Law School Deans, Law Schools

Professor Reduced To Arguing For The Psychic Benefit Of Law School

Law professors are desperate to justify value of law school.

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Of course there is a value to understanding our legal system that transcends employment outcomes and graduate indebtedness. There is value in knowing the difference between a doric column and an ionic column. There is value in being able to read Latin, stitch a wound, or solve for X. Being educated about things is valuable, I don’t think anybody disagrees with that.

The problem for American law schools is that they have to prove that the education they provide is three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars MORE VALUABLE than the education their students have already received in college and could receive with Google searches. There are lots of fuzzy, psychic benefits to legal education. I, for one, particularly value knowing exactly which of my rights are being violated when the NYPD puts its foot up my ass. But that’s an intellectual luxury. If law schools are just selling the masturbatory benefits of “knowing how things work,” the market has decided that they are charging too much.

For some reason, that reality — the reality that people who pay real money expect tangible benefits — is one that law professors have trouble accepting. Instead, professors really want to believe students should fork over huge sums of money just because “learning is cool,” or some similar tripe. If you want to know why law schools are slow to change, look no further than faculty and administrations who have lived in the life of the mind so long that they’ve forgotten that the body needs to make rent.

Today’s contestant on “Stupid Ways To Spend A Quarter Of A Million Dollars” is Northwestern Law professor James Lupo. There are probably a thousand professors who would say this after a tough day of drinking wine and editing a law review paper, but Lupo is the one who popped up in the National Law Journal arguing that people are right to chain themselves to a lifetime of debt so that they can be good public citizens.

I’m not making that up. The subtitle of his piece is: “Despite the critics, law school still provides a solid foundation for civic responsibility.” Northwestern Law: Come for the $60,000/year civics course, stay because you’ll never pay it off unless you land a Biglaw job.

Here’s why Lupo thinks you should go to law school:

Students who choose to come to law school despite all of the empirical gloom and doom are doing so for what have always been the right reasons — not because they are liberal arts majors at wit’s end about a career path and not because law school is a reliable entree to social status and financial gain.

They are coming because they want to be advocates and problem solvers. They want to learn the sharp, analytical cast of mind law school teaches. They recognize that an ethical practice of law is central to the functioning of a system of ordered justice and how that ordered justice upholds the rule of law. They are returning to first principles. They seek values, not just immediate value; they seek the necessary qualities of leadership, not just leading roles at the top of an increasingly unreliable ladder of success.

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Let’s employ that most liberal of arts: the close read.

  • “despite all of the empirical gloom and doom” That is the nice way of saying “I have no empirical evidence to back up the BS I’m about to shovel.”
  • “not because law school is a reliable entree to social status and financial gain” Are there lots of other things that cost $60,000 a year but do not reliably lead to social status or financial gain? [Thinking] Meth? If I spent $60,000 a year on meth, it would not increase my social status, and I wouldn’t make any money because I’d be too high on meth all the time. There must be other examples though, right? The list can’t just be “law school” and “meth addiction.”
  • “They are coming because they want to be advocates and problem solvers.” Actually, they are coming because somebody told them that they are good advocates and problem solvers, and that going to law school would be a way to monetize those natural abilities. Nobody says “I’m bad at arguing and can’t think my way out of a paper bag, maybe I should go to law school to learn how to improve.” Instead, people go to law school because they’ve been told that their low-grade Asperger’s can lead to a good job.
  • “They seek values, not just immediate value; they seek the necessary qualities of leadership, not just leading roles at the top of an increasingly unreliable ladder of success.” Is this a sentence or a logic game? People go to law school because they want to be leaders, but not have a jobs in leadership, because success is unreliable? I think he’s trying to say that having a good job is not the only way to be a leader, which is true I guess. But it’s also true that being a leader without any followers is kind of lame (just ask Jeb Bush, ZING). And I’m just going to ignore the preposterous notion that people go to a post-graduate, professional school seeking values. We’re talking about law school, not seminary.

You can paper cut Lupo’s argument to death if you like, but there is a more fundamental problem with what Lupo is pushing. Nothing that he says can’t be taught in college. Most of what he says already is taught in college: whether as a “government” major or a “criminal justice” focus or a “pre-law” requirement. Surely, any upper-level “Law and Leadership” concentration that can’t be “crammed” into four freaking years of undergraduate instruction could be buttressed with a one-year “law school” for those with unlimited funds who are interested in bettering themselves.

As usual with these professors, Lupo doesn’t fail to articulate a value for law school. He fails to offer an argument for why law school should take three years and cost a boatload of money. He’s an infomercial spokesman, trying to sell you a banana slicer to solve a problem that NOBODY HAS.

Law school isn’t worthless, it’s just not worth what they charge for it.

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