What Harvard Law Students Tell Themselves When The Demons Come

Harvard law student argues that making as much money as possible is good for the world.

Many people who go to Harvard Law School are going to end up in a Biglaw job at some point. The debt is too high, the money is too good, and the path into Biglaw is too easy for most HLS grads to resist, at least for a time.

Everybody has their price, and everybody deals with the reality of selling out for their price in their own way. Most people promise themselves that it’s “only temporary,” as if there is going to be some magical point in their future where making as much money as possible will not be that important. Others drown the better angels of their nature in substances or consumerism. Some people actually love their Biglaw jobs, God bless ’em. They work hard and are fairly compensated for their efforts.

But then there are the people who rationalize their choices as somehow contributing to the the greater social good. These are the people who tout their pro bono work, as if spending five hours looking at contracts for Habitat for Humanity negates the 70 hours they spent helping real estate moguls build luxury condos. These people aren’t concerned with “doing good” as much as they’re concerned with being judged by do-gooders. You’d think that they could use some of that money and stick it in their ears and say, “La la la, I can’t hear you over the drone of my eight-cylinder HEMI iSprocketdoodle, which you can’t even afford to Google.”

When backed into a moral corner, some people admit defeat and buy an expensive wine, other people fight back with ridiculously self-serving logic. And Harvard Law School excels at self-serving logic…

There’s an opinion piece running in the Harvard Law Record arguing that going into Biglaw is the best way to “save the world.” It’s pretty stupid. It’s not absurd enough to achieve Jonathan Swift levels of parody, nor is it thought through enough to be taken seriously.

The core premise is that you can do more “good” in the world by donating 25% of your post-tax, Biglaw salary to charity than you can as a public interest lawyer or a government lawyer or whatever.

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To even get into this argument, you have to accept the premise that there is any Biglaw associate, anywhere, who is going to give away 25% of their post-tax salary. And you would have to be really dumb to accept that premise. It’s a dumb premise, even if you assume that Biglaw associates are desperate to make charitable contributions to the world. Between rent and student loan payments, giving 25% away would make it a struggle for most associates to pay all their other bills. People don’t bill 60 hours a week working for the greater good of corporate clients to be functionally poor. The writer might as well be saying that conservationists should be focused on saving unicorns because magic is more precious than rainforests.

I can imagine the writer arguing that people who work in public interest consign themselves to similar poverty in their efforts to make a difference, but that goes to the second, even bigger problem with this piece: the assumption that money can be used to purchase good deeds. It’s a very old fallacy. The Catholic Church used to sell indulgences. Build a church, get into heaven, because God (or at least the Pope) will look the other way regarding how you amassed your charitable fortune. More recently, we’ve been introduced to the concept of Chicken Offsets, which is based on the same flawed concept that you can do whatever you want and then use cash to make things right.

People who are actually concerned about the public interest don’t think that way. They don’t think that currency is the only tender that can or should be offered up in an effort to make things better. They resist the endless attempts to commodify every action or inaction in this country with dollars and cents. The author estimates that you could save 150 lives a year by donating $25,000 to anti-malarial bug nets. That’s a great use of your spare cash, but you’ve got nothing on the people who spend their time helping to distribute those bug nets, or even the people who teach proper bug net use. Or, you know, the people who work tirelessly to bring down the cost and other barriers to anti-malarial drug distribution — I can just imagine a Big Phrama lawyer who spends six days a week to protect the company’s patent monopoly on life-saving drugs, then cuts a check for $6 for a bug net and thinks he’s done his good deed for the month.

In any event, the article crescendos into an orgy of stupid with this:

So there you have it—be a corporate lawyer, donate 25% of your post tax income to charity, and save 150 lives a year, or deworm 25,000 kids. Alternatively, go into Public Interest, Government, or Academia, and feel warm and fuzzy about yourself. Sadly, when people at this school talk about public service, they mean the latter, rather than the former.

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Yes, idiot, when people talk about “public service” they mean dedicating their careers towards something in the public sphere. That’s what public service means. Private practice, like Biglaw, means spending your professional time working towards the private concerns of your company. There’s nothing wrong with that. But arguing that there is something right or better about that suggests either a desperate rationalization or a complete lack of understanding about what public service is all about. Even the most charitably minded Biglaw lawyer is not Robin Hood. As a liberal I know that redistributing wealth is the easy part; actually making a difference for the public good is much, much harder. You can’t buy it. You can only work at it.

But I get it. Like I said, everybody has a price, but once somebody buys your life, it can be tough. Not everybody has to wrestle with the reality that not only do they have a price, but that they’ve actually sold for that price… and the price turns out to be (relatively speaking) quite low. How many people have to walk around knowing that they’ll passionately advocate for the highest bidder, regardless of that bidder’s moral worth, for the mere price of $160,000 a year? The brain is a self-preserving organ, it will do whatever it has to do to avoid peering into the dark abyss where a soul should be: “Just until I pay off my loans,” “I give a lot to charity,” “What do you mean ‘last call’ you sniveling barkeep?” People do what they can to justify their choices.

I would just advise what Al Pacino does in Devil’s Advocate: “Guilt is like a bag of f**kin’ bricks. All ya gotta do is set it down.” That goes for both sides. If you want to do good in this world in the public sphere, go do good. Don’t worry about what that’s going to mean for your bank account, your loans, or what Mommy and Daddy will think. Go and do.

If you don’t want to go into public service, don’t. And don’t feel bad about it. This is America, and in America we do not require people to justify the selfish choice of making as much money as humanly possible. We just ask that you not hoard so much that you ruin it for the next guy. Will people “judge” you? Sure. What do you care?

There’s no need to pretend that Biglaw is what people do to “save the world.” Biglaw is what you do to save yourself.

Want to Save the World? Do BigLaw! [Harvard Law Record]