Law Schools

Loathing This Supreme Court Is A Bad Reason To Go To Law School For Individuals But Great For The Profession

Somewhere out there, a future Supreme Court justice is in the embryonic stages of a legal career.

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961176Nearly two decades after the fact, I still get asked all the time why I decided to go to law school. Though I’ve done some pretty satisfying things with my law degree, I don’t really have a good response to the question of why I got it in the first place. The real answer is something along the lines of I received several attractive scholarship offers and didn’t, at the time, have anything else terribly important planned for the forthcoming three years of my life.

It seems many of today’s law students will have a better response to the question of why they went to law school. Dissatisfaction with our current Supreme Court is reportedly motivating a healthy number of aspiring lawyers.

There exist many valid reasons to loathe the Supreme Court. From several sitting justices accepting what amount to undisclosed bribes to their sloppy and blatantly partisan decision to overturn Roe v. Wade to this Supreme Court’s ahistorical take on any type of cogent gun regulation, we are indeed living the dystopian results of the Federalist Society’s half-century-long campaign to seize control of American jurisprudence.

As the wave of scandals and horrible decisions crested, respect for the Supreme Court plummeted to all-time lows. From 2020 to 2023, the Supreme Court’s favorability rating dropped by 26 percentage points and, for the first time since surveying on the topic began, the majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Supreme Court.

To the general public, the Supreme Court is the most visible avatar of the legal field. So it makes sense that some of those who wish to participate in changing the Supreme Court would themselves go to law school.

These law students deserve a medal for their willingness to fight the good fight. Personally, though, I think they are going to have a tough row to hoe.

Perhaps no profession is quite as resistant to change as the legal profession. New lawyers who express views contrary to the current Supreme Court’s orthodoxy will absolutely face career consequences for it at the hands of the older, whiter, more conservative echelon of attorneys camping out at the top of the legal industry.

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Some of those taking the LSAT today will regret going to law school tomorrow. Some of those who become lawyers as a way of seeking change at the Supreme Court will drop out of the legal profession, crushed by the long hours and relatively low pay at the do-gooder levels of the practice of law. Some of today’s ideologically motivated law students will become embittered by vast student loan debts and a system utterly indifferent to the good intentions of any single lawyer.

There will be career casualties among the swell of law school applicants who detest what the Supreme Court has become. For a lot of these people, life will not be great.

Yet, for the profession as a whole, it can only be a good thing to have a new pool of activist-attorney talent to draw from. Numbers do matter in challenging the entrenched power brokers, many of whom are quite old and fustily conservative. Talent development is important in creating a new generation of qualified judges.

Someday, there will be a new Supreme Court. When the time comes, I’d like our future president to have plenty of potential justices to choose from who went to law school because they dislike the Supreme Court majority of today.

If someone asked me whether they should go to law school as a way to counter the Supreme Court’s latest stream of outrages, I would say, “Absolutely not.” For any given individual, who will face monetary disadvantages and numerous career pitfalls in becoming a lawyer for reasons having to do with dissatisfaction with the Supreme Court, the cost-benefit analysis decidedly falls on the side of not going to law school.

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Fortunately for the profession, there are plenty out there happily disregarding such advice. With the number of law school applicants up about 3.7% compared to 2023, and with the national law school applicant pool the most diverse it’s ever been, the legal profession is well-positioned to create a rising tide of independently minded jurists.

Somewhere out there, a future Supreme Court justice is in the embryonic stages of a legal career. When that person is asked why they went to law school, the odds are good they’ll have a better answer than I do.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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