This morning, I opened up my Facebook account only to be swamped by a flood of bar-exam-passage-celebrating statuses from my former law school classmates. What better occasion can there be to reflect on my own decision not to take the bar exam (at least not yet) and to pursue a career outside of legal practice — as well as the idea of going to law school?

As my blogger spotlight hopefully shows, I’ve never been completely sold on the idea of being a lawyer. My experiences in law school only solidified my goal of putting my substantive legal knowledge to use in another field — legal analysis at think tanks and media outlets, if I have my way. If your life experience is anything like mine, then this goal should remind you of another piece of advice that you’ve probably heard a million times: “You can do lots of things with a law degree.”

It’s hardly a myth that law degrees are versatile; Lord knows plenty of lawyers go on to make their marks in business, politics, banking, and sundry other occupations. The question is whether this versatility makes it a good idea for someone who would rather not become a lawyer to go to law school.

I’ve already gotten a very blunt answer to this question from an actual lawyer, and an Ivy League-trained one at that. Almost three years ago, I met a fellow alumnus of my alma mater who had graduated from Harvard Law about six months earlier and was working — surprise, surprise — as a highly-paid corporate lawyer in Manhattan. When I inquired as to how work was going, he said, “It’s funny you should ask that. I actually just gave my two weeks’ notice last Friday. I can’t take it anymore.” Taken aback, I asked why, and was treated to a litany of the horrors of corporate practice: the grueling (billable) hours, the grinding tedium, the office politics, the pressure to make it rain. Having gotten just a taste of the lawyer’s life, he already wanted out.

Presently, the conversation turned to my motivations for going to law school. I explained that, while I still considered public-interest litigation a goal of mine (I was still a 1L, young and foolish), I was exploring career options outside of legal practice as well. I mentioned that I had gone to law school in large part out of sheer intellectual interest in legal issues, primarily constitutional and international ones. With a rueful laugh, he interjected: “That’s a terrible reason to go to law school. If you’re smart, you’ll go to law school only if you really, really want to be a lawyer — period.”

Other 1Ls, faced with this advice from this high-achieving graduate of one of the two or three best law schools in America, would have seen the handwriting on the wall and left law school for sunnier climes. Though I wouldn’t have blamed them, I saw it through to the end, since I knew that much of the politically-oriented analysis that I wanted to do professionally would require firsthand familiarity with the laws of the land. As a general principle, however, I eventually had to concede his point — for the most part, at least — based on what I learned during the rest of my legal schooling. Given the stress and hard work that it entails and, above all, the sheer cost of enrollment, law school generally really is best suited to those who go through it in order to do the one kind of work that one absolutely needs a law degree to do: lawyering.

As law schools gravitate toward more practice-oriented instruction, traditional J.D. programs are less and less appropriate for people who want to know what lawyers know without necessarily doing what they do. Yet as University of New Mexico law professor Carol Parker recently noted, legal knowledge comes in awfully handy for people throughout the whole workforce. Law schools are now churning out thousands more new graduates than there are new legal practice jobs each year, with countless graduates ultimately putting their legal knowledge to use without actually practicing law. This development is unsurprising given the overall climate in the country. As the regulatory state continues to grow and governments and courts continue to pile rule on top of law on top of regulation, there is less and less reason for familiarity with this tangled web to be the exclusive preserve of attorneys, judges, clerks and law professors.

Professor Parker advocates “creating exciting programs that combine legal information with the arts, sciences, and other professional programs.” This idea makes sense to me. I would have been delighted to find a non-J.D. academic degree program — in a political science department, for instance — that would have focused on a more intellectually-oriented study of the law. The deal breaker for me, however, would have been that the program provide the same depth of familiarity with constitutional and international legal doctrines law that actual attorneys have. The ideal setup would have taught me fundamentally the same material that I learned in the constitutional and international law-oriented courses that I took in law school, but in a very different style, one more similar to the kinds of study — independent as well as course-based — that one finds in graduate school programs. There should especially be less emphasis on courses in which the entire final grade is based on one final exam result (a topic on which I plan to comment at greater length in the future).

In my last post, I argued that J.D. programs should focus more on training students to practice law and less on teaching them abstract values like “educated citizenship” and “leadership for the future.” In addition, either law schools or grad schools should consider offering “Master of Law” programs that would take the approach I advocate above. Let those who want to be lawyers learn just that, and let those who want to learn about the law for other purposes do likewise. To each, his own.

Featured image courtesy of [Marc Baronnet 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 We Need to Educate Non-Lawyers in the Law, Too 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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