Some thoughts on going to law school

A few thoughts for those of you thinking about law school this fall. Somebody else can talk about strategy and how great it is to be a lawyer. I'm going to make a few observations about the realities of taking that path. I'm not saying "don't go." I am saying "be sure you know what you and 40,000+ people per year are getting into."

DISCLAIMER: What follows are some observations about the daily life of a lawyer.
IT IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE AND IT IS NOT ACADEMIC ADVICE. [can you tell I went to law school?]

1. Assuming you will get rich is dangerous. A few lawyers make a lot of money (more than a million dollars a year); a greater proportion make a fair amount of money (somewhere between 100,000 and a million), some others make a bit less, and many lawyers earn around the median income. Unless you are a very good lawyer or entrepreneur, chances are you aren't going to make that much money. Some law school graduates find themselves unable to pay off their law school loans. "But what about those 150k starting salary jobs", you may be thinking. The truth is that there aren't that many of those, and there are many many lawyers graduating from law schools each year. It's a numbers game: Unless you are attending a first tier law school or do well (top third of the class, for example) you probably are not going to get one of those jobs. You may not even get interviews for those jobs. So law school is not necessarily a great investment, at least as a moneymaking strategy.

2. Law school is not a good general education. The subject matter is of no use to you outside of law. Nobody besides other lawyers will care about your knowledge of civil procedure. Skills? Law school teaches—and rewards—a very narrow set of skills: reading comprehension, technical writing, and legal advocacy. Because of the peculiarities of law teaching, none of these skills are taught in a way that has much utility outside the field of law. There are some non-lawyer jobs where a JD might be useful, or even required, but generally speaking it's not necessary. If you want to go into business, do so and hire a lawyer to tell you what the rules are.

3. Being a lawyer is, usually, not particularly exciting. This observation is the one you may have encountered before. It needs to be repeated, over and over. Much legal work is clerical, detail work, and this is true of both litigation and non-litigation work. If you do non-litigation work, you will be endlessly redrafting documents for other people. If you do litigation, you will be drafting documents for courts, wading through mountains of paper and your adversary's incomprehensible papers. The vast majority of cases settle so there is precious little opportunity for actual courtroom work. Even then, good courtroom work is the product of months of painstaking attention to detail. Don't do it unless you love detail work.

4. Lawyers don't change the world. An unfortunate misconception to the contrary apparently arose in the 1970s at the high water mark of public interest litigation. That notion--that lawyers do change the world--has stubbornly and unfortunately resisted dying. Law is a deeply conservative practice. It's difficult to argue with that proposition; after all, if law was unstable, an orderly society would be much more difficult to maintain. Lawyers may, sometimes, address or alleviate a grievance or injustice, but that is a world away from changing society. Ask someone who works in public interest law--not a law teacher--about this.

5. The law is a jealous mistress. The phrase is useful, if a bit dated and sexist. All it means is that law is time-consuming and not conducive to doing other things. A full-time legal job will usually require more hours than another full-time job that may pay equally. Do not assume you can do other things in your off hours, because you may not have any off hours. Also, if you practice law, ethics rules may preclude involvement in other activities, moneymaking or otherwise.

Now, if you've looked at these observations and still want to go, more power to you. I STRONGLY encourage you to talk to a lawyer in whichever field you are interested in. There are many great legal jobs, and many people who practice law are quite happy doing just that. Make sure you're one of them. Good luck!

C. Hitchens & Justifications for Iraq

A few thoughts, in no particular order. I should note that I usually post only when I have something to say that hasn't already been said somewhere else. Or so I'd like to believe.

1. C. Hitchens. I can't say that I understand the man, or that I agree with him all that much. Still, I think he at least has the courage of his convictions, which is more than can be said for many of us. But, I find I have difficulties with some of his recent pronouncements, such as the Weekly Standard piece, or his performance last month on The Daily Show (Jon Stewart's show). Here's my first problem with his arguments about Iraq. He may well be right that dethroning Hussein was the right thing to do. But the problem with his approach is that while it may be morally superior, in that it is really a humanitarian argument, it ignores the unpleasant fact that the Bush people did not use that argument as a justification for invading the country. And this, I think, is the reason that so many people would like to leave the affair. Since we were sold a bill of goods, why should we continue to put up with being there? It's all well and good to point out how bad the Baathists were—and I am willing to accept everything Hitchens says on that point. But that's not the reason the US government gave as the reason for the invasion, probably for the simple reason that we wouldn't have gone there, any more than we would have invaded Bosnia or Rwanda. A war started under a false pretext that bogs down will necessarily run into problems, just as this one has done, because it would not have started but for the enabling lies (use inaccuracies if you think that word is too strong—the result is the same). This is another way of saying words do matter.

So at the end, then, we are left with an awkward variation of the ends justifies the means: it's ok that we fibbed our way into this war because it was for a good cause. There may be some scenarios where it's ok, even necessary to lie to achieve a policy. I don't think war should be one of them, as there is something troubling about killing people, ours or theirs, in the service of a rationale that we know is incorrect. And, as we see, once the original, unsustainable rationale is exposed as hollow, the will to see the fight through, which was inextricably linked to that rationale, evaporates, leaving the promoters of the war in an untenable position. Put more rhetorically, we can convince people to fight, kill, and die for certain ideas, but it's dangerous to ask them to fight for something that is demonstrably false.

A related problem with Hitchens' argument is his specific justification for the Iraq war. So far as I can tell, he seems to be suggesting that we saved lives by going in when we did. The problem with that idea is that it too is a switch, though a different kind of switch than the rationale switch. Here, he's adopted a utilitarian justification for an action that is a moral action. There are countries that pose demonstrably greater risks to the US than Iraq did: North Korea, for example. So Iraq was a moral imperative rather than a utilitarian imperative. That's fine, but he's adopted, at least implicitly, a utilitarian argument—means justifies ends—in the service of a moral good. This seems to be a deeply incoherent form of thinking. Since invading Iraq is a moral rather than a utilitarian exercise, the justification should be of the same kind. It is deeply incoherent to justify a moral act (invading Iraq) through a utilitarian strategy (it's ok to mislead people if that gets us into the war). It may well be that there are times when the ends justify the means, or it is either morally acceptable or otherwise useful to mislead the citizenry. War does not appear to fit into those categories as a general proposition (that is not to say that it doesn't happen), and this particular conflict seems an excellent example of the danger of employing mix and match rationales.

My second quarrel involves his "test" of when it's ok to invade a country. The problem with his four conditions is that most countries would probably flunk them. The US certainly would. So should we invade ourselves?