<p>"Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being "a good start"? Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys."</p>
<p>How</a> many lawyers does it take ... - The Denver Post</p>
<p>This article is pretty redundant, not really saying anything most here don’t know already. Additionally, the information was as relevant in boom times as it is now, merely because they choose to focus on Colorado law schools. They’ve never been the best sources of employment for their graduates, and it’s not like they’re expected to be so now.</p>
<p>Easy solution; make the bar exam harder.</p>
<p>Interesting that the legal profession’s circumstances are exactly opposite the medical profession’s circumstances.</p>
<p>Hint to lawyers; when everyone and his idiot cousin is one, it is not a “learned profession”.</p>
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<p>The bar exam is actually pretty hard, with passage rates being pretty low for lower ranked schools. The problem is that the ABA liberally allows for the creation of more and more law schools, which ostensibly provide the path to big bucks, but really don’t. Prospective students, fooled by misleading advertisements and career statistics, go into these programs with unrealistic expectations.</p>
<p>PS. It’s hard calling the “medical profession” a learned one either, given how ridiculously easy it is to backdoor in through off-shore schools.</p>
<p>If the bar exam were hard enough, there would be no surplus of lawyers.</p>
<p>Simple listing of the bar exam pass rate by school would then deter people from being sucked in by poor schools’ claims.</p>
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<p>Ummm… the USNews already does this. It’s called the bar passage rate per school.</p>
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<p>Now that’s just circular reasoning, and I hope you understand why.</p>
<p>Premise 1: There are too many lawyers.
Premise 2: If the bar exam is hard enough, there will not be too many lawyers.
Conclusion: Make the bar exam harder.</p>
<p>My Response: The bar exam is already hard enough, as indicated by the bar passage rates.
Your response: If the bar exam is hard enough, there will not be too many lawyers.</p>
<p>You’re just repeating yourself now. That doesn’t help you at all. Posting actual evidence does. Cute little lines like, “Hint to lawyers; when everyone and his idiot cousin is one, it is not a ‘learned profession,’” aren’t going to save you.</p>
<p>“Make the bar exam harder” is not a conclusion, it is a recommended action to remedy a problem; too many lawyers.</p>
<p>Are you saying that making the bar exam harder will not reduce the supply of lawyers?</p>
<p>“Circular reasoning” is the formal logical fallacy where the premise presusposes the conclusion. I am making a scientific recommendation regarding a mechanism for reducing the population of an undesirable species.</p>
<p>Premise 1: There are too any white tailed deer
Premise 2: If there is more hunting pressure, the population of white tailed deer will decline
Conclusion: Extend the hunting season</p>
<p>Is this “circular reasoning”?</p>
<p>And lawyers wonder why they are despised…</p>
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<p>Nope. I’m saying that it need not be any harder, as I think it sufficiently serves its purpose as it is. </p>
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<p>Circular reasoning also occurs when you repeat the premise or conclusion, verbatim, even after it has been denied. </p>
<p>I don’t care that you despise me, but at least despise me for the right reason. Right now, you’re despising me because you can’t seem to win a petty interwebz fight. That’s pretty sad. Also, it’s even sadder that you posted your cute little line without expecting people to call you out on it.</p>
<p>You are confusing “circular reasoning”, a well defined formal logical fallacy, with “belabor the point” a more casual critque of a verbal argument. </p>
<p>What do you consider the purpose of the bar exam?</p>
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<p>Circular reasoning is both formal and informal. Depends on what language you’re using. </p>
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<p>I’m unsure, but that I cannot give a positive definition does not preclude my giving a negative definition, or at least denying that the sole purpose is what you’re arguing for.</p>
<p>The quality control should happen at the accreditation level. In CA, you can take the bar even without a JD, but the number of people who pass along those lines is in the single digits annually. Compare this to a 90%+ bar passage rate at schools like SLS, and you’ll see the bar exam is not the problem. </p>
<p>But yes, if I saw a 90%+ bar passage rate from the People’s College of Law, I’d see where you’re coming from.</p>
<p>This really shouldn’t encourage or discourage anyone who is seriously considering becoming a lawyer. Times are tough everywhere so its not shocking.</p>
<p>There are two problems going on as to the glut of lawyers</p>
<p>First, law schools will take any major.
Secondly, it is fairly cheap to educated a lawyer in school vs other professions such as medicine or even hard scientists.</p>
<p>Finally, as a result, many schools are rushing to catch the “gold rush” in establishing new law schools. Sadly, the American Bar Association has not put a stop to this,which means that we have a major glut of lawyers. If the ABA would do their job, we wouldn’t have this problem. No wonder there is a lawsuit filed every 6 seconds in this country.</p>
<p>I was looking to go into Law…</p>
<p>How much does the prestige of your school matter?</p>
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<p>Why does this matter? People from diverse majors routinely become excellent lawyers and legal academics. It’s hard for me to imagine that your typical majors actually make a difference, or at least to imagine a proof demonstrating that while excluding any taint of selection bias.</p>
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<p>A lot.</p>
<p>I only mentioned the diversity of majors because it allows for a large number of potential applicants for law schools. It certainly, but itself, isn’t the only reason for the plethora of law schools.</p>
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<p>Hmmmm. Didn’t think of it that way. </p>
<p>I think, at bottom, you have it right. There are way too many law schools, and way too many law schools being created. So long as that occurs, LSAT and GPA will continue to meaningless gatekeepers, with their only substantive role being that they restrict access to the most esteemed institutions. What really needs to be done is some sort of regulatory framework for managing the stuff that lower-ranked schools are allowed to do.</p>
<p>Is it possible for a biology major to go to a prestigious law school if he has the LSAT score?</p>
<p>I don’t even get why this whole law school proliferation is a problem for anyone to solve. The only people really hurt by this are the people graduating from the bottom-ranked law schools. Are wages for lawyers from prestigious schools going to go down because a firm could theoretically pay an inferior lawyer (or at least one poses a much greater risk of incompetence) less money to do a crappier job? Of course not.</p>
<p>This is no concern for people who really want to be lawyers and have the smarts to do it.</p>
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<p>Well… that’s not true either these days. Many classmates of mine at Columbia/NYU are jobless at the moment. </p>
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<p>The problem is the dirty tactics used by low ranked schools in enticing students. They use misleading job statistics, scholarships with many strings attached, brutal curves, etc. It’s not so much the students’ fault as it is the law schools’, though I think both have roles in this mess.</p>
<p>The author makes the following claim: “Unlike other fields such as medicine and public health, whose pre-eminent professional organizations do not have control over the accreditation of schools and programs, the ABA exercises unfettered power over law school accreditation. It is an unusual arrangement. This is why the ABA should get out of the accreditation business completely.”</p>
<p>If Wikipedia is to be believed, the author seems to be exagerating:</p>
<p>“All medical schools within the United States must be accredited by one of two organizations. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), jointly administered by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association, accredits MD schools, while the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation of the American Osteopathic Association accredits osteopathic (D.O.) schools. There are presently 130 M.D. programs and 28 osteopathic programs in the U.S.”</p>