It’s Not a Trade School

It’s Not a Trade School

Kevin Noble Maillard^[각주:1]

Updated June 7, 2012, 12:10 PM

Law school is not a trade school. In that narrow model, a legal education would prepare students for one single thing: a job as a lawyer. But people go to law school, pay tuition and graduate to become many things: educators, business leaders, politicians and, yes, attorneys. Shortening the curriculum to cut costs mistakenly assumes that one model fits for everyone.

"Law school is more than test preparation and rote memorization. It should emphasize educated citizenship."

At the risk of sounding “liberal artsy,” law school should emphasize educated citizenship. It prepares people to become leaders in our society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as thinkers. They will become stewards of policies that affect our everyday lives: in our schools, our jobs and our families. All of this responsibility, in diverse fields, comes from legal education. As Chris Judge, my student at Syracuse, reminds me, “there are many paths toward becoming a lawyer,” and students and administrators should reject the customer-provider model of education.  [Read More]

Jake Goode

China

After attending a top-20 university, I went to a non-traditional evening law school, graduated with no debt, and passed the bar on the first try. Although there are differences in students and teachers across law schools (which may affect the quality of the overall education), the dirty secret is, THE CURRICULUM IS ALMOST IDENTICAL. We read the same books, brief the same cases, take the same bar exam, regardless of whether you went to Stanford Law or evening law. The worst part is, we all still have to pay an extra $5-6K for a bar review course, after three years of law school, because the classes are only slightly related to the ultimate goal at hand. Wait, I'm wrong, that's not the worst part - the worst part of all is, after graduating AND passing the bar, we are all still unprepared to practice any sort of sophisticated law except maybe DUIs. It is an outrage. If I had chosen to go to a full-time law school and graduated with debt, only to find a dead employment market, I would be seething.

Cutting out the 'fat' out of law school education (like tenure of teachers such as Professor Maillard) and making it more practical (instead of discussing post-racial love and sex, spending time going through useful sections of the Code of Civil Procedure (the bar exam hypos rarely come up in real life)) would improve both the quality of lawyers graduating and decrease the cost of the education. The only people to dispute that result are those profiting from the scam.

June 6, 2012 at 3:29 a.m.

John Graham

St. Paul, MN

The problem with Professor Maillard's argument is that it attempts to refute an analogy based on irrelevant features. He says “law school is not a trade school.” Why not? His sole reason is because people go to law school who then ultimately pursue different careers. While certainly there are those who do this, it's highly likely that they don't use their law degrees to do whatever it is they end up choosing to do. He mentions three other occupations of law students: educators, business leaders, and politicians. A law degree isn't sufficient to become a professor; a PhD, a further degree for which law school is not a prerequisite, is required for this. Business leaders may well use law expertise, but that's no different than a trade-school-trained mechanic using his training to start up his own garage. Politicians, in addition to law knowledge, also need a wide base of practical and people knowledge, which can come from anywhere.

Thus, if being applicable to multiple careers is even a feature of law school, it is not a relevant feature for a contrast with trade school, because trade schools can also teach skills that are widely applicable. A feature of law school that does pertain to this analogy is the fact that it is mandatory.

He cites a student of his as saying that “there are many paths toward becoming a lawyer,” but the relevant detail he neglects is that all such paths include law school. A trade school, such as a mechanic school, would of course, also teach field-specific curriculum. But the key difference is that you don't have to go to mechanic school to become a mechanic. Many mechanics start working at garages in high school, and just acquire knowledge on their own. There's no legal mandate to prevent a person interested in the mechanic profession from attempting to make a living as a mechanic. However, such a ban does exist for lawyers. Lawyers must both go to an American Bar Association Certified law school , and pass their state's bar examination. If Law School were not a trade school, it wouldn't be the only path towards becoming a lawyer. In fact, law school differs from other trade schools in that it is a trade school that every prospective tradesman in that field must attend.

Professor Maillard also says that we should forgive him for sounding “liberal-artsy.” Sounding liberal-artsy here isn't the problem. I think many would agree that getting a sound basis in educated citizenship is very important, but as many other readers have commented, there already exist places to do that. They're called liberal arts colleges. People who want a liberal arts education go to liberal arts schools for that explicit purpose. Who actually goes to law school for the purpose of becoming an educated citizen but not a lawyer?

The end result is that Maillard's argument amounts to a refutation of an analogy that relies on irrelevant features and ignores highly relevant features. He takes the trade school analogy in its weakest form, which results in a very weak conclusion.

Nov. 1, 2011 at 1:24 a.m

Mike O'Horo

Las Vegas

IMO, "not a trade school" is an extension of the larger vanity that exists in the legal field, i.e., that the law is a profession (some even cling to the quaint "calling"), rather than a business or, god forbid, an industry, despite BigLaw firms' self-reported seven-figure profits-per-partner. This vestigial claim to exalted status fuels silly perspectives such as that from Dr. Maillard and others conveniently insulated from the harsh reality of empirical evidence that law school is a bad economic bet for students.

The earlier post about the relative value of a plumber is right on, but ignores the additional favorable comparison that the plumber won't have to spend four hours of billable time figuring out the answer.

July 28, 2011 at 11:46 a.m

Willie

LA, CA

It's insulting enough to have someone from the academic establishment preach to us about the real world from his lofty ivory balcony. Even more insulting is that he is part of a system that lures women and minorities into law school with glossy brochures filled with questionable statistics while writing books about gender and dubious notions like "post-racial". Ushering women and minorities into a life of unmanageable debt without even providing them the education they paid for is the real disservice.

July 26, 2011 at 11:50 p.m

Maven3

Los Angeles

I suggest that Mr. Maillard begin his law school classes with a clear, candid statement that it is not his purpose or the purpose of law schools to teach the students the trade of lawyering, but to take their hefty tuition in exchange for preparing them for all that other "citizenship" stuff. Then we will see what happens.

The primary function of a lawyer is to know and understand the law, bring it to bear on clients' affairs in advising them, and when necessary, present it to the courts in a manner favorable to their clients' interest in a persuasive fashion. Maybe being a "trade school" isn't the whole story but it strikes me that for a law school to take students' money without training them to be effective lawyers smacks of consumer fraud. It is on the basis of graduating from law school that one is permitted to take on clients in order to protect and advance their interest. A law school that fails to do that as its primary function is a failure as a law school.

The rest is commentary.

July 25, 2011 at 11:42 p.m

Maynard Joseph III

New York, NY

I am curious as to whether the author had to pay $200K to attend law school. If law school matches the liberal academic model that the author promotes then why did he still feel compelled to get a PhD? I think that the author's view of the merits of a legal education are respectable but wholly out of line with the vast majority of people who choose to attend law school, the very folks who are paying his salary. There are a few schools, like Yale, that aim to empower a future generation of leaders. The rest of us need to actually report to work in the morning.

July 23, 2011 at 11:12 p.m.

Cyferion

New York, NY

Its pretty easy for all of these highly paid "professors" of law to downplay the enormous debt that students take on in pursuing law degrees while extolling the "intellectual" virtues of legal studies. But all of these "professors" need to be reminded that it is naive, gullible young students taking on huge debts that allow them to research and write on esoteric matters that few if any people will read. Their cushy livelihoods in the ivory towers are made on the backs of these students, most of whom would have been MUCH BETTER OFF had they not taking on this enormous debt to attend law school.

July 23, 2011 at 7:11 a.m

HLS Grad

Boston

It is by no means obvious – but is treated here as such – that three years of law school is the best way to prepare society’s leaders. I run into people with surprising frequency who are about to start law school but relate that they don’t want to become lawyers but rather have some other abstract goal in mind. I wonder whether to tell them that what they have signed up for at great financial cost is three years of reading appellate decisions.

If law school is the path to an educated citizenship free to choose its path forward, then the high cost and long tenure required to complete it serve to limit those to whom the fruits are available to the relatively wealthy. Is this the objective? But it is not at all obvious – and frankly rather self-serving to assert – that it is attending law school above all other means of spending one’s time that will deliver this elevated effect. And if it is law schools, is it really law schools are currently constituted?

Professor Maillard’s comments gloss over a significant anti-democratic effect of the high cost of legal education: no matter what high ideals students bring with them upon enrollment, the crushing debt they take on to attend law school (unless they are wealthy to begin with) substantially limits their choice of employment to high-paying jobs (if they can get one), which almost always represent corporate interests.

July 22, 2011 at 9:53 p.m.

Jennifer

Los Angeles, CA

This would be a great argument - if we were talking about undergraduate education. Everyone in law school already has a bachelor's. How many years of school does it take to be an educated citizen and a critical thinker? Law school is not the liberal arts, it's professional school. It exists to teach prospective lawyers the very specific and narrow methods of legal reasoning, thinking, and writing. The idea that it's useful for business leaders, educators, and politicians is a myth perpetuated by schools selling the idea that law school will turn you into one of the powerful elite. Some people with law degrees go on to do those things, but many English majors go on to careers other than writing and teaching.

The problem with law school (and I went to a T5 school, not an institution that barely scraped into the top 100) is that it's charging enormous sums to qualify students for jobs that are in extremely short supply. There weren't enough private jobs for every student with crushing debt at my top ranked school, and we were offer central compared to lower ranked schools (and we had guaranteed loan repayment for those in public interest careers, which most schools can't afford to provide). Of my many law friends who went to lower first tier institutions ranked higher than Syracuse, only one is employed after graduation. Schools dangle 160k salaries in front of gullible undergraduates knowing that those jobs exist only for a tiny percentage of law graduates. They force three years of rote learning at prices few students can afford, then hang them out to dry once the last tuition payment has been received. And then they justify it by pretending it's about education and leadership.

I'm not speaking from personal bitterness. I never had debt, I received plenty of offers. But I had many friends at lesser schools who didn't. They're sinking in debt they took out to pay for a worthless degree, not becoming leaders in society.

July 22, 2011 at 9:49 p.m.

1. Kevin Noble Maillard is a law professor at Syracuse University and the co-editor of the forthcoming “Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex and Marriage.” [본문으로]