Restoring Dignity to the Law: northwestern

Sunday, May 15, 2011

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?

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.