107. An aside about law school
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
The apparent exception to the list above is law school. There are tons of law schools, probably too many, and they apparently churn out hundreds of thousands of lawyers on a regular basis.
What any lawyer will tell you, though, is that law school doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer.
Law school is a three-year hazing process, a holding tank based on competitiveness and the absorption of irrelevant trivia, combined with high-pressure exams and social pressure.
The pedagogy of law school has nothing to do with being a lawyer, but everything to do with being surrounded by competitive individuals who use words as weapons and data as ammunition. This indoctrination is precisely what many lawyers benefit from.
(The ironic aside here is that law school provides precisely the sort of situation I wrote about earlier—it puts students into a place where they can develop their rational minds at the same time they learn to calm down and do the work, whatever the work happens to be.)
The method is clever: use the trope of school, the lectures and the tests, to create an environment where a likely byproduct is that personalities are shaped and the culture of lawyering is fostered. In fact, they could replace half the classes with classes on totally different topics (Shakespeare, the history of magic) and produce precisely the same output.
Part of the make-believe academic sideshow is the role of the law reviews, publications that are produced by law schools and that feature academic treatises by law school professors. Rather than acknowledging that law school is a vocational institution, top schools race to hire professors doing esoteric research. The $3.6 billion spent each year on law school tuition goes, in large part, to these professors.
According to a study done in 2005, 40 percent (!) of the law review articles in LexisNexis had never been cited (never, not even once) in a legal case or in other law review articles.
The problem is that this process is an expensive waste. Top law firms have discovered that they have to take law school grads and train them for a year or more before they can do productive work—many clients refuse to pay for the efforts of first-year lawyers, and for good reason.
One more example of failing to ask, “what is school for?” and instead playing a competitive game with rules that make no sense.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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