Law school: Reconsidering legal education and licensing

Unfortunately, I may never achieve the same heights as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former California Gov. Pete Wilson or former Memphis Congressman Harold Ford. I took the bar for the first time in February, and I passed. I can assure you, however, that it was no easy undertaking.

Now, no one likes lawyers. (Although, I hope my mother still likes me.)

And perhaps you think, the less of them, the better. (I am sorry for adding to their number; I promise I won't do too much damage).

But why do we even bother licensing lawyers? Certainly, you as a client can't rely simply on someone passing the bar to provide good legal counsel. Cases are handled by lawyers of different specialties, and I wouldn't recommend a wills and estates attorney defend you if you get prosecuted for murder. Even then, malpractice suits abound.

Most cases are, in fact, settled, and negotiation is not a subject tested on the bar, nor even required in law schools. And for every case that goes to court, there is a winner and a loser. Both passed the bar.

And why do we in Tennessee throw in the requirement that someone has had to go to law school? If someone is brilliant enough to pass the bar on their own, why compel them to go into thousands of dollars of debt? Vanderbilt Law School, my alma mater and ranked consistently in the Top 20 law schools in the country, estimates that the cost of attendance for 2013-14 is $71,944 (off a base of roughly $50,000 tuition). For context, 75 percent of Americans make less than $50,000 a year.

Luckily, the University of Tennessee Law School's tuition is less than $14,000 a year for residents - but it's still $42,000 you have to pay while out of the work force for three years.

The rap on law school is that they scare you to death the first year, they work you to death the second year, and then they bore you to death the third year. Northwestern Law School has eliminated the boredom, avoiding the avoidable third year. Washington and Lee University, which has graduated more American Bar Association presidents than any other law school, has actually made its third year much more practice-oriented.

While Washington and Lee is reacting to the fact that the legal market isn't able to sustain the same amount of lawyers entering the field every year, schools collecting hefty tuitions don't have much incentive to drop a third year of being paid so long as they enjoy the kind of monopoly that state power gives them. With the bar, however, students graduate law school and then have to spend an additional summer not working for clients and instead studying for the bar.

Other states recognize the value of their law schools. Wisconsin, for example, automatically admits to the bar students who graduated from Marquette or University of Wisconsin law schools. At the very least, law schools ought to consider an abbreviated last semester for their students, who should take the bar in February, one of the two times it's offered in the year, so that they can be licensed to practice - and represent clients - by the time they graduate in June.

Of course, in a previous era, lawyers such as Andrew Jackson, who served on the Tennessee Supreme Court, never even went to college - they apprenticed with local attorneys and proved their mettle through experience. In time, however, the expansion and professionalization of the lawyers' guild has created the bar as a barrier to entry to the profession.

Which brings us around to the start of this column: Lawyers are unpopular - the numerous jokes about them attest to that. But one reason may be that they are expensive. That is partially because the supply is artificially kept low, and partially because lawyers have to pay off their serious debts. If we were to eliminate licensure altogether, clients would still generally get what they pay for, but they might end up paying less.

Still, Tennessee is a state that goes so far as to regulate "shampoo technicians." Yes, the person who shampoos your hair at the salon requires a license. So, perhaps we're not that interested in breaking up the guilds, after all.

Grant Everett Starrett is a lawyer in Franklin, Tenn.

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