The American legal system is in crisis.  I know because the first line of a  New York Times editorial says so, and if it’s in the paper, it must be true.

American legal education is in crisis. The economic downturn has left many recent law graduates saddled with crushing student loans and bleak job prospects. The law schools have been targets of lawsuits by students and scrutiny from the United States Senate for alleged false advertising about potential jobs. Yet, at the same time, more and more Americans find that they cannot afford any kind of legal help.

It’s not a great scenario by any stretch of the imagination, but a crisis?  The country’s economy remains in deep trouble as the price to be paid from living the unearned dream and profligate spending.  Sure, law schools turn out more lawyers than the economy can absorb, and neither the ABA nor the schools themselves want to admit this or deal with it.  We’ve known this for a while, yet neither law students nor their parents had the good sense to do the legwork of figuring out that one shouldn’t go to law school unless one really wanted to be a lawyer,

The claim of crisis, however, turns on the argument that Americans can’t afford legal help.  That likely has something to do with the fact that they don’t have jobs, real earnings are in the toilet, we’re a litigious, over-regulated and over-criminalized society. 

We could take all those underutilized lawyers and hook them up with the unrepresented litigants, except it wouldn’t do much to pay off their student loan debt or feed their babies, on the lawkids side, or provided competent representation, on the poor litigant side.

Some might see this as a crisis, and maybe it is.  Certainly, the young lawyer with neither job nor expectation of one is having a crisis.  Similarly, the poor litigant with neither competent representation nor ability to fend off his accuser is having a crisis.  For that matter, we’re having a crisis in history majors in college. Philosophy too, unless they get credit for employment in the food service industry.

But law schools aren’t having a crisis. They’ve maintained their position of cash cow in the university structure.  They are educational Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. They have to, or the American promise, a nation where there are only corner offices, cannot be fulfilled.

Somehow, the NYT relates this crisis to Langdellian method. 

Instead of a curriculum taught largely through professors’ grilling of students about appellate cases, some schools are offering more apprentice-style learning in legal clinics and more courses that train students for their multiple future roles as advocates and counselors, negotiators and deal-shapers, and problem-solvers.

While there’s much to discuss about the way to produce competent and client-safe lawyers, whoever drew the connections between this and the crisis hasn’t got the slightest clue about lawyers.  From what I can tell, the theory is that if law school was less expensive and produced more competent new lawyers, the excess would be able to go forth in the world and make a living representing people who can’t afford legal services.  Problem solved, right?

Well, no. Law students fight to get into school, and lose three years of their life, after four years of college, for the privilege of making it through a fairly rigorous course of study (regardless of whether that course of study does anything to really prepare them to eventually practice law). When they pop out the other side, some will chose to forego making big bucks to serve people in need, just as they always have. Others, however, want some remuneration greater than what they could have gotten as assistant manager at Dairy Queen, something they could have gotten without all this struggle.

The people who can’t afford legal services have one abiding quality. They don’t have money to spend on lawyers. This means that no matter how qualified the lawyers are, they aren’t going to make a good living representing them. Sure, if their student loans were smaller, they would be able to keep more or what they earned, but the differential doesn’t make a dent in the problem. The bulk of people who can’t afford legal services can’t afford to pay anything. Maybe they can give their lawyer a chicken, but that’s about it. They have their own children to feed, and they can barely do that. Plus, they need a new iPhone.

So the poor still won’t be able to pay lawyers, even cheap lawyers, because they’re poor.  The new lawyers still won’t be able to survive, even if law school cost less, because they are being paid squat by poor people. Even if they come out of law school incredibly competent and skilled, they will still go hungry.  And it makes no sense to go to law school, even if it was free, if you’ve going to end up earning the median income of an assistant manager at Dairy Queen.  Just head straight for the Dairy Queen, and then we can have a Dairy Queen crisis.

The problems start at the top, with our litigious, over-regulated, over-criminalized society, creating a demand for lawyers by people who can’t afford a lawyer.  If they had jobs and earned decent money, they would be better able to afford a lawyer. If politicians stopped manufacturing legal solutions for every oddball complaint, they could save their money because they wouldn’t have as great a need for legal representation as every facet of American life wouldn’t require counsel. 

If the ABA shut down a third of the law schools, we wouldn’t be pushing out 15,000 more lawyers than our economy can absorb, and those who came out would have a place to go during the day.  The displaced lawprofs would have to work for a living, but then they would gain the practical lawyering skills that would be demanded by law schools bent on using lawyers/scholars as professors rather than philosophers. Imagine law schools where experience was viewed as a positive rather than odious.

As for the cost of law school, it can be cut to near zero by charging liberal arts doctoral students what we now charge law students.  Except they wouldn’t pay it, because law students get rich and they don’t? 

If this is a crisis, and the New York Times says it is, then it’s one created by all the players, most of whom exist outside the profession and the academy.  Sure, we’ve got plenty to do to put our house in order, and plenty of resistance to change.  But our crisis came about in the context of problems created outside the law.

Fixing our internal problems won’t solve the crisis, and expecting the profession and academy to suffer the pain while the rest of society,

• the ones who demand a new law every time a child dies,


• the ones who refuse to work on the assembly line because they were promised a corner office in a society that doesn’t produce anything of value,


• the ones who want lawyers to spend years in school but work for free,


• the ones who demand free doctorates on the backs of law students,


• the ones who see no problem sucking gazillions out of our economy to bomb and rebuild countries across the globe who want nothing to do with us,


• the ones who demand law and order but refuse to pay taxes,


• the ones who will pay any price in the name of safety,


• the ones who want to micromanage every perceived societal ill,


• the ones who want to get rich themselves but decry others as greedy,


• the ones who expect to earn a paycheck but can’t understand why others want to earn a decent living commensurate with their education, effort and opportunity costs, as well,

goes about their lives as if this has nothing to do with them.  So lawyers suck and we’re all a bunch of blood sucking leeches?  Try running a society without us. Then you will have a crisis. For real.

We may argue amongst ourselves over the best way to produce the proper number of competent and honorable lawyers to serve the needs of this nation, but I’ll be damned if the rest of society can screw itself up and dump its problems on the backs of either lawyers or lawprofs. The “crisis” about which the New York Times opines stems from a badly screwed up nation, its economy, philosophy, work ethic, expectations and irrational demands.

It’s not up to lawyers to suffer for society’s sins. We’ll fix our problems. You fix yours.