Posted on 10/06/2021 1:11:40 PM PDT by karpov
Back in the mid-70s, I decided to give law school a try. After doing pretty well on the LSAT, I applied to and was accepted by Duke. So I went there, studied hard enough to pass every course I took, learned some useful things that I still remember (such as the fundamentals of contract law), and graduated with my JD in hand.
No doubt the most important thing I learned while in law school, however, was that the legal profession wasn’t for me. I realized that I’d be a round peg in a world of square holes, so I didn’t pursue it, instead winding up in college teaching. The years I spent in law school had been interesting, but overall, a waste of my time. (At least it didn’t cost a lot of money; back then, a year’s tuition was under $2,500.)
Much later, I came to understand that law school is largely a waste of time for everyone. The obligatory three-year degree covers many legal subjects that the student can promptly forget, and fails to cover more than a tiny fraction of the constantly changing knowledge that a lawyer needs to be successful in his particular field of practice. The vast majority of useful legal education takes place on the job, not in law school classrooms. Law school is a long, and now extremely expensive prelude to the process of acquiring the information that a lawyer actually needs. It is a high, artificial barrier to entry into the market for legal services.
It wasn’t always so. In early America, hardly any lawyers attended law school. They learned by reading the law on their own (as Abraham Lincoln did) and/or working in law offices as apprentices, mastering how to advise and represent clients.
(Excerpt) Read more at aier.org ...
I think that is true of any real profession. I'm a professional, have a degree in my field, and maybe 5% of what I use I learned in college.
If you can pass the bar, you should be entitled to a law license despite not having a law degree. Most science, technical and math types would breeze right through it with some studying.
Folks, it is all a game.
I support your thesis absolutely.
T. Rustin Noone
Florida (and Georgia Alabama Texas Oregon Washington California) Architect
“We Need a Free Market in Legal Services”
Much, much more than that.
You should be able to choose under what form of “Law”, “Governance”, “Guidance” “Force” you wish to live.
I never got to vote on 90% of the crappy rules I have to live under.
Your neighbors vote to take your house.
Majority rules, Democracy and all that.
You Lose.
What’s the difference between that and other total strangers voting to take your money in confiscatory taxes?
National Divorce is imminent.
Why can’t we just be free from it all?
Provide me a free attorney instead of health care. But you know they’d politicize that too. I’ve heard Public Pretenders sit back, play games on their iPhones and were there just to make sure the sentencing was ‘Fair”, they never argue for their client unless they are getting BIG $$Money for the trial.
The point of law school is not so much to teach you the law, but for your mind to be changed to a certain way of thinking (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion)—it is essentially a three-year brainwashing session.
We need loser pays.
That is absolutely true. Anyone who can pass a bar exam is demonstrating the “think like a lawyer” skills that the ABA insists can only be imparted by a law school.
As a lawyer myself, I do feel that anyone who attended and graduated from a law school and can’t pass the bar has no business being a lawyer. It’s just not that hard.
Full disclosure, I passed the CA bar exam on the first try.
We also need incisive citizen oversight over both the legal and the medical professions. Without it the common citizen will only be further screwed and bamboozled. The amount of power that attends to these fields warrants a check of sorts.
That should be the case with a lot of professions. If you pass the test, you're in.
Conversely, if you DON'T pass the test, then you are NOT in, even if you have the degree. Professions like teaching could be improved by this, but people would scream about racism.
That article is written by a cousin of mine. My grandfathers cousin. He looks too business like : )
He is co-owner of a family business and is well off.
In California, last I checked, you could still get a law license by apprenticing with a practicing lawyer for five years and then passing the bar exam. In retrospect, a much better way to go. There’s a well-known UCLA law professor, Gary Blasi, who became a lawyer that way.
More than 40% of the hucksters posing as US Congressmen were lawyers before they started slopping at the public trough. You think you’ll ever get that lot to vote to reform their profession?
"We need loser pays."
Amen to that. The US has 6x more personal injury attorneys (per capita) than it did before SCOTUS ruled it was unconstitutional to deny AMBULANCE-CHASING SHYSTERS the right to advertise their services.
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