Restoring Dignity to the Law: Appalachia

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Know Anyone At East Tennessee State?

I know undergraduate schools have law school fairs all the time, but I thought this one coming up at East Tennessee State on Jan. 18 was especially interesting. Here's a list of the participating schools:

Appalachia
Ave Maria
Belmont
Campbell
Charlotte
Drexel
Florida Coastal
Liberty
Lincoln Memorial/Duncan
Memphis
Mercer
Tennessee
Stetson

Apparently, if you ever want to have a regional pow-wow of lower-tiered law schools, just have a law school fair at a lower-tiered undergraduate school. There must be a Batman-like sign that goes up that calls admissions people to the trough of possible tuition-payers.

There is one school on this list I would pay a dime to attend (Tennessee, and that's only if I was a Tennessee resident and didn't get a scholarship to somewhere nicer).

One of the panel presentations is going to be called "Why Go to Law School." If anyone near ETSU is free on January 18th and wants to have some productive fun, go and ask the representatives what percentage of their graduates are employed, what percentage default on their loans, etc.

I understand ETSU probably thinks its doing its students a service by hosting the educational equivalent of a "buy-a-Timeshare-now" circus, but ETSU's "best and brightest" would be best served by having an objective picture rather than an orgy of propaganda.

About RDTTL

I am a current law student who dreads the end of the conveyor belt and wishes to see positive change in the legal community.

To me, a dignified profession is one that is respected, one whose members serve as ambassadors for its social value, one that lets its practitioners lead healthy, productive, and active civic lives, and one where the members of the profession take active steps to protect the profession's honor.

It is self-evident that the legal profession has problems on that front (or all of those fronts, if you want to break it down). Lawyers are twice as likely to kill themselves as the average person. They are significantly more likely to become depressed or alcoholic. Along with other factors, an oversupply of labor has led to smaller salaries for most - putting the ability to have families or manage debt at risk - while making attorney work an impossibility for others. Last year roughly 1/3 of recent juris doctor recipients did not have jobs. Legal process outsourcing makes it far less likely that they'll ever get them.

These issues existed before the recession and extend beyond its effects. This blog explores these issues and seeks to provide helpful information and commentary, especially with regards to legal education, the reform of which I believe would aid many the other issues that prevent the law from being a fully-dignified profession.

I have chosen to use pseudonymous speech for roughly the same reasons outlined by zerohedge, even though I don't think the risk of retaliation is that high in my case (of all the professors I've had, I can only think of one who would "retaliate").

If you wish to contact me, please leave a comment. In the interest of simplifying my life, I am cutting my email addresses down, including the one that used to appear here, which has become unmanageable due to spam.