Reading for the bar

More via Maggie's Farm:  It used to be commonplace to "read for the bar"--i.e., apprentice oneself to a practitioner rather than get a J.D.--but in recent decades the practice has all but disappeared.  It's a mystery why reading for the bar shouldn't be an excellent alternative.  Assuming the bar exam itself has any validity, why would we care how people learn to pass it?  Not everyone goes to an elite law school with a high bar pass rate, and yet we're comfortable handing out licenses to people from second-rate or third-rate schools as long as they're in the top portion of their class and can eke out a passing score on the bar exam.  It's not as though learning the law required expensive facilities or laboratories.  These days it doesn't even require a good law library, considering that absolutely anything a lawyer is likely to need can be found online.  I haven't done legal research in a book for decades.  There's some value in talking out legal principles in class with a good professor, but less than you might think, and anyway who says you'll have a good professor, outside of a handful of good schools?

This assumption that only an accredited school can disseminate professional knowledge is part of the attitude that denigrates home-schooling.  Judge by the results, sez I, not the trappings and the expensive salaries.  Clients are free to decide whether they want to hire a lawyer with a fancy degree, or just one who's proved he knows his stuff.

12 comments:

Joseph W. said...

But you also know enough economic history to know that if you allow any profession to form a guild with government backing...the first thing that profession is going to do is to restrict competition. Which of course they will dress up as "protecting the quality/integrity/whatever of the profession."

And making people go to a school...or for many kinds of practice an "accredited" school (the accreditation of which naturally makes it hellaciously expensive)...is well designed for that.

Adam Smith deplored the long apprenticeships required by craft guilds in his day...which were designed to that end. There's even a hint of it in the Hippocratic Oath....where the new physician promises to teach his knowledge to only a tiny little section of people, and promises not to perform surgery (apparently as a some kind of agreement between the physicians and surgeons).

(I've read that Hippocrates himself would probably not have approved....that he would teach medicine to anyone who paid his fee, and allegedly wrote treatises on surgery.)

Cass said...

When I was just a young lass, I dreamed of reading for the Virginia bar. But marrying a Marine and moving every 1-3 years doesn't really allow that sort of thing.

I still wish I had been able to do it, though.

Texan99 said...

You still could. You think very much like a lawyer and wouldn't find it at all difficult to learn enough to pass the bar.

Grim said...

You think very much like a lawyer...

Hey, now! You better smile when you say that! :)

Texan99 said...

Cassandra has an unusual ability to put her positions to the test of seeing how they'd work out when applied to other people with very different concerns. Clients can afford to take whatever position most suits their immediate purpose. Their lawyers can't; they have to be able to put themselves in the position of all the parties to a dispute in order to find rules and principles with universal appeal.

Cassandra consistently demonstrates her ability to understand the point of view of her opponent in an argument, which makes her more persuasive. Her "gut" and her head work well together: she's as abstract as she needs to be without being drawn into absurdities, and as humanely practical as she needs to be without giving in to sentimentality or unprincipled intuition. She's diligent about digging up facts to support her views and has a strong sense of which facts are relevant.

But maybe it's just as well she never attached the label of "lawyer" to this constellation of skills, so she never had to be insulted for them. (I invite you to imagine me smiling as I say that.)

Joseph W. said...

I once looked into the Virginia requirements for "reading for the bar". It's a lot more than just passing the bar exam; you have to work under the mentorship of a practicing lawyer for a number of years, and that lawyer has to report on your education to the bar. I think they designed it to be at least as onerous as law school - though not as expensive necessarily.

Cass said...

Thank you for the kind words, Tex :) They are all the more meaningful, coming from someone I respect so much.

A lot of my friends are lawyers, at least online. IRL I don't have occasion to socialize with attorneys - my job is in tech and my husband's has always had something to do with the Marines. But even several of the Marine wives I liked over the years were lawyers.

Joseph, that's why I said moving around pretty much precluded trying to read for the bar in Virginia :p Even attending 3 years of school would have been extremely difficult. An apprenticeship was out of the question unless I wanted to put that before my marriage (I was never tempted).

Grim said...

(I invite you to imagine me smiling as I say that.)

As Han Solo would say, I can imagine quite a lot. :)

Gringo said...

I have been the attorney liaison for my HOA for a number of years. I have been impressed at the way attorneys master a given set of knowledge- the reason the client has come to the attorney- and are able to apply this knowledge in terms of what is achievable under the law. I have never dealt with an attorney who has given us a false idea of what was achievable under the law.

Coupled with knowing what is achievable, the attorneys I have dealt with have been adept at looking at the issue from our opponents' point of view to find a path of compromise.

Unfortunately, some opponents do not want to compromise. One such opponent was saddled with ~ $200,000 in attorney fees- his fees plus the attorney fees the court awarded us.

Joseph W. said...

Yep. I just didn't want anyone walking away with the impression that our learned profession would ever let someone enter it just by knowing enough to do the job. "There must be hoops, and jumping through them."

douglas said...

We've brainwashed the masses to think college is the answer to all questions about what you're going to be when you grow up. I've mentioned to some of my students that you don't have to go to college to become an architect, but while they find that fact interesting, they don't seem to inclined to investigate that path. You have to work for accredited architects for a number of years, but I think it's quite a sound path if you find the right people to apprentice to.

Grim said...

That's true! That's what my uncle did. He sent his son to college (to become a civil engineer, which allowed him to join and improve the family business). But he himself did not go, I gather, which I always found difficult to reconcile with how intelligent and professional he was. But it is possible to do it, if you are the right kind of person.