Legal Costs and Legal Education; Random Musings

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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Full disclosure: I’m currently a 1L student at an ABA-accredited law school in NYC.

The vast majority of states require that, as a condition of sitting for(i.e. taking) that state’s bar exam, any aspiring attorney must have graduated an ABA (American Bar Association) accredited law school. A few states require only that one have graduated from a regional or state-level accredited school, and there are also a few states which have potential alternative procedures, such as “reading for the law”. But, for most practical purposes, attending an ABA-accredited law school is a prerequisite for taking the bar exam.

Law school is also, like most higher education today, ridiculously expensive. Total law school debt very easily runs over $100,000 and can be much higher, which is, I would argue, one of the primary reasons that, although the country has an approximate shit-ton of lawyers, access to legal services remains out of reach for many, many people. Think about it: if you have $100,000 in debt principal (to say nothing of the generally non-subsidized interest over 3 years being added to principal plus interest rates in the high single digits if you’re lucky), then it’s no mystery that legal advice can cost an arm and a leg, even for relatively basic things like drafting a will, a standard lease document, etc.

To be clear, the high cost of legal education is not the only reason why legal help is so expensive, but it certainly plays a major role.

Which, together with a rhetorical question raised by an ex-convict in a legal pleading, got me thinking.

What real justification is there for requiring those taking the bar exam to have graduated from law school, let alone an ABA-accredited one? If the purpose of the bar exam is to determine who is and is not competent to practice law (i.e. it’s essentially a licensing requirement), then adding an extra and very expensive requirement on top of that makes no logical sense.

To (hopefully) illustrate, consider the hypothetical Person A and Person B.

Person A graduated #1 from the best law school in the country, and failed the bar exam.
Person B graduated last in his class from the worst law school in the country, but passed the bar exam.

The main difference between A and B: Person B can practice law, but Person A cannot.

If attending law school actually mattered for purposes of determining a person’s competency to practice law, wouldn’t one think that it should matter which law school one went to, what their class ranking was, etc.?

I submit that the fact that such criteria don’t matter for purposes of one’s (theoretical) ability to practice law are pretty strong evidence that the entire ABA accreditation scheme, and state/federal regulations which use it, are nothing more than arbitrary guild-like restrictions.

Thoughts?

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Would’ve thought I’d have at least gotten a lawyer joke by now…

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I think if you were going to spend 180k you’d live a better life doing what you please and paying it to attorneys when you get into conflicts than to spend it becoming an attorney and deal with everyone’s conflicts all the time. At the end of the day, the vast majority of people who have law degrees make what a good car salesman would make if he worked all his perks and did a great job. Nowadays a JD isn’t a sure path to a picket fence, and there’s a high probability of being under an insurmountable debt when you find out that you’re only making 34k a year for the 1st 5 years. When it’s all said and done, the hustlers and the thieves get the prizes in life. There isn’t a set of hoops you can jump through to get to live a good life. You have to figure it out for yourself.

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I agree. The problem is that the people who write the tests have gone to the schools, know the people that run the schools. They have no reason to change the costs. Too many people forget, the colleges are for profit businesses. They, just like all businesses, profit by making connections and building the law around themselves. This is a perfect, and funny explanation of the problem.

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Jager what do you want to do a) with that JD and b) with your life each day?

Sometimes people worry so much about what they’re going to do for a living that they end up not living at all, or not as much as they could.

When a guy dies with a load of money in the bank…is that the best he could have done? Should he have lived more?

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I wasn’t intending to focus on my situation specifically with my post, but since you asked…

A) Help entrepreneurs, start-up companies, and small businesses navigate the ridiculously complicated legal world so they can have a fighting chance to compete with larger and better politically connected companies. Try to make sure that you don’t need an expensive, time-consuming license, as just one example, to put together floral arrangements. Help people fight back against abusive eminent domain or civil forfeiture proceedings. Make sure your property rights, your free speech rights, and your freedom of association rights, among others, are respected.

B) See A.

As I said, I wasn’t really intending to focus on my own personal situation here. I’m lucky enough to have very supportive friends and family and significant scholarship opportunities. I was mostly hoping to just start a dialogue.