Law is Magical

Lately, there’s been a lot of buzz—well, “a lot” as defined by the tiny little circle of the world devoted to law schools and law school admissions–about whether law school is still a sensible choice. Various writers have pointed out the lay-offs by big law firms, the smaller summer-associate classes, the change in hiring practices from virtually auto-admitting the summer associates–and concluded from all these trends that law school is now a sucker’s bet. That conclusion, and its exclusive focus on the economics of the undertaking, strikes me as misguided, to say the least.

There have always been people who viewed law school as an acceptable but uninspiring path—the best post-org-chem alternative to med school, in some cases—and the new economy should probably be an impetus to those folks to think again. But they probably should have been thinking again for a while now, because it wasn’t like getting a job at a big law firm was ever akin to winning the lottery—winning the lottery, after all, does not require a lot of hard work for the rest of your life. Somehow, those big-law-firm jobs seem to have taken on a whole new luster now that they’re much harder to get.

But legal careers have never been limited to, or defined by, the 4% of law jobs whose locus is in the big firms. There are government lawyers, there are public interest lawyers, there are in-house counsel, there are lawyers at firms that don’t have 500 other lawyers, there are sole practitioners. Then there are the uber-successful lawyers manqués: the sports agents, the novelists, the Sam Zells, the Gretchen Rubins. (And let’s not forget the admissions deans.)

Putting aside the considerable variety of very satisfying career paths beyond the Am Law 100 that are available to lawyers, 1 there is an even more basic reason why getting a law degree continues to make a lot of sense. The reason was summed up nicely by Professor J.J. Prescott in his commencement address to our December grads: Power. The Law School had taught the grads, he said, first, “how to quickly digest and understand any area of law, to appreciate how it fits together and functions, what justifies it, and indeed how to think about making or changing the law in a way that will improve it by understanding what the law lacks, where it is weak, or wrong,” and second, “to use the law. We’ve taught you not just the language of law books, courts, and legislatures, but how to connect a problem in the world to the result you seek with language, rules, logic, and persuasion.” The result? Power. Power to protect yourself and those you care about, ability to change the world, and, specifically, make it better:

That is because the cost of everything is a function of the law. Regulations, taxes and subsidies, these are the things that make the real world look the way it does. . . . Just like we need energy, labor, wood, and steel to build things, we also need laws – the rules of the game. . . .

If you think about it, nothing would be built without law, and whether we build a lot or a little, what we build, what we *do* – all of this, too, turns on the shape of the law. Law, therefore, by its nature represents social judgments about what’s important, and by setting our priorities, it dictates what everyone and everything does.

Consequently, giving you the ability to use or change the law provides you with tools to do…. well…. anything. It just takes a bit of time to see this. It is as if we’ve taught you every other trade, plus those not yet even conceived.

All this for the price of law school–such a deal! Now, Prescott, who is young (as far as I can tell, he looks about 16, but surely that’s not right), quoted the Spiderman movie (great power, great responsibility, yada yada) and held up Voldemort and Harry Potter as the poles of power to seal his case. But I am old, and I will say: be a lawyer in the mold of Mr. Chaffanbrass, or perhaps Sir William Patterson, 2 and not Mr. Tulkinghorn.

But if you’re unconvinced, well, consider a career as a roustabout.

 

-Dean Z. Assistant Dean and Director of Admissions

 

1 Probably people don’t put footnotes in blogs as a general matter, but I am a lawyer and I cannot help myself. I need to insert a shout-out here to Josh Deahl ’06, whose graduation speech included the following: “I have to say I’m concerned about being an attorney. I can’t think of another professional degree where one of its main attributes is that it allows you to enter other fields. When I was thinking of going to law school, people kept telling me, ‘the best thing about a J.D. is that you don’t need to go into law, you can use it for anything.’ And if you said, ‘I actually want to practice law,’ they would’ve burned you for witchcraft.” Now Mr. Witchcraft is doing the most legalish of law jobs imaginable: clerking for the Supreme Court. Ha.

2 Apparently, Anthony Trollope isn’t as popular as Charles Dickens and so I can’t find any readily-linkable references to these excellent lawyers from Phineas Redux and Lady Anna. That’s tragic, so you’ll have to just go read those books.