Are Law Schools Just Liberal Indoctrination Factories?
Do schools spend too much on public interest, or is it just a meager effort to balance the scales?
The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog recently ran a post titled “Law Schools Are ‘Indoctrinating Students with a Social Justice Morality,’ Says Professor.” I saw this and wondered.
Yes, the typical law faculty tilts seriously leftward. But most, if not all, of the law students I went to school with came out politically unscathed — they leaned the same way on graduation that they did on day one. And while quite a few folks who had originally wanted to be public interest lawyers ended up in private practice, few or none who wanted to be in private practice ended up working for public interest organizations.
So it was with a healthy dose of skepticism that I pulled up the article: “The Imposition of Social Justice Morality in Legal Education” by Julie Lawton, a clinical professor at DePaul University College of Law.
Is The Future Of Law Distributed? Lessons From The Tech Adoption Curve
To her credit, Professor Lawton never tries to gild the cowpie that is the current state of social justice in the United States. She starts off strong: “There exists an undeniable need for social justice in this country. Our American society, in all its greatness, is still neither equitable nor just.” Indeed, she runs through some of the topics I cover here at Above the Law, in particular the huge gap between people’s need for civil legal aid and how many lawyers are actually out there actually providing it, and the wide disparities in funding between prosecutors and public defenders.
But then she poses her central question: whether it is fair for law schools to use their students as a means of addressing these disparities. She suggests the answer is no, and her reasoning goes like this: The existence of the justice gap is essentially a moral issue. This means that the choice of whether to address the justice gap is likewise a moral one on which reasonable people can differ — in Professor Lawton’s words, “While the need for social justice may be objectively valid, the choice to support it is not.” The upshot of this, Professor Lawton suggests, is that when law schools offer financial support for “public interest students and programs, clinical programs, and mandatory pro bono requirements,” what they’re really doing is “attempt[ing] to inculcate law students with a responsibility of social justice that reflects the morality of the faculty and administration.” And she suggests that this is a problem. So what should law schools do to address the problem? First, they should put more resources into “students who are not interested in engaging in social justice,” and second, they “should be cautious of trying to impose their own morality on students.”
Professor Lawton herself, however, effectively refutes her second point. She notes what I observed at the outset: “student interest in public interest jobs,” according to a study she cites, “fell over time but increased with private law firms.” There are lots of reasons for this, and she points to several: a big one is financial (law school = high debt, public interest = low salary), a second is intellectual rigor (legal aid can get mind-numbingly repetitive), a third is changing political beliefs (I guess some people come out of law school more conservative?), and a fourth is the relatively thin public interest job market. The end result, though, is that, sure, law schools may try to impose their own morality on students — but they fail.
Professor Lawton also offers up some tidbits that, especially when fleshed out further, seriously undermine her argument that schools should offer up more resources for non-public interest students and programs.
Sponsored
Legal AI: 3 Steps Law Firms Should Take Now
Navigating Financial Success by Avoiding Common Pitfalls and Maximizing Firm Performance
The Business Case For AI At Your Law Firm
Legal AI: 3 Steps Law Firms Should Take Now
For one thing, why is the public-interest job market relatively thin? Because the resources in that sector pale in comparison with the resources in the private sector. This extends to summer work, too: Legal aid organizations don’t have the money to fully staff themselves, let alone pay law students. Some law schools fill that gap, often with stipends that are just enough for students to get by on ramen, rice, and beans — and often with money donated by outside individuals (not classmates’ tuition dollars). But law schools don’t need to pay summer associates working for law firms, because the firms themselves pay. And even for public interest students, most law schools don’t offer significant financial support — Professor Lawton figures that “well over a quarter of law schools offer financial support specifically for students and graduates working in the public interest industry.” Well over a quarter is not exactly a lot.
On top of that, the suggestion that schools don’t devote comparable resources to non-public interest students? Absolutely ludicrous. Take a look at any law school’s OCI list and compare the number of private firms to public interest organizations. And then take Professor Lawton’s own words: “Despite the overt efforts of law schools to indoctrinate students with a social justice morality, law schools actually undermine those efforts in subtle, more effective ways by perpetuating a preference for working in private industry.” For example: required courses and recommended bar courses? Generally most relevant for private practice. And don’t forget that the school’s resources in support of non-public interest students are backstopped by the massive resources of the private bar, which go to support those same students.
Finally, at least in my experience, it’s simply not true that law schools’ public-interest resources inflexibly support a left-leaning moral framework. A friend and law school classmate of mine who’s on the opposite end of the political spectrum from me got school support for a summer spent at a conservative public interest law firm, while I got school support for my civil legal aid work. The people who draw on schools’ public-interest resources are the people who pass up the private sector to do public interest work, regardless of their moral or political positions.
All told, some law schools’ dedication of some resources to public interest law is simply a way of making the scales just a bit more balanced: helping to provide legal assistance to people who need it, and putting money into societal needs that the legal market isn’t addressing. So, with respect to Professor Lawton, I would suggest that law schools not worry too much about whether they’re imposing moral values on law students (they’re not), and that they put more resources (not fewer) toward their public interest students (who, on the whole, really need them).
Sponsored
Early Adopters Of Legal AI Gaining Competitive Edge In Marketplace
Is The Future Of Law Distributed? Lessons From The Tech Adoption Curve
Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.
