I think David Segal’s flashy and inevitably much-e-mailed Sunday Times piece on law schools ultimately represents a missed opportunity. There’s some good stuff about rankings competition and how law schools continue to expand, charge high prices, and generate large profits even as the market for lawyers contracts. But he takes the easy way out by mis-portraying a tournament as a lottery.
Segal repeatedly characterizes going to law school as a form of gambling, “like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long-line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a game that few of them can win.” Yet nearly all of the students, he notes, “are convinced that they’re going to win the ring toss at this carnival and bring home the stuffed bear.” Segal acknowledges that this argument is “complicated by the reality that a small fraction of graduates are still winning the Big Law sweepstakes. Yes, they tend to hail from the finest law schools, and have the high G.P.A.’s. But still.”
But still what? Law school isn’t a game of chance. It’s a tournament. My wife, for example, entered the law-school tournament in 2001. The first stage was getting into a good law school, which she managed with stellar grades from a Big Ten university and very good (but not quite stellar) LSAT’s. That was enough for the night program at Georgetown Law, which sits near the bottom of the top tier at number 14. Then she spent the next four years working really, really hard. She attended every class, five days a week, 5:30 to 8:30 PM, and spent every Sunday, morning to night, in the law library. And unlike Spendthrift McGee, the lead character in Segal’s article, who borrowed $250,000 to attend a fourth-tier law school because it was in a warm climate, with long debt-financed European vacations thrown in for good measure, she didn’t want to be overwhelmed by loans. So she took a difficult four-fifths-time job as a law-firm analyst during the day to help pay the bills. Four years later, she graduated Magna Cum Laude, entered the federal clerkship tournament, and won that too. Now she works for the federal government as an appellate litigator.
The point being, there was nothing random about it. She want to class and other people didn’t. She spent Sundays studying while others were watching football. Everyone applying to law school takes the same standardized test. Classes are graded on a curve and class rank is relative to other students who took the same classes. It’s not perfect—nothing is—but law school is about as close to a fully transparent pure meritocracy as you’ll find in American education.
That has strong bearing on how we should think about law schools from an ethical perspective. The thing about three-card monte is that it’s illegal. You can’t set up a carnival ring toss in your back yard and charge $1,000 a throw. Lotteries are the exclusive province of state legislators who would rather not raise taxes honestly. All legal gambling is highly regulated. That’s because these are all games of chance where the odds are deceptively stacked in favor of the house.
The morality of tournaments is more complicated to judge. The worst offenders are probably those who open up new bottom-tier law schools and charge top-tier prices. Students there have lost the game pretty much before it begins. And just because law schools can induce legions of young students to borrow tens of thousands of dollars for tuition doesn’t mean they ought to. “Non-profit” law schools that generate tons of cash to be spread among faculty and the larger university aren’t exactly embracing the ethic of public obligation.
At the same time, trying to win the law school tournament is like shooting for the top of a lot of other difficult, talent- and effort-dependent professions—artist, musician, novelist, professor at a Research I university. Most who try, fail. But that’s not exactly a secret. It’s telling that Segal framed his story around someone so callow. There is a better, more nuanced account of law school ethics to be written.
6 Responses to Law Schools: Tournaments or Lotteries?
11291652 - January 10, 2011 at 7:45 am
In general people analyze the value of education in terms of immediate and remunerative employment. That’s easy to understand in a society where value is expressed as money, schooling is costly and money and monetary success are increasingly in short supply. But education, including the kind of education you get in law school, is more than vocational. Law graduates are prepared to do many things beyond actual “lawyering.”
Many people who aspire to law school have little idea what actual lawyering looks like going in, and many law graduates have little inclination to do the real work that lawyers actually do once they graduate. But they’re still in enviable positions: Lawyers have skills and habits of mind that make it possible for them to succeed in many endeavors.
12114440 - January 10, 2011 at 8:25 am
Thanks for your article. I also thought, where is the responibility and culpability of the student and since when are law students spoonfed any information? The article described a job that the Spendthrift character had obtained outside Manhattan but was not longer holding. There was some comment about the crazy firm owner making her associates thank her for giving them off on Labor Day, but no mention as to why Spendthrift doesn’t have the job anymore. It occurred to me that perhaps Spendthrift doesn’t have the work ethic that is required to succeed as an entry level attorney. It is a ridiculous work ethic and there may not be shame in not wanting to work 365, 24-7, but that is the plight of a many a successful lawyer.
gameswithwords - January 10, 2011 at 10:56 am
“‘Non-profit’ law schools that generate tons of cash to be spread among faculty and the larger university aren’t exactly embracing the ethic of public obligation.”
This was one place where I thought the NYTimes article was under-researched. What evidence is there that faculty at 4th-tier law schools are getting rich? My lawyer friends say it’s impossible to make much of a living teaching at anything but a top-tier law school, and law professors at top-tier law schools must take *hefty* pay cuts in order to teach at them (suggesting they aren’t doing it for the money). I’m not saying someone isn’t making money off these diploma mills, but it would be nice if someone checked to see who it was.
But otherwise, I had a similar reaction to you. There are clearly some fools who were easily parted with their money (that includes us, the foolish tax-payers who guarantee many of these essentially fraudulent student loans). And it’s clear that some hard-working people do the right things and win the tournament. The article made no attempt to establish how many non-fools got suckered in by lies, though those are the people the article is really concerned about.
rodneytoady - January 10, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Forgive me, but Carey, your perspective is skewed. First, Georgetown is not the “bottom of the top tier,” it’s the bottom of the T-14. There are 50 schools in the “top tier.” The reason the T14 exists as a sub-category in the top tier is because you’re thought of as being “safe” in terms of employment options if you attend one. Not as safe as Y/H/S (Yale/Harvard/Stanford), but “safe.” Also, your wife graduated in what, 2005? This is when the BigLaw salaries were starting to kick up like crazy, and not long from when the hopeful refrain was “NY to $190k!”…as in, the salary of a first-year associate. This is before the bottom completely fell out.
Is there some level of responsibility on the part of the students who line up like lemmings for the chance at a 4th tier law school education, and acquire 6 figures of debt (not counting undergrad) in the process? Of course. And that responsibility grows the easier it is to find more information, and contrary perspectives to the glossy brochures and pie-in-the-sky promises coming from the admissions counselors. But you’re missing two very important things:
1) A major point of the article is the rankings are based on doctored numbers. People in this country are typically ignorant as to how stats can be fudged or manipulated. It’s deceptive, and can’t be waived away by sticking our fingers in our ears and yelling “caveat emptor” at the top of our lungs.
2) Our entire society seems to have a single-minded obsession with higher and higher education as the path to success, with no critical view of the quality or prospects of the individual programs. Can’t find work with a generic BA? Educate yourself into a better job with a 4th-tier law degree (and $150k in debt, and little chance of a good ROI). A lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer, right? This serves the higher education sector wonderfully, at the expense of the misled students and society at large.
You call it a “tournament” rather than a “lottery.” You know what both have in common? Published odds of winning. For fair tournaments and lotteries, you have an idea of what you get if you win, and what you get if you lose (and if 2nd place, or getting 5 of 6 numbers, gets you a consolation prize). We’re presenting applicants to these programs the idea that the real tournament is getting into a program and finishing it; once they finish, they win. And nothing could be further from the truth.
academicjd - January 12, 2011 at 6:28 pm
I attended a T-14, and graduated in 2005 as well. My grades were average to slightly above average, and during my second year, I had no trouble getting a summer job with a top corporate firm. What I didn’t know (because the firm did not disclose it) was that this particular firm was already beginning to have financial difficulties (it wound up closing down a few years later). In the meantime, I was not offered a permanent position in spite of having good work reviews, which, as anyone familiar with the law school “tournament” knows, is the kiss of death if you want to work in a big firm. I couldn’t get one of those 160k jobs after that, and no other legal jobs pay anything like that – so please explain to me how I played the game wrong and should just suck up my $170k (I grew up poor and had no option other than to take out loans) on my $60k salary?
I know another person who was actually offered a big firm job and then was laid off within 3 months of starting. She was also from a poor family, and also relied on loans – I guess she was just irresponsible too, though, right?
serhiy - January 14, 2011 at 12:10 pm
I was sworn in as a new Illinois attorney last November by the Illinois Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Freeman. He told me, along with another thousand new attorneys, that we are entering a noble profession. The other speakers at the swearing in ceremony, notable and successful attorneys, proclaimed that to be a lawyer is a calling, similar to being a priest or a pastor.
Surprisingly, they did not mention anything about a lottery or a tournament. We perform an important service in a free and democratic system. Attorneys fight to free innocent people from jails and make sure that citizen’s rights are protected. When public and private universities turn law schools into many-making factories that spit out newly-minted graduates as a by-product, it diminished the role of attorneys.