Of all the odd voices to start such a fight, it was former Vox founder turned outcast Matt Yglesias.
I’m for a modest student debt forgiveness program (which I think is what Biden will do) but as you shift from “modest” to “total” debt forgiveness you are increasingly talking about helping dentists and lawyers rather than sympathetic cases.
At this moment, you wonder, “how often have I asked myself, ‘what does Matty think of this?'” before realizing that the answer is never? As an aside, why people find it valuable to express things they’re for or against as opposed to why they’re for or against it is a mystery. But I digress.
In other words, $10,000 worth of forgiveness would be a game-changer for a community college graduate but it genuinely doesn’t do that much for you if you followed up your Brandeis education with a Yale Law School degree and then sociology grad school at Harvard.
This is what law might look like to some, but not to most lawyers. We didn’t go to Harvard (unless your name is Ken or Elie), and we didn’t get a gig at Biglaw with a starting salary of $185,000. Most of us went to Brand-X law schools and got tossed out into the world of too many lawyers and not enough jobs. We learned this hard lesson following the recession of 2007, when a generation of lawyers were lost and went on to do whatever they could to pay off their school debt, but it wasn’t law.
But that lesson appears to have been forgotten, as a new generation of students went to law school, not to become overpaid Biglaw benchwarmers but “public interest” lawyers. That’s what they call themselves because that’s what they fancy themselves. They wrap it around themselves to bask in the warmth of their self-righteousness, that they have become lawyers to serve goodness and social justice. And because of that, they are special, and because they are special, they deserve special treatment.
Something like 95% of law students go to law school wanting to do public-interest law; 5% actually do. That’s not because of some nefarious PMC socialization. It’s because we come out with $100-200k in loans. Get rid of them and suddenly we can afford to leave BigLaw.
What they refer to as “public interest law” is what used to be referred to as public defense. It’s not exactly a new practice area, a subgroup of criminal defense notable for too many clients, too little pay and an opportunity to gain a lot more experience than any biglaw tool. It was once the niche filled by a handful of passionate baby lawyers together with those who couldn’t find gainful employment elsewhere. It’s now a very hot niche among the Harvard and Yale types.
Whether the percentages above are remotely accurate is hard to say, but not really important enough to waste time figuring out. There is a strong interest in baby lawyers to serve a higher good than line their pockets upon graduation, and that’s a wonderful thing. There is a strong need for quality representation in public defense, and it’s great to see students from top schools competing for the handful of woefully underpaid public defense jobs out there. Whether they have such enormous debt isn’t clear, but no doubt some do.
But if so, then these bright-eyed, well-intended law students chose a path knowing that they would be assuming debt to take on a mission that would never be sufficiently remunerative to cover it and provide them with a decent lifestyle. In a sense, it’s like giving to charity and then complaining that the charity isn’t giving you value back for your money. You knew it was charity in the first place. What did you expect?
Seeing a small fire burning, Matt Bruenig poured gasoline on the conflagration.
This percentage is way overstated. But still the actual constraint here is that there actually is not a large market for “public-interest law.” Law schools and law students should be less dumb about who legal services consumers actually are.
If what he’s trying to say is that there isn’t a large market for public defense, then he’s just unaware as a privileged kinda guy about what Gideon means, how we’ve failed it and how many poor people get dragged into the well on a daily basis. But then, what it appears he’s confusing, perhaps because the practice area name of “public interest law” is nonsensical, is that it’s a self-sustaining practice area like Mergers & Acquisitions, Personal Injury or Constitutional Contract Law. That’s not at all what’s happening or where the need is.
For the past generation, we’ve recognized that law has become so integral to society that there exists a serious Access to Justice (A2J) problem for people who can’t afford a lawyer or choose not to allocate their very scare resources to get representation. To pretend this isn’t a huge problem is delusional.
What it is not is a sustainable practice area for baby lawyers who want to be “public interest lawyers” because they can’t earn a sustainable living doing this. There have been many attempts at addressing this problem, none of which have worked because they were based primarily on the fantasies of well-intended academics and techies, who believed they could reinvent the future of law. Nobody wanted what they were selling, so now it’s apparently forgotten by all involved.
Are the new generation of “public interest lawyers” entitled to special consideration for their dedication to social justice, or are most baby lawyers making dentist-level fortunes sitting in Biglaw libraries and their cries of poverty and entitlement a cover for giving baby lawyers about to live the good life a free ride on the backs of plumbers?
And why doesn’t anyone consider where all the money from these outrageous and fiscally-illiterate student loans went? It’s bad enough that law students who choose to dedicate their careers to the public good can’t figure out that they’re not going to earn enough to carry their debt load plus eat on occasion, but if anyone owes them a refund for their good works, what about those law schools with huge endowments that foster their ideological passion while never forgetting to send them tuition bills?
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This is what happens when the schools marketing dept. wins the conflict it has with the academic standards dept. They need warm asses with good credit scores filling the classes, and god forbid, never tell any of the darlings they might have unrealistic goals or should possibly think about a different career path.
Drop outs don’t pay tuition.
The debts are guaranteed by the United States of America. Law schools get paid. The government, not so much.
That wasn’t quite my experience. I went to a law school in the top twenty and walked away with 175k in debt. I was told that if I did public interest work my debt would be forgiven in ten years and that may payments in the meantime would be pegged to my financial circumstances. I thought, given my love for criminal law, that the public defender route was therefore doable, so I did it. Had that not existed, I would have gone to biglaw with the rest of them. I do not see it as charity. I see it as a program that was developed to get people to do good work if they were willing to be a little poor for a decade. You make it sound like these kids are idiots and shouldn’t be able to rely on what they were told. That’s an implausible way to think about the brightest minds in a particular generation. If your generation would like to stop having smart people do public defense, get rid of the program. If you’d like to stop the skyrocketing cost of college, stop letting the government loan to anyone whatever colleges are claiming their degrees are worth. Right now it’s just free money, no one in the government is making any inquiry into the value its getting for its buck, like say Medicaid does. It’s not sustainable. And the biggest joke at the moment is that same inflated price gets you zoom college. That, to me, is a scandal.
You’re confusing the status a decade ago with the status today. It’s an easy mistake to make, for those who will spend the rest of their lives whining rather than doing anything with any possible chance of actually fixing real world problems.
I believe there is a principle of Economics that states that the more money you throw at something the more expensive it gets.
I am continually amazed that people do not recognize that the basic principles of Economics are as inexorable as the laws of Physics. If supply exceeds demand for a particular type of labor, then wages for that labor drop.
The legal profession is also (or will) face additional pressure from the AI field. Decades ago, beginning lawyers did all the grunt work in the law library Then Lexus\Nexus made its appearance and a lot of the drudge work disappeared as did some jobs for young lawyers. The legal profession may be facing a massive shakeout in coming years.
We can go on forever about the folly of student loans and weak college programs. As long as society mistakes salaries and degrees for worth as human beings, this problem will persist. We need to teach that there is nothing wrong with honest work of any kind. And as our host has stated before: choices and their consequences.
Finally: “There is nothing more horrible than the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts.” Samuel Johnson,
François de La Rochefoucauld
Steve, AI for the legal profession has a long way to go — as anyone who has used “natural language” with a law search engine can tell you. And while I’ve heard all sorts of claims about document review software, every time I’ve demo’d such products, they’ve foundered on the shoals of anything that isn’t OCR’d (such as handwritten notes) and to require input by a human who has both legal knowledge and an understanding of the need for consistency in data entry. AI hasn’t eliminated jobs in the legal world so much as changed how they’re carried out, without appreciably saving time (because someone has to scan all that paper, OCR it, upload it, delimit the search, de-bug it, etc. — and guess who that is in the solo practices that largely populate the criminal defense world?)
The same people who now assert AI will kill off large swaths of the legal profession were preceded by those who said pre-printed legal forms at Office Depot (followed by law-for-dummies software programs) would kill off transactional practices. Near as I can tell, all those brilliant products have done is ensure more work for lawyers when it turned out Grandpa’s pre-printed “quitclaim” deed actually clouded title and his pre-printed will had more testamentary holes than Swiss cheese.
AI may be able — eventually — to present legal answers, but until it can ask the correct legal question and exercise judgment in planning legal strategy, there will be human lawyers.
For more than a decade, the legaltech folks have been touting AI as the future of the law. They still are, to the extent they still exist, and it’s still not. AI will eventually be able to do some of the grunt work, with human oversight, but it will barely make a dent in what lawyers do.
Really? And under what moral reasoning is student debt not bankruptable?
In other words, people and banks both take chances when they take and give loans. The marketplace punishes both those parties who make bad decisions.
Except in this case. In this case, the entire burden of taking a bad chance is laid on the shoulders of 18 year olds.
The schools exist essentially on the life-long (!) indentured servitude of their “customers”. Without that indentured servitude, without that unshirkable debt to be paid back, universites might have to fire a few of their diversity czars and they might look less like glass and steel monuments to their sports teams.
So let’s be perfectly clear. Marxists professors fund their deep six figure salaries, gold-plated health-care and lavish retirements on the backs of indentured servants, in effect sucking well-being and the ability to establish homes and start families from the young to themselves, all while preaching revolution against The Man.
This is not even hyperbole; this is a literal description of what actually obtains.
There are two types of people in the world. Those who are related, dependent or otherwise associated with the universities and those who think student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy just like every other debt.
Whenever I read another column of this from people of any political persuasion, I find out who’s who.
I agree that student debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy, but that has absolutely nothing to do with this post. Have you considered that a large part of your angst derives not from “who’s who,” but from you’re being kinda dumb?
Depending on where the number originates, student debt is $1.5 or 1.6T. That’s peanuts compared to this year’s deficit of $3.3T, without the pending $900B in virus relief. Go find 20 or 25 Bezoses and take all their money. That solves the problem.
At what point does a person with a vote in Congress ask from what source the money will originate? Is there a problem, of any magnitude, that can’t be fixed by tossing cash that doesn’t exist in its direction?
Don’t you get the feeling that those with the votes know things are beyond reclamation, so why not spend more of what doesn’t exist?
If we had the money, would that change the nature of the problem? Would it stop the problem from recurring? Would it be fair to those who scrimped and saved to pay off their tuition/debt?
It’s one thing to relieve debt as an incentive to get baby lawyers to become PDs, if there was a problem finding lawyers willing to work for a pittance, but there’s no shortage of willing lawyers who knowingly assumed the debt and yet chose this life?
It could, but that’s not my point. I know I’m less important to the system than are CDLs. They represent those in the most dire straights. I represent money: I always get paid. They should have better lawyers, but when I walk into criminal courtrooms a dozen or-so times a year, I’m far readier than are the the CDLs. As the old Swamp lawyer Mr. Black would say, “ready wins”.
The proposed solution to the problem, which is a real problem, is to spend what doesn’t exist. It never will exist because the money is gone. Fair isn’t really an issue if the solution doesn’t exist. I don’t have an answer for how to get better representation for criminal defendants. I wish I did, as I see some real junk, but tossing another trillion of make-believe money at it is not the cure because it can’t last.
[Ed. Note: I made this a reply and fixed it for you. Merry Christmas, Skink.]
Thanks, pal-o-mine. I realized the error as I drove to the store for popcorn and ice cream. Who lives better than me?
Lucky for defendants in your part of the country —where ivy league schools are an actual option—that the grads actually want to be public defenders. Down here in one of the the sad fly-over states, most of the very few Ivy League grads that show up for some reason, fail the bar. With rare exception, no one wants to be a public defender. It’s the lowest paid job and ranks lower than the car wreck settlement mill firms.
That’s interesting. I keep hearing that young lawyers are begging for jobs as PDs and can’t get them. While I don’t know where your part of the country is, I hear of HYS kids going to flyover country to find a job as the competition is too fierce in east coast cities. I guess this isn’t true of all places and I wonder why?
FYI in a major Ohio city “don’t write off the public defender’s office” is still pretty common advice to new law school graduates struggling to find work.
Perhaps the best argument against this may seem radical to those who are already lawyers and enjoy (many) aspects of their profession: Tucker Max’s article on not being a lawyer. Of course if more people followed this course of action, then there would be an even greater shortage of lawyers for the people who truly need them (the indigent and generally poor, as even a basic defense will be a year (or more) wages. As Skink pointed out, this is a problem without a easy solution. (There probably is a solution, but it will be expensive to someone.)
If there was less need for lawyers by the poor, there would be less need for lawyers by the poor. Have we over-regulated, complicated and criminalized society to the point where everybody needs a lawyer regularly? Maybe less law would mean less need for, and expense of, lawyers.
If you want to do PI law or help poor people, there’s a simple way: Go to a lower-tier law school.
If you have the grades and LSAT to get into a top-20 school then you’ll get free tuition when you move down. Voila: No tuition debt, and you are entirely unencumbered by tuition debt. You don’t need a Harvard degree to be a kickass lawyer.
Of course, that means serious tradeoffs!
-You don’t get to rub elbows with the hoity-toity high-powered folks.
-You have to REALLY be willing to give up BIGLAW, they will never ever hire you.
-You don’t get to hang a fancy degree on the wall and some clients won’t hire you either.
-Your friends will do federal clerkships; you won’t get the interview much less the job. Not a good solution for envious types.
-It’s humbling: Since few folks do this, most people will assume you weren’t smart enough to do anything else. (Then again, this assumption can help in court.) That can sting a bit.
Still, it works.