Too Many Lawyers? The Free Market has a Solution
September 09, 2009
Having too many lawyers is not just bad for society: It is bad for the lawyers. Too many lawyers means too few jobs. Life is tough out there for nearly every recent law school graduate. Many people have offered many solutions.
Most of these solutions are paternalistic. They involve quotas. Limit the number of law schools, or number of income law students, they say. There's a better solution that involves the free market: Get the government out of the student loan business.
The federal government provides direct student aid to students. It also guarantees most private loans. Thus, companies like Sallie Mae loan money to a student knowing that even in default, Sallie Mae will get paid. Money is loose, easy, and to a 22-year-old 1L, seems free.
Thus, law schools may raise tuition each year. The students are spending other people's money. Who even notices?
Won't getting the government out of student lending mean that law will be a profession of those who were lucky enough to be born into rich families? I don't think so.
Schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford will always serve the richies. The richies will go to the Holy Trinity on mom or dad's dime. Other people will attend law schools that cut cost.
In most law schools, a full teaching load for a professor is six hours. Six hours - one-seventh of the average man's work week, and an even smaller fraction of a lawyer's work week. That's not even counting a professor's summers off; and Christmas break; and sabbaticals; and every politically-correct holiday.
Yes, professors hold office hours and answers e-mails. But a professor who "works" more than 20 hours each week is doing it wrong. Those same professors make six figures.
A school who wanted to save money would cut salaries in half, or double the professorial work load. Who knows: Maybe lawyers would teach law school part time.
WIth students paying with their own money, maybe these law schools would actually teach lawyering. I could have gotten into any philosophy program in the country. If I wanted to hear philosophy of law, I'd have gone to graduate school. If I wanted to hear embarassingly amateurish philosophy of law - Well, I'd never have paid for it; but that's what you get at law school.
Part-time programs would also increase the quality of lawyers and lawyering. Imagine if you had to actually think about whether you wanted to be a lawyer? A part-time law student goes to work, and then to class. You think that person doesn't ask himself, every freaking day, "Is this worth it? Is this what I really want?"
The current system is defined by a word - thoughtlessness. The government gives baby-faced student "free" money, and tells them to let the good times roll. Law schools gladly take their money. What we see in the legal market is but an echo of the melody.