The latest news from Northwestern Law School seems eerily reminiscent of the TV show “Suits.” Just a few months before graduation, Northwestern University Law School discovered that one of its students, Mauricio Celis, was a Texas felon infamous for posing as a lawyer. Celis was expelled in March from the school’s International Law LLM program as soon as they discovered his criminal history. He is now suing Northwestern over the decision.

Northwestern Law argued that the 42-year-old LLM student misled admissions officials by failing to inform them of his criminal history during the admissions process. Celis’ record includes a felony conviction for falsely presenting himself as a lawyer and a misdemeanor conviction for misidentifying himself as a police officer in an incident involving a woman wandering nude from his hot tub to a local convenience store. According to Northwestern Law, Celis’ criminal history makes him an “undesirable candidate” for their program. School officials say he would not have been admitted had they known of his past.

Celis is arguing, however, that they never asked about his criminal history during the admissions process. He was accepted to the prestigious program in 2012, spent about $76 thousand on tuition and fees, and was never once asked about his criminal history in the process.

While Celis has not commented on the lawsuit, he mantains that he is innocent in the Texas cases, despite the fact that both ended in convictions. He told the Chicago Tribune, “I’ve been trying to put this thing behind me for many, many years already”. According to his Northwestern application, Celis holds dual citizenship in the United States and Mexico. He worked in the legal field in Mexico and then co-founded a personal injury law firm in Texas in 2005.

In 2006, Celis made headlines in Chicago. After six children died in an apartment fire, he read a statement outside their wake. The Chicago Tribune picked up the story, and quoted Celis as the family’s attorney. According to Celis, he has no idea how the Tribune got the impression that he was the family’s attorney. He believes that he was brought in to help because he speaks Spanish, like the victims’ family members.  He has also stated that he has “never allowed anyone to have the impression” that he was licensed to practice law in the United States, and that while he was happy to help, he “let the lawyers do the lawyering.”

In 2007, Celis was indicted in Texas on charges that he illegally presented himself as a lawyer. Based on the court records, the argument was over whether or not Celis could technically be considered a lawyer from Mexico, despite the fact that he never obtained a license to practice law in the United States. Celis argued that the legal education that he received in Mexico qualified him to practice certain types of law there, although he was unable to provide any official documentation of his certification. He also maintained that he never actually practiced law in the United States.

However, the jury wasn’t buying it. They found Celis guilty on 14 counts in 2009, and he was sentenced to 10 years of probation. In response to the jury’s verdict, Celis said, “they looked at me as being some shyster faking my credentials, I am a Mexican lawyer.”

Regardless, Celis was convicted, and the issue at stake here is that Northwestern Law really should have caught it. If they were truly concerned about having convicted felons in their program, then that is something that they should ask about on their application. At the very least, they could have googled him. One quick search and you have access to public criminal records. That way, they wouldn’t have had to kick a student out just months before he was set to graduate. Paul Campos, a University of Colorado law professor and frequent critic of law schools put it best, stating,  “the fact that this guy got into Northwestern … it’s, I think, kind of revelatory of how much checking goes on even at a top program.” If a school doesn’t manage to ask its applicants a question that is found on every McDonalds application, then that’s on them.

Northwestern is arguing that Celis should have known that his criminal history was a problem, and should have voluntarily disclosed the information to admissions. However, I would disagree: if you don’t ask, what would stop someone with a criminal history from applying to your program? If someone with a criminal past wants to do something positive in their life, like get an education, why would they voluntarily disclose information that could stand in their way? It’s the school’s responsibility to ask the right questions of their applicants, not the applicants’ responsibility to anticipate possible issues.

According to court records filed in Chicago, Celis and Northwestern both agreed to a voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit. No details of a settlement were disclosed. While they were able to work something out this time, hopefully this situation will make law schools rethink their application processes so something like this does not happen again.

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Brittany Alzfan (@BrittanyAlzfan) is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Chris Devers via Flickr]

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Too Much, Too Late: Northwestern Law Expels LLM Student for Former Crimes appeared first on Law Street.

I spent much of this past holiday season mulling over a sob story about a JD who got screwed by the law school racket. Though the media landscape of the past several years is strewn with such wreckage, this particular tale of woe stood out for me. For one thing, the victim went to an unspecified top-20-ranked law school and yet is still struggling on a $45,000-a-year salary, living with his parents and staring almost $200,000 of debt in the face. For another thing, he met with this fate after spending two years working at “miserable small law firms” for one abusive, larcenous boss and for another who made him work for nothing for 3 months, for a paltry $1,000/month for the next 3 months, and for a measly $2,000/month for another 3 months after that.

Though this poor man ended the article on a self-blaming note — “At the end of the day, it’s my own fault for being a sucker” — the gist of the piece is that his dire straits are really his law school’s fault. The school fed him a slew of misleading, half-true statistics about his post-graduation employment prospects, never informed him about the demoralizing nature of much legal practice work or the non-transferability of legal skills in the job market, etc. The tireless law school detractor Elie Mystal at Above the Law agrees: “If we’re going to blame the guy for something, blame him for believing the hucksters who were selling him on legal education. It’s fine if you want to look down on the fool who buys the snake-oil thinking that it will cure cancer, just don’t forget that the real culprit here is the snake-oil salesman.”

As an underemployed 28-year-old who also wonders whether law school was the right choice for him, I sympathize with my compatriot’s quandary. Yet I must confess that I’ve never felt that kind of resentment toward my law school, and never felt as if anyone were to blame but myself for the challenges I’ve faced in the job market. More broadly speaking, I’ve never joined wholeheartedly in the chorus of condemnation being directed at the legal academy.

Admittedly, it may be because I haven’t yet suffered quite the same misfortune as the subject of the article. My status as an international student (I hail from Montreal, Canada) slammed the federal student loan door shut in my face when I applied. While this had the obviously detrimental effect of saddling me (oh, hell, who am I kidding — on my mother, really) with a vastly heavier up-front tuition burden, it also required me to rely on my school for its modest financial aid grants and loans. As a result, I’m facing maybe a third of the student loan debt that the average law school graduate has to shoulder.

Also, my extracurricular activities and my post-2L summer internship plugged me into a network of public-interest and public policy organizations and foundations inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway. Those connections have so far netted me two back-to-back legal internships with nonprofits in the nation’s capital that have kept me employed since I graduated last May. I obtained the first position through an internship-stipend program that paid me $10 an hour during the summer — $1,600 a month. Last fall, I did a stint at a prominent D.C. think tank that was able to pay me a stipend of $1,400 a month. Each sum was too stingy to enable me to do much more than scrape by, especially after taxes…but scrape by I’ve so far managed to do, and without having to work for any bosses from hell, either. In those respects, I’ve been luckier so far than the hapless JD from the Business Insider article.

Yet I have a broader reason for steering clear of the “damn law schools” bandwagon. It is the applicants’ responsibility to conduct thorough research into the academic programs to which they apply and the careers to which they grant access, the better to ensure that they’re investing their time, tuition/loan money and work in the right places. More specifically, I think applicants have always borne that responsibility, since even before it became fashionable for pundits to pillory law schools for their purported racketeering.

Consider, for instance, this Business Insider interviewee’s own story. He rightly advises prospective law school applicants to “work for a law firm for at least a year before going to law school and see if it’s something you want to do.” (Sound familiar? I sure hope so.) Yet he seems to have learned this lesson the hard way, since at the interview’s outset, he answered the question, “Why did you decide to go to law school?” with “Because I wanted to be a lawyer. I also wanted greater career opportunities than my BA offered me.” Left unmentioned is the issue of what made him want to be a lawyer, or why he thought that a JD might be a ticket to any careers beyond just practicing law. It’s a pity the interviewer didn’t ask about it, for the answer might have shed some light on whether he had any business going to law school in the first place, regardless of the current state of the legal job market.

He further mentions, “I believed the legal education industry’s sales pitch circa 2007-08 that lawyers will always be in demand and that bankruptcy will be a hot practice area when the economy is poor.” Insofar as this pitch was misinformed or even downright dishonest, I sympathize — but only so much. These claims were certainly plausible and believable, especially from the vantage point of that period, when the economic crisis was just taking off and the arguable folly of law school wasn’t yet obvious. Nonetheless, these were law school officials leading our man astray — not actual lawyers. While he can be forgiven for listening to this advice, given its supposedly reputable source, it’s fair to blame him for falling for it hook, line and sinker. He shouldn’t have believed the hype without consulting some practicing lawyers who could have set him straight. They would have been much less biased sources of advice; after all, as he himself puts it, “law grads do not have an economic interest in your attendance at law school. The law school always does.”

Could he have been expected to know any of this back in his younger, more callow days? I think so. Anytime a school that mires its students in debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars paints a glowing portrait of its program, without mentioning any caveats or sounding any cautionary tone, one should always take its cheerleading with a grain of salt. Is his naiveté nonetheless understandable? Certainly it is…but there is a more general principle here, one that applies to the analysis of whether one should apply to any academic program. The people running these programs have a vested interest in getting you in their doors; what they tell you isn’t necessarily to be trusted. You should never base your decision entirely on their word.

None of what I’ve said here should be taken to mean that law schools themselves don’t deserve a hefty share of the blame for so many of their graduates’ predicaments. It’s only right to criticize them for their lack of transparency, which can and does have destructive consequences. Yet that doesn’t absolve applicants of their own responsibility to do their homework before jumping in with both feet. That principle holds truer than ever these days, with law school enrollment plummeting and law school-bashing so popular. I salute all those who continue to warn young people of the perils of going to law school unprepared, or for the wrong reasons, or at all; they are performing a valuable service to the public. I just hope that the intended beneficiaries of these warnings continue to be smart enough to listen up — before it’s too late.

Featured image courtesy of [Michael Fleshman via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Are Law Schools to Blame for Graduates’ Struggles? appeared first on Law Street.

Shame on me. I only just stumbled upon the paper published in the Journal of Legal Education by University of Michigan law professor Sherman J. Clark last month, arguing that one of the perks of law school is that it helps each student “to thrive, to live a full and satisfying and meaningful life.” Through the Socratic method of lecturing, by training students to look at legal issues from the viewpoints of both parties in each case, by forcing them to confront the reality of uncertainty in both legal doctrines and empirical knowledge, and by teaching students certain ethics, law school helps students “explore the range of possible ways in which one might find meaning in or give meaning to life.”

I agree with Professor Sherman’s basic point, but I would have made the case for it rather differently. An otherwise well-written piece is riddled with highfalutin’, mealymouthed abstractions like, “Thinking well about what people care about and what things mean to them calls upon us to imagine more broadly what might matter and what it is possible for things to mean.” Upon closer inspection, these passages actually do seem to mean something, but they’ll probably strike the average prospective law school student as pretentious gobbledygook.

Nonetheless, I do find that my legal education comes in handy, and not only in, say, knowing my constitutional rights in case I get hassled by the police or knowing that oral contracts are legally binding, too. Mind you, I actually learned that last tidbit on TV when I was a child:

I think that doctrinal and practical legal knowledge proves useful in philosophical contexts, such as in discussions about what is the morally right thing to do in a particular situation. Certainly, the ability to navigate these often treacherous waters — the better to inform one’s ethical choices— is a skill that can help people to live life more meaningfully.

For example, among the basic doctrines that all first-year law students learn are the four elements of a negligence tort. In order to sue someone who’s harmed you through careless behavior, you, the plaintiff, have to prove that the defendant had a “duty of care” — i.e. that the defendant was legally required to take steps to avoid harming others. You also have to prove that the defendant breached that legal duty; that you suffered some form of harm that the law can correct; and that the defendant’s carelessness caused that harm. In later conversations and arguments with my fellow politics and philosophy geeks, the knowledge of those elements has served me in good stead. It’s a very philosophically sound way for the legal system to provide redress for people’s private grievances against each other.

Consider, for example, the duty of care requirement. It makes sense for the courts to require a plaintiff to establish that the defendant had such a responsibility before even proceeding with the lawsuit. Not every situation in life in which your behavior could affect others adversely should require you to spend resources guarding against such harm. Some situations in which people can get hurt are unforeseeable to everyone involved; sometimes it’s not within the alleged wrongdoer’s power to prevent them; sometimes the wrongdoer’s carelessness was only one factor that helped do the damage. The breach of duty criterion makes sense, too; if you’ve done everything the law requires you to do to avoiding hurting anyone, and someone gets hurt anyway, you arguably shouldn’t be liable. Similarly, if you’ve breached your duty of care, but there was miraculously no harm done, or if some harm occurred, but it isn’t clear that your carelessness actually made it happen, then the government shouldn’t force you to compensate the defendant.

The same can be said for the doctrine of “consideration,” which helps determine whether a contract will hold up in court. It basically means that courts can generally enforce agreements that involve some exchange of favors or benefits. Each party to the deal has to give up something of value to the other(s), be it money, products, services or what have you, or the court may not provide satisfaction in the event that one party doesn’t hold up his/her end. This general rule makes sense in light of nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” which essentially holds that the government should only restrict personal freedom when it’s necessary to prevent individuals from harming others. In the contractual context, if I make a deal with you that doesn’t require me to sacrifice anything to you in order for you to fulfill your obligations, you probably won’t make me any worse off if you break the agreement. In that case, the government has no business forcing you to pay me back.

These underpinnings of legal doctrines can be helpful in larger philosophical exchanges. In arguments over when government intervention can and cannot be justified, I often refer to certain aspects of tort law to bolster my position that Mill’s harm principle, as I understand it, is a better general rule than the more dogmatically libertarian non-aggression principle. Aggression, as I understand it, involves inflicting harm on others on purpose, whereas negligence entails mere carelessness rather than intentional harm. Yet people can do a world of damage to each other without going out of their way in order to do it. In my view, government has a role to play in trying to prevent negligent as well as deliberate harm.

It’s not only legal rules and doctrines that can serve useful purposes outside of a purely legal context. The nitty-gritty realities of legal practice offer their own useful insights to non-lawyers. My 1L Civil Procedure professor had the whole class read the novel A Civil Action, about a 1980s toxic tort lawsuit in Massachusetts gone tragically awry. One point that the novel drove home for me was the fact that personal-injury lawyers like the protagonist in the book are not charity workers. They’re profit-seeking businesspeople who earn their bread and butter by suing defendants with deep pockets, ones who can actually afford to cough up large sums of money in damages. This issue came up in a recent Facebook discussion, when I threw cold water on an intriguing proposal to abolish criminal law and leave the righting of interpersonal wrongs to civil courts. I pointed out that many heinous acts are perpetrated by low-income people whom ambulance chasers are not exactly in a hurry to sue. And anyway, what restitution could even willing lawyers hope to extract from poor defendants?

Of course, it’s no secret that legal knowledge and training can be helpful in any number of obvious public policy-related ways; Professor Sherman seems to have had a different set of advantages in mind. Nonetheless, although lawyers aren’t exactly known to the general public for being great philosophers, legal education does teach certain ways of thinking that should be appealing to anyone seeking to live a rational as well as a moral life.

Featured image courtesy of [Pedro Szekely via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Law School and the Unexamined Life appeared first on Law Street.

Seeing as how I’ve already argued that law schools should put more emphasis on teaching law students how to practice law, it’s only fair that I respond to a certain contrary viewpoint circulating on the interwebs. Above the Law blogger Elie Mystal—whom I’ve seen speak and whose commentary I enjoy—has dismissed as a “myth” the idea that students can graduate ready to practice sure-footedly right out of the law school gates. “I think the pedagogical infighting over ‘theory’ courses versus ‘practical’ courses,” Mystal writes, “is irrelevant when people are graduating from lower-ranked law schools with $100,000 (or more) in student loan debt.” In this critique, Mystal echoes University of Maryland law professor Robert Condlin, who in a recent research paper called the practice-ready concept a “millennialist fantasy.”

As Professor Condlin writes in the abstract to his paper, post-graduate job placement “is a function of a school’s academic reputation, not its curriculum, and the legal labor market will rebound only after the market as a whole has rebounded (and perhaps not then).” It’s the shortage of legal jobs out there that has got current law students and recent graduates (like me) at such a disadvantage, he points out, and “producing more ‘practice ready’ graduates will have no effect on the supply of jobs.” At any rate, “legal practice” itself is a multi-faceted thing, one that cannot be fit into a simple package that law schools can teach to all comers: “There are as many different types of practice as there are levels of readiness for it, and proponents of the proposal do not say which of these various possibilities (and combinations of possibilities) they have in mind.”

The problem with Mr. Mystal’s and Professor Condlin’s position is not its substance, which seems pretty sound to me. Rather, they go wrong in their choice of target: the notion that training law students to have at least some clue of how to practice law is meant to be “a panacea to the problems with legal education,” as Mystal puts it. Now, I’ve done a great deal of (highly worrisome) reading on this and related subjects over the past three-odd years. (Warnings about the follies of law school—including a lot of pretty snarky and entertaining ones—have been circulating widely through media both old and new since at least my 1L year.) In all that time, I’ve never heard or seen anyone suggest that more vocational legal schooling will be a cure-all for the problems in the legal job market.

Perhaps one shouldn’t blame Mystal, Condlin and their sympathizers for thinking otherwise. Many observers calling for law schools to operate more like trade schools don’t make it clear enough that they’re only addressing one particular problem with legal education, not all of its problems. Yet even if correcting this systemic error won’t boost the post-graduation employment rate by itself, that correction is still an inherently worthy goal. I always remember with amusement the early scene in the 1992 blockbuster My Cousin Vinny in which Joe Pesci’s titular character tells his long-suffering fiancée that law school teaches you what the law is, but not how to make use of it in the courtroom. As John Marshall Law School professor Alberto Bernabe has written, “Vinny is terrible at the things we do teach in law school, but very good at the things we don’t…[such as how to] interview clients, to gather facts, to prepare a theory of a case, to negotiate, to know when to ask a question and when to remain quiet, to cross examine a witness forcefully (but with charm) in order to expose the weaknesses in their testimony.”

Without exactly being an expert on the subject myself, I gather that Mystal and Condlin are essentially right on the facts. Common sense alone suggests that no greenhorn can emerge from any school already knowing exactly how to get the job done. At least some experience is a must for success in any position; there’s no reason to think that lawyering would be an exception to that rule. Even professional schools that focus on teaching practical skills can do only so much to prepare their students to hit the ground running after graduation day. As for law specifically, there are also many different kinds of legal practice, and law schools would be logistically hard pressed to teach all of the skills that are needed for work in all of those fields. Moreover, Mystal is right when he caustically points out that “Seton Hall could produce the most ‘practice ready’ graduates in the country, and those students still aren’t going to do as well as Columbia law students.”

Nonetheless, too many students nowadays graduate not really knowing how to be lawyers—including many who actually get jobs after graduating as well as the ones who don’t. This fact is problematic for overcharged clients and overworked attorneys who need even rookie associates to be able to walk and chew gum. Even if more practice-oriented education won’t magically conjure up a cascade of new law jobs, the legal academy should still adopt a more vocational approach, if only for the sake of productivity. It may not be possible to prepare students to practice with 100% competence when they’re hot and fresh out of the law school kitchen, but they can be made readier than they typically are today. Newly minted lawyers should not be put to shame by a Vincent LaGuardia Gambini.

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Featured image courtesy of [UBC Library Communications via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post So What If Law Schools Can’t Produce “Practice-Ready” Graduates? appeared first on Law Street.

About four years ago, one of the professors who gave me recommendations for my applications to law school described the institution to me as “trade school.” I imagine that my professor completed his legal studies quite some time ago (a hunch supported by his shock of white hair), because fewer and fewer legal beagles out there seem to share that assessment these days. Consider, for instance, the American Bar Association’s ongoing Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. The ABA formed the Task Force in the summer of 2012 to ascertain how law schools, and the Association itself, should address recent problems in the economics and the delivery of legal education. In comments submitted for the Task Force’s consideration, legal practitioners have frequently raised the issue of whether law schools presently do a good job of preparing students for legal practice. A consensus seems to be emerging that the answer is no.

As The Economist magazine recently noted, American law schools don’t exactly strive to teach practical legal skills, since firms traditionally train new attorneys themselves. Many in the legal academy believe in principle that the doctrinal approach that law schools generally take is a positive good. Syracuse University law professor Kevin Noble Maillard, for example, has argued that “law school is not a trade school,” that “people go to law school, pay tuition and graduate to become many things: educators, business leaders, politicians and, yes, attorneys,” and that law school “prepares people to become leaders in our society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as thinkers.”

Yet in these belt-tightening times, law firms are increasingly loath to pick up the academy’s slack (if only because clients are getting tired of footing the bill). I, for one, can’t say I blame them. My application referee may not have been quite on the money when he described law school as “trade school,” but more’s the pity. The constant refrain I hear from practicing attorneys is that they learned little or nothing about legal practice in law school, which defies common sense. Lawyering involves a lot of hands-on work that can’t be taught in the abstract, from drafting contracts to persuading clients of the right pleas to enter or claims to file. Given that an increasingly expensive legal education is almost universally required of anyone who wants to enter the profession, it’s only logical that law school should put greater emphasis on practical skills.

Professor Maillard’s position strikes me as rather misguided. He tellingly prefaced his statement with “at the risk of sounding ‘liberal artsy’”—which is exactly the point. There is no logical reason why law schools should consider it their mission to “emphasize educated citizenship.” That goal seems much better suited to undergraduate programs, which in any case cast a much wider net than law schools do and will thus reach more of the societal leaders of tomorrow. Training those leaders to have certain knowledge and to think in certain ways is desirable—but not all such budding public figures go to law school, and American law students have to go to college first anyway. It would make more sense to let them learn “educated citizenship” while earning their bachelor’s degrees and learn how to practice law in law school.

Some schools have already begun getting with the program, establishing practical skills courses and requirements. The ABA’s own Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has received a petition to amend law school accreditation standards. In addition to requiring J.D. students to earn 15 academic credits in experiential courses, the proposal would also require each student to take at least one law clinic or externship in order to graduate. This seems like an eminently wise proposition. Every time I’ve heard a lawyer tell me that he or she didn’t learn anything about legal practice in law school, I’ve wondered, “Didn’t you do any clinics?” Lawyers themselves seem to agree that clinic work is one of the main means by which law students can learn how to be attorneys while still in school. In a 2004 ABA study, lawyers who had been practicing for two or three years rated clinical courses their third most useful law school experience—behind legal jobs during summers and the school years, and ahead of legal writing courses and internships and traditional doctrinal courses.

So if clinics have so much potential to prepare law students for legal practice, then why are so many of them graduating from law school so operationally clueless? After a bit of digging, I found that—as I suspected—clinical training isn’t as widely accessible as it could or should be. According to data from the ABA and the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), only 15% of law schools presently require or guarantee legal clinic experience to all students. Yet according to Robert R. Kuehn, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, the same data indicate that 84% of law schools have the resources to offer clinical opportunities to all of their students at little or no additional cost in higher tuition.

So I look favorably on the proposal made by the aforementioned petition submitted to the ABA. Requiring all law students to get at least a taste of what lawyers actually do on the job will help make sure that graduates are ready to do what they are studying to do. It can also help give prospective law school applicants a better idea of what they may be getting themselves into—when they still have a chance to avoid it.

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Featured image courtesy of [walknboston via Wikipedia]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Should Law School Be More Like Trade School? appeared first on Law Street.

As luck would have it, the nonprofit work I’ve done since graduating from law school last spring has situated me among hordes of college students and recent graduates a few years younger than I am. The question I’ve gotten from them most often has been “Should I go to law school?” Without answering the question definitively for anyone, I gladly offer the advice that I wish I’d been given as a youngster. “Whatever you decide,” I tell them, “know this: being a skilled communicator or arguer, by itself, does not a lawyer make.”

I’ve had a knack for writing and oratory since I was young, excelling in public speaking and debate competitions and Model UN conferences throughout high school. In law school, I joined the Moot court Honor Society, participating in tournaments that simulated oral arguments before appeals courts. Over the years, I also became a decent writer (though of course, you can be the judge), contributing to student newspapers, opinion journals and online blogs. I’ve also been a history and politics buff since childhood, and many of the issues that enthralled me required legal knowledge to do them justice.

So what career development advice did I get from countless grownups around me? “Do law,” they said. “You’re good at speaking, writing and arguing; you’re into politics and history; you want to make a difference in the world. What better career could you have?”

From a young age, then, I leaned toward law as the most sensible career path for me. The fact that I developed a genuine interest in constitutional and international legal issues in college only further steered me in that direction. So after struggling to find other decent work for two years after graduating, I bit the bullet and went to law school.

A rude awakening awaited me. I found most of the course material—particularly during 1L—mind-numbingly boring; the four- or five-hour final exams, punishing; and the overall cost, staggering. What I learned about legal practice in summer internships and Moot Court didn’t shine much light at the end of the tunnel, either: demoralizing Bluebooking; poring through reams of cases, statutes and regulations written in stultifying prose; the endless formatting that goes into any halfway decent brief. Scandalously for me, even oral argument proved a letdown. You have no idea how aggravating it can be to argue with someone who outranks you and can crack the whip over your head at will. After years of debating my peers, I balked at the almost slavish deference that lawyers have to pay judges in court.

I also found that making losing arguments perfunctorily is not my strong suit. I know, I know—debaters are supposed to be good at that, no? Unlike academic debate, however, the law straitjackets its practitioners with binding rules that may have little actual merit. Together with real-world facts, these rules often require lawyers to make downright ridiculous arguments on their clients’ behalf. I still remember with annoyance my last Moot Court tournament, in which I had to argue with a straight face that my client, a fictional Pacific country, had somehow not violated international refugee law by apprehending boatloads of people who had gotten lost at sea while fleeing a series of natural disasters, detaining them for years without processing in an overcrowded, grimy facility with asbestos in its walls, and then transferring half of them to a neighboring country with a horrific human rights record. In the real world, although such lawyering is a dirty job, someone has to do it; I just increasingly doubt that I am that someone.

Once disillusioned, I remembered the days when elders urged me to study law because of how articulate and argumentative I was. Only then did it dawn on me that none of them were lawyers; none of them were especially qualified to recommend it as a career. I also realized that none of the actual lawyers I had known had ever encouraged me to follow their lead. Although they didn’t mention what a stressful, expensive bore law school is, none of them ever suggested that because I was a skilled writer, speaker and debater, law was the way to go. They knew better.

It’s not the fault of the first group that my decision to go to law school was so uninformed. They gave me the best advice they could (deluded as they were by television and films, which conceal the sheer mundanity of lawyers’ work). What’s more, I have no excuse for not contemplating the humdrum nuts and bolts of legal practice from the beginning. In the eleventh grade, my high school let me spend a day shadowing a high-powered attorney while she and her colleagues defended a tobacco company in a civil trial. The experience didn’t get my juices flowing. A bailiff had to admonish me to stop slouching and sit up straight; later on, I actually dozed off and had to be nudged awake by one of the attorneys. Yet I unforgivably missed this chance to learn a critical lesson the easy way. One necessary attribute for success as an attorney is, quite frankly, a very high tolerance for tedium—a quality I’ve never possessed in abundance.

The moral of my story is that students should find out what lawyers actually do daily before deciding to become one. Succeeding in law takes a lot more than an argumentative streak, a golden pen and a silver tongue, and not all attorneys even need those qualities. Drafting contracts and wills, doing real estate closings and other transactional legal tasks don’t require a gift for the gab. Moreover, lawyers aren’t the only ones who get paid to write, speak and argue well, or to advocate for deserving causes and people. The earlier prospective law school applicants are alerted to this reality, the less the workforce will be plagued by the scourge of mismatch—and the happier and more fulfilled a lot of people will be.

Featured image courtesy of [Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

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