should get out of law school.
If you want lawyers to graduate with substantive legal knowledge, law school should be a lot more like med school. 6 years with tons of clinics, externships, etc.
But, if the main goal is to teach people how to “think like a lawyer” then a BA in law is fine with me.