Awkward Utopia

We spoke briefly after last meeting about how there were somehow criminal penalties for copyright infringement, and I have written recently about the extraordinary lengths the US will no go to in prosecuting such infringement at the behest of the entertainment industries. I then went berserk about how public education is criminally negligent for producing so many people who are defenseless against mortgages they don’t (can’t?) read, taxes they don’t understand, and laws they are at the mercy of.

Professor Harrison, who teaches at UF Law, has an economics PhD, and has had significant impact in his work, writes on his blog recently (my comments in italics):

Unless public legal education is viewed as a huge and ill-conceived method of redistributing income from lower and middle income groups to relatively higher income groups, its only purpose can be to enhance public welfare. In this sense, both faculty and students are means to an end. Both are necessary components and their efforts should complement each other.

Within the faculty student relationship, though, there is a huge imbalance. Students are relegated to a distant second place. The bias in favor of faculty desires undercuts this complementary relationship and also reduces the return to the public investment.

For example:

1. The courses offered are what faculty want to teach, not necessarily what is needed to best prepare students.

2. Teaching times are dictated by faculty. Generally they want to teach from 10-3 on Tues. – Fri. Thus, classes conflict while there are stretches of time when classrooms are empty. [

3. Scheduling is dictated by faculty. For example, a 4 credit course may be offered in two two hour sessions. Especially for first year students taking standard courses (as opposed to a skills course) this is pedagogically indefensible and only exists because of a desire to minimize student contact days. [...]
7. The use of machine graded, multiple choice exams with recycled questions can hardly be reconciled with an education designed to stress analysis and critical thinking. Law School is, after all, a graduate level education. Those exams, however, can be reconciled with a desire to avoid grading.

I generally agree with this analysis. What it boils down to is the insulation of academia from the market. As such, the best we can hope for is that law schools will somehow read its price signals (its demands) and be able to respond (supply the demands). As it stands, it seems to me that Professor Harrison is right: the bias in favor of faculty preternaturally distorts the results. Such is the institution.

A huge sampling of my own friends indicates that law school does precious little to prepare its graduates, whether they hail from Florida or Harvard, for the rigors of practice, i.e. applying the law. As Admiral Kirk said in Star Trek II,  and as I endlessly quote, “We learn by doing.”

This isn’t even addressing the faculty intransigence in teaching classes at “unnatural” hours of the day, that is, whatever isn’t TWR 1000-1500 hours as you say. This condenses our schedules and forces us to generalize our education in many cases as opposed to specializing in something we want to practice. For instance, I would love to take Copyright Law: but there are a billion classes that through that 7th period (1400 hours)? It’s criminal.

So, speaking of criminal liability, the truly nefarious force here is the licensing of our legal professionals. Requiring them to go to law school is indeed simply a redistribution of wealth if they aren’t worth more in what they can do afterwards. They ARE worth more afterwards, but only because of the goodwill asset value of a degree. Take the licensing requirements away, let anyone take the bar, or better yet, do away with the bar completely, and you suddenly have no shortage of public defenders.

Given the extraordinary opportunity cost, those who advocate for licensing of lawyers seem like the criminals to me…..