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Obama Starts a Dialog
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The author of this post is George Leef.
If two years of law school are better than three, why not whittle away more?
In the movie Catch Me If You Can the protagonist does a number of things he legally isn't allowed to do because he doesn't have the right education and license. The movie was based on the actual exploits of Frank Abagnale who, among other things, got a job in the Louisiana attorney general's office by claiming to have graduated from Harvard Law School.
He hadn't gone to Harvard or any other law school, but nevertheless succeeded in passing the bar exam in Louisiana. Abagnale never handled any cases, though, and decided it was best for him to leave the AG's office when an attorney who really had gone to Harvard started making inquiries about him.
In some instances, people who haven't been to law school have successfully handled real cases. What must surely be the ultimate in that regard is Samuel Sloan's successful argument before the United States Supreme Court in his own stock trading case back in 1978, noted here. As of 2010, the Supreme Court only allows licensed attorneys to argue cases, but what we learn from Sloan and Abagnale is that having gone to law school is not a necessary condition for learning a lot about the law.
All of that is pertinent to an idea that President Obama recently advanced - that law school might be shortened from three years to two. The president argued that two years of classroom study are sufficient and that for the third year students "would be better off clerking or practicing in a firm even if they weren't getting paid that much, but that step alone would reduce the costs for the student."
All right, but if there is nothing sacred in three years of full-time study, why stop at whittling off just one year? Could law school teach future attorneys what they need to know in less than two years? And what about the possibility of allowing people to study on their own, without ever setting foot in a law school?
If you go back in American history, you find that most lawyers learned their profession without any formal legal education. Clarence Darrow, for example, spent just one semester at the University of Michigan Law School before leaving to study the law as an apprentice in a Youngstown, Ohio, firm.
Darrow was a tremendous courtroom lawyer, but there was nothing unusual about his legal training. In his day, most lawyers began by working in firms with legal veterans. Law schools existed, but most lawyers bypassed them in favor of immediate, practical immersion in legal work.
That might have worked in the old days, some readers are probably thinking, but the law is far more voluminous today. Doesn't that fact mean that at least a couple of years of study in law school is necessary before someone can be competent to advise or represent others? No, it doesn't, for, as many lawyers will acknowledge, the years spent in law school are an unnecessary (and very expensive) prelude to the actual learning they need. Hans Bader, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that his years at Harvard were largely wasted and the need to study for the bar exam was the beginning of his real legal education.
Six states permit any individual to sit for the bar exam with or without a law degree in hand (California, Maine, New York, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming). The rest only allow those who have graduated from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) to take it. And thus we meet the villain of the piece.
Back in 1921, the ABA decided to deal with the "problem" of too much competition by flexing its lobbying muscles in state legislatures in favor of laws restricting the bar exam to people who had graduated from an ABA accredited school. Less costly avenues into the legal profession (individual study, apprenticeship, and law school programs shorter than three years) were to be blocked off, supposedly to improve the quality of lawyers.
So the norm of law school lasting three years came about because the professional guild for lawyers insisted upon it, not because it was found to be ideal through competition.
President Obama couched his argument for reducing the time spent in law school only in terms of student costs. That isn't a bad reason, but the better reason is that it is a waste of resources to keep intelligent people stuck in a formal schooling environment when they could be doing useful work. We lose the benefit of work the students would otherwise do as well as the work that law school faculty members and administrators would otherwise do if they didn't have captive students.
Law school is not the only kind of training where we have permitted special interest groups to enrich themselves by mandating longer period of formal education than is necessary. Medical school appears to be another instance. In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Doctors Ezekiel Emanuel and Victor Fuchs write that there is "substantial waste in the education and training" of physicians in America and stated that the average time that students spend in medical education could be cut by 30 percent without any adverse effect on the quality of care.
Why does medical school last four years? Mostly because the Flexner Report in 1910 recommended four years as part of an effort at thinning the ranks of medical schools and doctors - an effort similar to the ABA's move. Emanuel and Fuchs contend that doctors can be well trained in three years and note that Texas Tech and two Canadian schools now offer 3-year programs.
What about Ph.D. programs? Many people complain that universities deliberately make the path to that degree longer and more costly than is necessary to develop expertise in a field. That suits the universities nicely because, as doctoral student Brian Gatten explained in this New York Times piece, "Universities need us as cheap labor to teach their undergraduates, and frankly, we need to be needed because there isn't another way for us to fund our education." Graduate programs benefit from having the student dogs chase their tails for a long time, but are all the years of doing so necessary to prepare future college professors? Under the Bologna System, Europeans can typically get their doctoral degrees in five years, but the average time in the U.S. is over seven years.
Across the board, America has tended to favor lengthy and often mandatory formal education programs. Formal education does have its benefits, but it's also subject to diminishing returns and the trade-off with other uses of time and resources.
Seldom do I agree with President Obama, but with regard to law school - and many other educational programs - he has opened discussion on a key topic: How much time is optimal?
Go Back
The author of this post is George Leef.
If two years of law school are better than three, why not whittle away more?
In the movie Catch Me If You Can the protagonist does a number of things he legally isn't allowed to do because he doesn't have the right education and license. The movie was based on the actual exploits of Frank Abagnale who, among other things, got a job in the Louisiana attorney general's office by claiming to have graduated from Harvard Law School.
He hadn't gone to Harvard or any other law school, but nevertheless succeeded in passing the bar exam in Louisiana. Abagnale never handled any cases, though, and decided it was best for him to leave the AG's office when an attorney who really had gone to Harvard started making inquiries about him.
In some instances, people who haven't been to law school have successfully handled real cases. What must surely be the ultimate in that regard is Samuel Sloan's successful argument before the United States Supreme Court in his own stock trading case back in 1978, noted here. As of 2010, the Supreme Court only allows licensed attorneys to argue cases, but what we learn from Sloan and Abagnale is that having gone to law school is not a necessary condition for learning a lot about the law.
All of that is pertinent to an idea that President Obama recently advanced - that law school might be shortened from three years to two. The president argued that two years of classroom study are sufficient and that for the third year students "would be better off clerking or practicing in a firm even if they weren't getting paid that much, but that step alone would reduce the costs for the student."
All right, but if there is nothing sacred in three years of full-time study, why stop at whittling off just one year? Could law school teach future attorneys what they need to know in less than two years? And what about the possibility of allowing people to study on their own, without ever setting foot in a law school?
If you go back in American history, you find that most lawyers learned their profession without any formal legal education. Clarence Darrow, for example, spent just one semester at the University of Michigan Law School before leaving to study the law as an apprentice in a Youngstown, Ohio, firm.
Darrow was a tremendous courtroom lawyer, but there was nothing unusual about his legal training. In his day, most lawyers began by working in firms with legal veterans. Law schools existed, but most lawyers bypassed them in favor of immediate, practical immersion in legal work.
That might have worked in the old days, some readers are probably thinking, but the law is far more voluminous today. Doesn't that fact mean that at least a couple of years of study in law school is necessary before someone can be competent to advise or represent others? No, it doesn't, for, as many lawyers will acknowledge, the years spent in law school are an unnecessary (and very expensive) prelude to the actual learning they need. Hans Bader, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that his years at Harvard were largely wasted and the need to study for the bar exam was the beginning of his real legal education.
Six states permit any individual to sit for the bar exam with or without a law degree in hand (California, Maine, New York, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming). The rest only allow those who have graduated from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) to take it. And thus we meet the villain of the piece.
Back in 1921, the ABA decided to deal with the "problem" of too much competition by flexing its lobbying muscles in state legislatures in favor of laws restricting the bar exam to people who had graduated from an ABA accredited school. Less costly avenues into the legal profession (individual study, apprenticeship, and law school programs shorter than three years) were to be blocked off, supposedly to improve the quality of lawyers.
So the norm of law school lasting three years came about because the professional guild for lawyers insisted upon it, not because it was found to be ideal through competition.
President Obama couched his argument for reducing the time spent in law school only in terms of student costs. That isn't a bad reason, but the better reason is that it is a waste of resources to keep intelligent people stuck in a formal schooling environment when they could be doing useful work. We lose the benefit of work the students would otherwise do as well as the work that law school faculty members and administrators would otherwise do if they didn't have captive students.
Law school is not the only kind of training where we have permitted special interest groups to enrich themselves by mandating longer period of formal education than is necessary. Medical school appears to be another instance. In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Doctors Ezekiel Emanuel and Victor Fuchs write that there is "substantial waste in the education and training" of physicians in America and stated that the average time that students spend in medical education could be cut by 30 percent without any adverse effect on the quality of care.
Why does medical school last four years? Mostly because the Flexner Report in 1910 recommended four years as part of an effort at thinning the ranks of medical schools and doctors - an effort similar to the ABA's move. Emanuel and Fuchs contend that doctors can be well trained in three years and note that Texas Tech and two Canadian schools now offer 3-year programs.
What about Ph.D. programs? Many people complain that universities deliberately make the path to that degree longer and more costly than is necessary to develop expertise in a field. That suits the universities nicely because, as doctoral student Brian Gatten explained in this New York Times piece, "Universities need us as cheap labor to teach their undergraduates, and frankly, we need to be needed because there isn't another way for us to fund our education." Graduate programs benefit from having the student dogs chase their tails for a long time, but are all the years of doing so necessary to prepare future college professors? Under the Bologna System, Europeans can typically get their doctoral degrees in five years, but the average time in the U.S. is over seven years.
Across the board, America has tended to favor lengthy and often mandatory formal education programs. Formal education does have its benefits, but it's also subject to diminishing returns and the trade-off with other uses of time and resources.
Seldom do I agree with President Obama, but with regard to law school - and many other educational programs - he has opened discussion on a key topic: How much time is optimal?
| Political Grudges Are Nothing New | John William Pope Center Guest Editorial, Editorials, Op-Ed & Politics | Friday Interview: Common Core Questions Covered |
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