More Graduation Mockery: Integrity? Really?

Justice John Paul Stevens spoke at Northwestern's graduation yesterday, and since he's 91 I'm going to cut him some slack because these really aren't his problems, but this is a doozie of ridiculous graduation-type advice:

Stevens . . . told the students to “remember that your most valuable asset . . . is your integrity.”

“If your adversaries and colleagues know that your word is good, you will be a successful lawyer,” Stevens said.

Even at places like Northwestern, students are feeling the pressure of lawyer oversaturation, offhosring, etc.

Take this Above the Law writer, for example:

I graduated from Northwestern Law in 2009. It is now 2011, my loans are coming due (real due — not the fake, put ‘em in forebearance, due of yesteryear), and I am currently “employed” doing two things: reviewing documents at an embarrassing hourly wage on projects that start and stop without any sort of consistency, and writing “jokes” about the Microsoft Zune every weekday morning, every other week.

Yet, all he needs to "be a successful lawyer" is integrity? What a crock of insulting horseshit. It's like telling a starving African that all they need to eat like kings is hope and prayer. It sounds nice, but it just ain't true.

And to my mind, telling law students that all they need is integrity is especially egregious because their suffering is the result of a system that completely lacks integrity. Where is integrity in bogus and misleading employment statistics? Where is the integrity in training professionals by teaching them things other than the what the profession demands? Where is the integrity in price gouging a non-dischargable debt? Where is the integrity in numerical legerdemain to jump up 5 USNWR spots at the expense of your students' educations? Where is the integrity in drawing a 200k+ salary running an institution selling products 1/2 of the customers can never possibly use?

And all that is not to mention the obvious flaw with Justice Stevens' remarks: if your adversaries know your word in unflinchingly good, in this world, they'll play you like a sucker for it.

The pie-in-the-sky visions of inevitable legal success are insulting and offensive enough, but talking about integrity at a modern law school graduation? That's hypocrisy at its finest, even if the speaker himself has personal integrity to spare.

In non-law graduations, my quote of the day has to come from this Boise State graduate:

“It feels pretty good, it's more of a transition. Walking after law school, I'll be excited.” — Justin Jeppesen, BA in history, going on to University of Idaho law school.

How about you check back in three years and tell me how "excited" you are, Justin, to get that Idaho degree?

Replacing Some Advice From the Washington Post

A little bit off the beaten path today, but here is part of a letter that was written in to the Washington Post's advice column:

My girlfriend has recently started back to law school as a full-time student. She says she does not have time to see me AT ALL for the next three months. She said she will be able to communicate by e-mail or text.

I understand she is very busy with law school and her part-time job. She lives only five miles from me. I asked her if she would not mind seeing me weekly for a half-hour walk in her neighborhood, just to keep in touch. She said no.

I want to know if her behavior is reasonable, or am I being selfish in thinking that she should make some small amount of time for me?

The advice given by the Post's writer is basically that the schmuck doesn't possibly know her true intentions, so he either needs to decide for himself whether she is worth waiting for or not and either wait or move on.

While normally I don't interject myself in these things, I think this is incredibly poor advice. It said in the introduction paragraph that the guy is in his 30s, and if he's writing in to a newspaper for advice, he's likely not the type to take ambiguous advice well (i.e., he's going to wait like a schmuck and wind up miserable one way or another).

So here's my advice: you need to compose her an e-mail (her preferred method, apparently) that states, very clearly, that you are strongly interested in her, and you will gladly continue talking to her, but that you will be actively dating other people for the next three months and that, although you respect her, you do not agree with her course of behavior. Because here's the thing: she's being incredibly dumb and, if this course of behavior continues, you want absolutely nothing to do with this woman.

Let me explain. First, they tell you when you enter law school not to have a part-time job your first year and to be careful with work after that (generally a 15- or 20-hour limitation). I don't know what "recently" means, but if she's trying to work a part-time job while taking her 1L 2nd semester finals, she's an idiot.

Second, law school does not black out every fragment of time in a three-month period. Can it be busy, yes. Are there are multi-day blocks where seeing people really isn't an option? Of course. But under no circumstances is every weekend just wall-to-wall reading and writing and class-ing. Anyone who has to take every ounce of time to do well in law school should not be in law school.

Even if law school was a major time-hog for her, it's really unhealthy to sacrifice social interactions, including romantic ones. Given a choice between working 65 hours a week on law and making time for coffee or a walk around the neighborhood and working 75-80 hours a week, the 65-hour a week person will be healthy, happier, and probably a bigger success. It's a margin cost evaluation where the benefit of spending the extra 10 hours almost never justifies the high cost. And when you're talking about sacrificing parts of your life, it's a very high cost.

Most of the mental health issues lawyers have stem from law school behaviors. These include this perverse idea that you have to study obsessively and that if you haven't drowned out other pressures, you're not a hard-working student or aren't taking it seriously. This is bullshit. Being a lawyer is not worth being a shellshocked, socially-isolated zombie, but it's obviously a belief that many young legal students and professionals have and one this young woman seems to have adopted.

So let's go back to the facts. The Post writer said we can't know this woman's true intentions. That's fine; we don't have to. One of two basic things seems to be true: (1) she's really not interested in our letter-writer and is using law school as a passive excuse to phase him out so she doesn't have to break up with him; (2) she's interested in him, but views school as a priority that takes absolute precedence over him.

If it's (1) - and because he wrote the letter you know that's what he strongly suspects (and rightly so; what woman has time to email but not grab coffee somewhere?) - waiting around for three months is the worst thing you can possibly do. In this scenario, you want to force her to be honest with you and tell you she's not interested in seeing you anymore.

If it's (2), she's got a sickness that isn't going to be cured by waiting three months. If she has this belief now, what will stop her from having this belief if and when she's a young attorney? If you let yourself be marginalized now, you set a precedent (lawyers are big on this) where her school/work comes before your emotional needs, which are obvious from the letter.

If there's no time for you now, there won't be time for you next year or the year after, so even if she is Abigail to your John Adams, Simon to your Garfunkel, yin to your yang, your heart and your penis will grow moldy and stale on the shelf while she's scrutinizing RFA 13 in the Hawkins interrogatories at the kitchen table at 3 am because this is "a really important case."

And that's if she's lucky enough to be in the part that gains legal employment. For 1/3 (maybe more) of law school graduates, law school turns out to be no more important or door-opening than a hobby or a musical history class. This even happens to Georgetown grads. What if, 5 years from now, it turns out that you put your life on hold so she could get the part-time same job she has now? Won't you be bitter towards her? If I had to wait a few months for a woman who I knew was going to be making a good living (a doctor, for example), that's one thing. If I had to wait for a woman so she could pursue a degree that may only make her 40k, that's another ball of wax entirely.

So, letter-writer, I would advise you to give her a quasi-ultimatum and say that you accept the way things are, you don't agree with them, but you're opening the door for other people. Then gauge her response. It will be easy to tell whether she's really interested or not.

Above all else, do not wait three months for her. You'll drive yourself crazy obsessing, for one. And if she does actually like you, you should not let her have her cake and eat it, too. Letting type A personalities have things exactly as they want them is a bad idea. Grow some balls. You're a man, not a pony to be stabled until she wants to take you out in three months. If she insists on marginalizing you in such a way, all for a career that may not be that lucrative, you want no part of her slow-burning suicide, anyway.

You owe it to yourself, letter-writer, not to be placed in that mental prison. Go out and meet some other women if she doesn't want to spend time with you. Maybe you'll find one who isn't crazy enough to try this crap.

A Message to Yale Grads

So the Yale Daily News today published this piece about Yale grads applying to law school and/or putting it off in the wake of recent events.

In case any Yale grads (or grads of any other elite school) come around here, I want you to remember four simple words: you are not immune.

There is a tenancy at many "elite" undergraduate schools to think that you are "set for life," and I'm sure there are still many out there who believe if you go to school [x] that you should have no trouble finding a good job, even if a stagnant economy. Many of you are probably thinking that because you went to a school like Yale and did well, you would be able to thrive at any law school in the country, be it NYU or NYLS.

I'm going to tell you you are not immune to the conditions of the so-called "real world." Your Yale degree will mean jack squat at whatever law school you go to. You will be thrown in the same bin with Southeast Utah Tech grads. Finals are graded anonymously, and even though you may develop into an expert on Tort or Contract law, the odds are you will get a B after working significantly harder than you did at Yale to get A/A-'s. And if you choose to attend a non-elite law school, be it because of easy scholarship money (which you will have to work hard to keep) or because you couldn't score well on the LSAT, almost no one will care that you went to Yale.

There, in two paragraphs, I gave you better advice for your future than much of this article. For example, your newspaper chooses to devote the entire middle third of the story to allow Wendy Margolis of LSAC to advertise. To wit:

Margolis speculated that fewer students are interested in law school overall because of increased media attention regarding the impact of a poor economy on the legal job market.

“Last year, with the other sectors of the economy slowing down, people were taking the opportunity to enhance their education by going to law school,” she said. “People were still thinking that law school was a good investment. It is still a good investment, but people are just being more realistic about what the outcome is going to be.”

Um...yeah. The "increased media attention" is only minimally related to the economy, and the whole point of it is that law school is NOT a good investment for many people, including, I'm sure, some Yale grads.

But at least there are some good advisers at Yale.

“A lot of people say they’re considering it because there’s nothing else to do,” [student Kwaku Osei] said, “but the process is really complicated and the number of people who actually apply is much lower.”

He added that while most people have encouraged his own choice to apply to law school, his adviser in the Political Science Department told him not to apply. Osei said his adviser warned him of the high cost and the fact that law school only prepares students to become lawyers.

First of all, if you think the process to apply is "really complicated," you want no part of law school or being a lawyer itself. And second, your adviser is smart, unlike this fine representative of your lying-through-its-teeth career services department:

Elayne Mazzarella, deputy director at Yale Undergraduate Career Services, said Yalies turn to law school not just to prepare themselves to practice law, adding that students also use the degree to “to advance their careers, to make themselves more marketable in specific industries, to teach [or] for the love of learning.”

My god, seriously? If you love learning or want to make yourself marketable in any industry except law/government/compliance, law school is the LAST place you should go.

Apparently, Yale students aren't immune from having crap spewed at them, either. 50k for tuition and room and board and they can't even give you sane advice. At least some students learn about reality the hard way:

Shelagh Mahbubani ’11 said she had planned to apply to law school, but decided against it after an internship with The Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit legal services provider in New York City.

“I got to see lawyers working, and I realized that I wasn’t interested enough in the work to be able to put in the hours that are required to be a good lawyer,” she said. “They work ridiculously long hours to prepare for trials and I don’t want to spend that much time around paper, and doing one kind of work.”

While I'm wondering what the hell she thought lawyers did, and what jobs in this economy don't involve the dreaded "paper" or "one kind of work," it's good that she actually did the internship and that her experience was published to the whole community.

Because, kids, you're not immune. Unless you have choice connections, you're getting thrown in the same meat-grinder as everyone else. And if you think it's hard getting a job with a Yale liberal arts degree in this economy, it's even harder if you go into a field that has long-term shifts affecting it beyond the current recession's effect, and especially if you go to a non-elite law school.