The small town lawyer used to loom large in the American psyche. When an American of a certain age pictured a lawyer he thought of Abraham Lincoln, Atticus Finch, Perry Mason, or Matlock.
These lawyers were regular guys who took the business that walked in the door. If you went to law school expecting to be Perry Mason or Matlock you were certainly disappointed by how boring your life was, but not by what you earned.
After L.A. Law and The Firm Americans stopped thinking of lawyers as solo practitioners and somehow decided that all lawyers were good looking, interesting, and super, extra rich. This drew a whole new wave of confused history majors from college to law school, and floated a thirty year boom in the number of law schools, the number of law students, tuition, and profits. This was awesome news for law schools, less so for everyone else.
It didn’t help that it was subsidized by the student-loan program.
I’ll wager that a high percentage of law school students over the past 30+ years had undergraduate degrees that left them unemployable. Law school was seen as a step towards earning a living.
I’ve certainly been preaching the “get a useful degree, preferably in a technical field” gospel to my kids for some time now, despite having a JD. It’s also a very rough job market for graduates right now, so that’s another reason not to go into the profession.
Gasp, Rand, are you implying that federal subsidies expands the money supply and raises the cost of education?
One would think that the same principle applies to other elements of federal subsidies, such as real estate and health care…
But that twisted logic is easily refuted by a link to the Atlantic.
Far and away, the most terrifying thing in the movie “The Devil’s Advocate” was when Al Pacino’s character spoke the following: “Did you know there are more students in law school than lawyers walking the Earth?”
This surprises me. At a time of Peak Regulation I would think that the demand for lawyers would be near-infinite?