Thank you very much for your post 39. I found it very thoughtful and on-subject.
I particularly agree that I had not thought through my comments on law school as being an advanced technical vocation school. It really isn’t. I know this because at one point I had wanted to become a lawyer and had taken the Law School Admission Test and noted that a number of the questions dealt with Western Civilization, the thoughts of the Founding Fathers and other historical/cultural matters. It was obvious that the power-that-be within the law profession did not want narrowly-trained people; they wanted lawyers who had a background and understanding of the American and western European history and cultures.
BTW, I did pretty well on the LSAT, good enough to be admitted to the American University (Washington, DC) Law School. Unfortunately, I had chosen the wrong parents and the money was just not there, for that law school or any other law school.
Yes, the LSAT is hard; no doubt about it. The original purpose of the LSAT was to identify people who had a certain basic comprehension of American principles of government and the purpose of the law, and you are absolutely right that it is designed to measure breadth as well as depth of knowledge.
Sometimes I wonder how Barack Obama possibly managed to pass his LSAT since he makes comments that my 13-year-old knows, just from conversations with me in my car on the way back from school, are clearly contrary to basic principles of American civics. However, he somehow got through law school and that may say a lot more about his professors than about him.
One reason I didn't specifically challenge your statement about the law being a type of advanced technical training is that the profession is changing, and especially in some specialties and in some large law firms, it **HAS** become more technical than theoretical. Someone can spend thousands of hours sitting in a room of a large corporate law firm doing highly specialized drafting of legal documents or doing detailed review of someone else’s legal documents to find mistakes that can be used against the other side in a lawsuit, and even in small law firms, some lawyers make lots of money sending demand letters or taking pre-written boilerplate language and turning it into a will or a legal land description for their clients.
That's not the kind of law the Founding Fathers anticipated because our legal system has morphed into something different than what the Founding Fathers inherited from Britain and encapsulated in the Constitution. As law has become more and more specialized and as the lines between highly-trained paralegals and low-level lawyers have blurred, I do think that the legal profession has become more technical in nature. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it has created a type of lawyer who is highly skilled in a narrow field but probably would not have been able to practice law a century ago.