I wouldn’t trade my “night school” law degree for one of the “prestigious” ones–I was lucky enough to actually be taught something useful.

Most law schools, trying to teach students to be legal scholars when the students want to be taught to be lawyers, fail to do either well.

On the other hand, I don’t know many law schools that actually train lawyers, do you? I’m sure there are some, but most law schools I know think they’re doing what Marquette says it’s doing. Most don’t succeed at doing what they think they’re doing, though. Most would be insulted by my (truthful) statement that they are essentially trade schools for people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty by becoming mechanics.

On the other hand (as Tevya the Milkman would say, “how many hands do I have, anyway?”), although law schools don’t really train lawyers, people go to them for that anyway.

The reason I think there would be fewer students if law schools were intellectually honest and AIMED at training people to become lawyers is that I think more people would drop out in the first year. I make the (perhaps erroneous) assumption that if they were aiming at training lawyers, they’d explain what it meant to BE a lawyer and expose people to that as 1Ls.

I know quite a few lawyers who are disenchanted with being lawyers, but continue to do it because they invested so much money in becoming lawyers. I’ve heard stories of people who went to law school, but never practiced law afterward, or left the practice of law shortly after finding out what it was really like, although I don’t personally know any such people.

If I had been taught in my first year of law school that being a lawyer did not really have much of a connection to Law with a capital-L and if I had been taught what my life would REALLY be like, I probably would not have gone on. I would have known earlier about the disconnect between Law and being a lawyer.

While I believe that a good knowledge of Law does help, it’s more useful in the sense that I mentioned in my first comment: It provides some foundation and/or inspiration for argument. The more I learn Law, though, the more disgusted I become with courts and the more convinced I become that our system is irreparably broken. At least in my expected lifetime.

I am not satisfied by the response of one long-experienced and high-ranking attorney to whom I said “I feel it doesn’t matter how much Law I know; when I go to court, I’m still just throwing the dice.” His reply was, “Yes, but you’ve got a better pair of dice than most people.” It’s still dice.

Meanwhile, attorneys typically put in long hours. The “billable hour requirements” for attorneys in law firms are so high that most attorneys actually put in around 50 hours a week at a MINIMUM to meet them; many put in significantly more. For that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income for attorneys after one year in private practice is $85,000 and $46,150 for government attorneys (i.e., prosecutors or public defenders). Starting salary in my town for new Public Defenders, by the way, is allegedly around $32,000.

So, I reiterate, teach law students the truth about what it means to be a lawyer and there will be fewer students.

If law schools want fewer students, they can advertise that they are training legal scholars and not practicing lawyers. At 27 large a year, I don’t think they’ll get many takers.

At least some of us who went to law school have come out the other end quite disappointed when struck with the reality of American life: knowledge of LAW is irrelevant. For those who actually care about law, this can be jarring.

What we have is an oligarchy with its own sometimes interesting and usually varying rules, tenuously connected (in some parts of the country and/or with individual judges) to LAW. Analytically-minded technicians capable of making sense of these systems can sometimes help people caught up in them.

There isn’t much of a need for people who are interested in legal theory in such systems. The exercise of being interested in legal theory (and history) can sometimes be useful to such a technician and may sometimes provide a foundation, or at least inspiration, for arguments that might actually work at times. But it is not necessary and seldom provides a good return on the investment. (And it CAN lead to more frustration for those who don’t recognize the aforementioned tenuousness of any connection between such studies and reality.)

Law school is, when it comes down to it, a trade school for people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty by becoming mechanics. And I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, in the long run. But law schools really should be more up front about this.

I agree with the comment that if all you want is to be a legal technician, Marquette may not be the place for you. At least they’re honest about it.

In fact, I have learned a tremendous amount about black-letter rules of law from gifted teachers whose lessons went far beyond the mere words on the page — they imparted insights about how different rules of law interact, how to employ them effectively, and how to determine the best way to apply them to new situations. That teaching required genuine talent and insight — talent and insight that I’m not sure was within the grasp of professors who favored talking about how law made them feel.

Ultimately, the professors (the best of whom was a small-town practitioner) who taught me about the rules of law far better equipped me to serve my clients, which I rather thought was the point.