Amongst the many tenets of our American dream, a foundational principle is that every child deserves a good education, and with that education, anyone can grow up to be President.  While it is no doubt true today that anyone can, the corollary is that everyone can’t.  Nobody mentions this part.  It would be bad for business.

From Sarah Waldeck at Concurring Opinions, we learn that:

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently reported that college tuition and fees rose 439 percent between 1982 – 2007, while median family income rose only 147 percent. The Center’s president commented, “If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education.”

Yet the dream pushes student and parent to reach for the stars.  The reality is that they might do better to invest in lottery tickets.  Sarah suggests that distance learning, as yet a quasi-acceptable method of gaining a higher education, may be a solution, as it eliminates the need for physical plant, an obviously expensive proposition.  She notes that a student of Concord Law School, an online school authorized to grant J.D.’s, was recently admitted to the Massachusetts bar.  Mind you, he had to sue to do so.

Interestingly, Sarah doesn’t consider the salaries paid to lawprofs within the realm of possible solutions, particularly since they are putatively paid to teach when their true purpose is to publish to advance their personal standing as a scholar on the backs of law students’ tuition payments.  Perhaps if tuition wasn’t subsidizing their vanity, costs would be lower, particularly since so many ivy-covered buildings were long since bought and paid for.

The cries of new attorneys about the crippling burden of law school loans have been a source of dismay for a long time.  Coupled with the death of Biglaw as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, this might be an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate the entire approach of higher education and the law.  It costs too much.  It produces more lawyers than our society needs or can absorb.  It serves an ulterior purpose of dubious merit.  Law schools are another suck-hole burdening society while doing little to advance its purported cause. 

Internally, all those very smart boys and girls who want to be lawprofs refuse to see, or more likely acknowledge, that they are parasites.  They aren’t doing this to teach students to become lawyers, but to advance their own interests on the students’ dime.  Aside from Jim Chen and Jeffrey Harrison at MoneyLaw, few will even acknowledge the truth, no less engage in a serious discussion about it.  Some, like dear Marquette lawprof David Papke, are so enamored with their pseudo-intellectualism that they openly disdain the time wasted on such dirty, worthless efforts as teaching students to be lawyers. 

We don’t want law school to be lawyer-training school. When we cave in to demands of that sort from the ABA and assorted study commissions, we actually invite alienation among law students and lawyers. Legal education should appreciate the depth of the legal discourse and explore its rich complexities. It should operate on a graduate-school level and graduate people truly learned in the law.

The “we” that Papke refers to is the lawprofs.  I suspect that some of those students footing the bill for his having some place to go during the day might disagree.  Indeed, they might actually expect to be taught to be lawyers.  They might actually think that those escalating tuition payments are in exchange for that training.  Fools.

But it’s not just the failure of law schools to serve their purported purpose.  It’s their ever-increasing hunger for more warm bodies with cash or access to student loans to provide an adequate financial base to fund this lawprof vanity.  No one in academia asks whether we need more lawyers.  No one in academia has the balls to stand up and say, we are producing far more lawyers than this nation can use, can absorb, can support.  We are selling these students false hope.  There is no place for them to go.

Society, on the other hand, has been learning over the past few decades what a surplus of lawyers means.  Wild and crazy lawsuits filed by half-baked lawyers desperate to earn a fee has reduced the respect of what was once a profession to slightly below used-car salesman.  And lawyers have indeed become used-car salesman, spending far more effort on learning the art of huckstering than lawyering.  Young lawyers in particular have come to believe that success as a lawyer has nothing (not little, but nothing) to do with quality of service but with learning the tricks of marketing and search engine optimization.  It’s all about tricking people into hiring you. 

This is the new legal paradigm: Clients are the scarce resource the requires allocation, and allocation requires marketing.  Marketing, therefore, is king.  Today’s successful lawyer is not the one who demonstrates any competency in the practice of law, but excels in the practice of marketing.  The internet is permeated by lying lawyers, scamming the public about their qualifications and indulging in ethical violations up the wazoo, with neither shame nor concern.  They care only about getting the next case, and they will say and do anything necessary to get it.  A bit hyperbolic, but it’s intended to make a point. 

Couching lies in marketing lingo doesn’t make them less deceptive.  The apologists and rationalizers who explain why lawyers have to market and why everything we do is marketing will never restore honor and integrity.  They seek merely to excuse their own indulgence, and no one is fooled who doesn’t want to be fooled.

If Sarah Waldeck was truly focused on reducing the cost of law school, and was honest about what young lawyers needed in order to survive, she might consider reducing it to a six month course of study in deceptive marketing, the only admission requirement being a willingness to disclaim any interest in integrity, taught entirely by lawprofs sitting in boiler rooms in low-rent locations.  Should any student experience difficulty with the curriculum, there is always phone-a-friend.

Or, we can start a movement to revitalize the law as an honorable profession.  Lawprofs, at significantly reduced salaries, can spend their days teaching law students to be lawyers.  Law schools can cut their student populations in half.  The three year curriculum can be cut to two, maybe even one and a half, with the balance by apprenticeship where students can actually learn what lawyers do all day long.  And admission to practice, a privilege not a right, can be conditioned upon a waiver of the right to commercial free speech and the end of lawyer marketing.  

Or students can take those loans, to the extent that there will be any available under the current economic climate, and buy some lottery tickets.  There’s no shame in winning the lottery, and your chances of success at achieving great wealth are substantially better.