Restoring Dignity to the Law: public perception

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Respect: An Observation from Ann Levine's Reasons for Going to Law School

Ann Levine, lawyer and capitalist feeding off want-to-be law school applicants, has published a new list of her reasons to go/not to go to law school. This reason to attend struck me as worth commentary:

4. Being important and respected

While I think some of her other reasons are suspect (e..g, if "money" is a reason NOT to go, why is "financial security" suddenly a reason TO go? Something can't be both a good investment and a bad investment for the same person at the same time), this one struck me as odd.

First, she links to a page from Notre Dame's website that talks about how lawyers are hated, many people go to law school for the wrong reasons, and that reasons such as "I wanted a profession with prestige, respect and status" are "problematic."

This, by itself, should raise a few questions. For example: Does it speak well of the University of Miami Law School to have a notable alumna completely misconstruing source material when said skill is a large part of legal argumentation? Would you hire someone who can't carefully read a simple webpage to help your child get into law school by reading their admissions essays? And does it speak well of the legal profession as a whole to have an ambassador at the gateway citing source material that (a) she apparently hasn't read thoroughly and (b) comes from such bastions of knowledge as Yahoo! Answers?

But more importantly, she's wrong. While the law may be important (I would argue essential), the over-supply of lawyers has rendered them replaceable on the individual level. And lawyers, as a whole, have not been respected for quite some time. Judges are respected; lawyers really aren't. A simple Google search got me this 2002 report from the ABA. Although this report does mention positive characteristics of attorneys, one would be hard-pressed to read it and conclude that being a lawyer brings vague and generalized "respect." And that was 8 years ago.

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.