Today the New York Times has a debate among legal scholars considering whether three years of law school, followed by the bar exam, should be required to enter the legal profession.
The best contribution is from libertarian George Leef, who argues that we should allow anyone to take the bar exam. As he points out, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most lawyers didn’t go to law school at all; they just apprenticed and learned how to practice law by working in a law firm. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be so now — except, of course, that the legal profession has been cartelized by the American Bar Association. Leef’s proposal would be an appropriate first step toward the libertarian ideal, which wouldn’t even require a bar exam.
Meanwhile, it’s funny to see law professors try to defend the status quo, arguing, almost in as many words, that students should be thrilled to pay $200,000 for three years of left-wing indoctrination and shouldn’t care so much about whether they’ll be able to practice law afterward — which probably they won’t be able to, at least not at a salary that comes anywhere near those of their privileged professors.
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Funny, back in 1700′s when John Marshall and John Adams learned law, there were just some basic common law to read and understand. This was really the wild west. Now, we have too many different legislations and other statues that there is no way anyone could just read and learn. Heck, Madison just got a couple of books from Jefferson to learn about finance issues. He kept notes about facts in his hat. We now have so many small and little rulings and such that no one can know anything.
Right on, Huebert. Great post.
Lawyers need to be imortant. What better way to make yourself important than to have a test!
If the laws were easy to interpret and understand, then there would be no need for lawyers at all. So lawyers have a great incentive in seeing to it that we’ve as many laws as possible and that they are as obscure as possible.
Thanks for the morale boost. I’m taking the Mississippi Bar Exam next week.
In Virginia you can take the bar exam without attending law school, but you apprentice, aka “reading
law” with a lawyer for a lengthy period of time. According to the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners, of the almost 13,000 persons taking the Va. bar exam between 2000-2009 only 25 were law readers; the others graduated from law school. Anyone interested can read more details of this law reader memorandum: http://www.vbbe.state.va.us/reader/readermemo.html
Good luck on the bar exam guys.
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