Another Stupid Defense Of Law School From HuffPo

We get to look inside what the leading law school trade organization actually wants kids to think about law school, and the floor model falls laughably far from the reality.

Everything about 22 Reasons Why Going to Law School Is the Best Decision You’ll Ever Make is sublime. The article touches the face of God by slapping Him and then giving Him the finger. Imagine a defense of law school so bereft of substance that it actually exposes the cynical lie driving the law school-industrial complex. Truly a work of beauty.

Presumably trying to newsjack the success of How To Get Away With Murder (inaccurate though it may be), the venerable Huffington Post unleashed these 22 Reasons Why Going to Law School Is the Best Decision You’ll Ever Make upon the world. If we were trying, I’m pretty sure we can come up with 165K+ why it’s a bad one.

The story is written by Madison Rutherford, a senior in Journalism at San Francisco State. What does she know about the value of a law degree? Not much actually. And she’s graciously offered to show us how little she knows about law school in reader-friendly listicle format!

Join us then, as we review all 22 terrible reasons to go to law school….

Let’s get this straight, we shouldn’t blame Rutherford for anything in this article. The real culprit is LSAC, which appears to have commissioned this advertorial content to shore up their flagging numbers. Meaning, they intentionally commissioned someone someone not in a position to understand the truth. That’s one more reason this article is so brilliant: we get to look inside what law school’s trade organization actually wants kids to think about law school, and the floor model falls laughably far from the reality.

1. Know Your Rights: Or pay attention in your high school government class and you’ll know just as much as a law student about your rights. But this is as good a place as any to point out that all 22 items on this list fall into three basic categories: (a) stuff that suggests that lawyers have magic powers, (b) stuff that’s blatantly untrue, and (c) stuff that’s true, but kind of irrelevant as between going to law school and “doing a million other things that adults do.” As the list goes on, each of these makes the flimsiness of the law school argument more and more apparent.

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2. Contest a Ticket Like a Boss: I forgot about NYU Law’s Traffic Law Clinic. Seriously though, you will learn nothing in law school that will help you contest a ticket because there’s nothing in traffic law that makes any goddamned sense anyway. If you try and challenge a ticket, here’s what happens: You take time out of your work day to show up and wait around for an hour, then the judge comes in and hugs the officer who is obviously his brother, then you pay your fine and walk out. A deep understanding of Delaware’s corporate governance laws provides little comfort.

3. Make Any Agreement Iron Clad: High-end litigation is mostly about how gaggles of the smartest lawyers in the world routinely fail to make agreements iron clad. But, yeah, a law student can probably do better out of the gate. To be fair, one actual reason to go to law school is to confuse normal people into thinking you can make an agreement iron clad. Which is something, but probably not worth the debt.

4. Become an Interview Snob: Absolutely correct. You will be going to plenty of interviews as you become ever more desperate to find work in this market.

5. Convince Others:

Do you and your girlfriend disagree on whether or not robots are taking over the world? Do you and your best friend fight over which posters best represent the vibe of your apartment? Does your boss think you’re slacking when you think you’re overworked? Law school will teach you how to approach conflicts with different types of people, how to understand their mindset and how to deliver your points of view. This will position you to win any argument.

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Law school teaches you to convince others about the law. If you want to figure out how to get the gang to order Chipotle, take an undergrad course in basic essay writing or argumentation. In fact, if you sought out some basic argumentation instruction, you’d recognize that an argument that is not unique to going to law school is at best a severely mitigated argument for going to law school.

6. Get Real-World Experience: Get a job out of college instead of spending three years in an ivory tower wonderland racking up debt. But this is a stunning effort at Newspeak — law school is literally the alternative to getting real-world experience, and yet here they are pitching themselves as “real-world experience.” Unless of course they are describing the MTV show. In which case, they may be on to something. Get a summer job doing very little all while living way above your means? That’s actually pretty accurate.

7. Negotiate a Raise: Biglaw firms pay lockstep. No one is learning how to negotiate a raise because they don’t even understand what a raise is. In fact, if you want to guarantee never learning how to negotiate a raise, become a Biglaw associate.

8. Be Purposeful: Like most people, I went to law school because I walloped the LSAT and had no better plan for my life. Not exactly “purpose.”

9. Expand Your Views on Diversity: Yeah it seems like a great place for diversity. About 70-30 male to female and 88 percent white. But if you’re looking to meet people from all WASPs of life, by all means sign up.

10. Know How to Act When Disaster Strikes: Throw everyone else under the bus because they were just messing up the curve anyway. Lesson learned.

11. Speak Klingon… aka Legalese: Both languages are just about as useful in day-to-day life. The only reason to know legalese is to be a lawyer. Meaning this bullet point boils down to “law school is a great idea if your goal is to be a lawyer,” which is probably true but makes for a pretty stupid list.

You’re halfway there. How much stupider does LSAC’s list get?