Take a contract for example, studying contract law is interesting but it rarely helps write a contract. The only real help to writing a contract is to write a contract, hundreds and perhaps thousands. And watching what goes wrong, reading other contracts, and the like. It is truly the business of an apprentice. Academic lawyers rarely know contracts, the theory at best, yes, but the practice, rarely.
Now take Torts, or the game of getting even. Form frequently is as important as facts. Learn from other torts filings and learn how to frame your argument in tort format, but the key is the trial, convincing a jury. That is the development of a style that is rarely if ever attained at law school. The ability to get the best from your witnesses and the disclosure of the worst from theirs.
Now take Administrative Law, the dominant body of law we deal with today. It is almost all process, and how to work the system. I have seen this before the FCC and a plethora of Governmental bodies, State and Federal, it is pure process.
Finally Criminal Law, and here experience and style count for everything. One need look no farther than some of the cases of late. Style, the ability to manipulate a jury is as important as the number of cases under one's belt.
All of this can be accomplished by "reading" the law, by that I mean real law, and by apprenticing, namely doing real law.
Thus why have Law School at all, just to make money? It is not like Engineering or Medicine, where labs and real stuff is required. In the law you get a desk and some one talking. It is a real farce to charge almost a quarter million dollars for three years, and then to award an ersatz doctorate!
One of the authors in the piece above states:
That education also deals with the relationship between law and society as well as the manner in which law is both used and transformed in action. Whether the questions involve constitutional protection for undocumented children or cloning or climate measures or the parameters of humanitarian intervention or the ownership of the resources beyond our gravitational field, the best in legal education prepares its graduates to participate in the discourse and arrangements necessary to such complex concerns. It is true that the cost of this quality education, all in, may exceed $200,000. The value of a new generation of law graduates prepared to take on these challenges: Priceless.
The important question may not be cost but, rather, access. What will we do to insure that talented people from all groups in our society, especially those historically excluded, have access to this course of study about the arrangements of power? And how do we insure that all groups in society, including our public and governmental institutions, enjoy the services of our brightest and best prepared?
If the author of this piece sees law school as correcting societal issue or in educating more humanitarian lawyers, then so much the better, but why force all to go through the process. The issue should be passing a Bar Exam, and a Law Degree does not guarantee that. In fact experience is a better marker here.
Finally why should a Law Degree cost so much, it has no infrastructure costs, except the professors. So my thought is just let anyone sit for the Bar, and that solves everything.
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