Don’t Go To Law School¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Paul Campos
- ASIN: B009D13IA6
- ISBN: 1480163686
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009D13IA6
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
the only good reason to go to law school is to become a lawyer. — location: 125 ^ref-24735
Most of the time, law school is not merely a bad economic investment – it is also a waste of time in both intellectual and practical terms. — location: 232 ^ref-4351
Law school fails because law school pretends to be something it isn’t, and because those who profit from the status quo have every reason to keep pretending. — location: 238 ^ref-20180
these people have no formal training in how to do academic work beyond what they received in law school (which was none), nor do they know more about being lawyer than what they learned in law school, and in very short stints as big firm associates (which was next to nothing). — location: 243 ^ref-8076
legal academics almost never know anything about the business side of legal practice. — location: 253 ^ref-22735
by the second semester – of law school, any halfway able student has learned how to read and argue about appellate court opinions (this is what law schools call “thinking like a lawyer”), — location: 296 ^ref-54791
Most Americans, and particularly upper middle class Americans (i.e., the people who are most likely to go to law school), are socialized to be optimistic. — location: 366 ^ref-46044
First, look at the median outcome for graduates. — location: 383 ^ref-38319
use what I call the 80% rule. The 80% rule involves ignoring the top ten percent and the bottom ten percent of the class, and then asking what the range of possibilities are if you attend the school in question. — location: 384 ^ref-45958
Here are some things that very few lawyers ever do: — location: 421 ^ref-42958
Vindicate the legal rights of poor people. — location: 426 ^ref-28837
Use the legal system to fight social injustice. — location: 427 ^ref-58261
Approximately seven people who graduated from law school in 2011 got those kinds of jobs, and all of them finished near the top of their classes at Yale, Stanford, and Harvard respectively, — location: 455 ^ref-44441
the practice of law almost always consists of some combination of bureaucratic maze-running and small business development. — location: 459 ^ref-63161
One of the most cynical things law schools do is to play upon the best impulses of idealistic young people, by encouraging people to go to law school not to make money, but rather so they can learn to employ the legal system as a tool for creating a more just society. — location: 464 ^ref-57581
it’s becoming harder than ever to use a law degree to work for social change, — location: 480 ^ref-29306
if you want to work for social justice, you don’t need a law degree — location: 489 ^ref-16868
indeed at present getting a law degree is more likely to impede your pursuit of that goal than advance it. — location: 489 ^ref-12756
some law school graduates who don’t practice law do end up in jobs where their law degrees helped advance their careers. — location: 532 ^ref-48571
the only people who should go to law school are people who genuinely want to be lawyers, — location: 578 ^ref-37244
who have good reasons for believing this desire is based on some at least minimally realistic knowledge of what being a lawyer involves, — location: 578 ^ref-57219
who can do so at a reasonable price. — location: 579 ^ref-43700
look people up on the bar registry of the state where the school is located.). — location: 660 ^ref-44063
Yet the vast majority of these merit “scholarships” aren’t really scholarships at all – they are merely cross-subsidized tuition discounts. — location: 691 ^ref-6737
In short more than 90% of the students attending these two law schools are paying at least $150,000 in direct expenses to do so, and the large majority pays well more than $200,000. — location: 707 ^ref-56883
no less than one out of four of the students who graduate from these schools – 23% of Columbia grads, 27% of Northwestern grads -- finish law school with no law school debt whatsoever. — location: 712 ^ref-45669
on average, law students who come from lower SES backgrounds subsidize the tuition of those who come from privileged backgrounds. (This has been called the “reverse Robin Hood” principle). — location: 733 ^ref-46070
What sort of work are you likely to do in the first few years after you graduate? — location: 831 ^ref-6311
what kind of job you’re going to law school in order to get, — location: 1029 ^ref-9013
what your backup plan is if you don’t get that kind of job. — location: 1030 ^ref-29639