Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately, the primary value of law school is signaling, but it’s a big one. You could skip law school in California and take the Baby Bar and become a “real lawyer” in the sense you could legally do everything any other lawyer can do. But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality.

E.g. in the recent leaked conversation between Macron and Putin: https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/leaked-call-reveals-fiery-exch...

> Putin quickly turned the conversation to “our dear colleague Mr. Zelensky,” accusing the Ukrainian president of “lying” to Macron about his intention to implement the Minsk Accords, which had sought to end the war in the Donbas region.

> Putin then took issue with Zelensky’s apparent refusal to negotiate with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian separatists, which infuriated the French president and prompted him to exclaim in audible frustration: “I don’t know where your lawyer learned law!”

> But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality.

This isn't that different from any other profession though. A doctor, professor, or engineer from Harvard or Stanford etc is going to get a lot more respect than the one had no schooling at all (even absent licensing requirements).

"don't worry, I watched a bunch of youtube videos on this."

Yeah, it's totally just like all of these no-degree developers, except when there's a failure in your lawyering, you might get sued, disbarred, and also get jail time for being incompetent in addition to potentially ruining someone else's life, or at least wasting a lot of their time.

I also got the idea from law school that a lot of going to law school is to show to the courts that you've shown you're not going to waste the legal system's time by not knowing how to follow all the procedure and how to write legal documents you submit to the court. The rules of civil litigation and how you must write documents are hideously complicated due to having been built up over centuries to strike a balance between unnecessary and time wasting game playing by very crafty players and giving parties a fair chance to prove their case.

For example, the clerk at the civil litigation court is often like a compiler that will just ignore your document if you didn't do it just right. It's like writing a nice big long program and the compiler's only response is to segmentation fault on you if you made any error in the filing. I bet these court clerks receive lots and lots of filings that are a big unprofessional mess that they just throw in the trash.

> built up over centuries to strike a balance between unnecessary and time wasting game playing by very crafty players and giving parties a fair chance

Did they strike a balance? Or did they just make it pay to play?

"I got my legal degree from Legal Eagle"

I'd say all three of those cases are a bit different from each other and from law. Schools do make a difference for doctors but you still have an MD (or whatever) and can probably earn a pretty decent living in the US even if you went to a lower-ranged US school and aren't a total hack. Yes, academia is pretty status conscious. Engineering (especially software) is more forgiving. The common wisdom around law is that if you can't get into a better school and ideally get a prestigious clerkship, it may not be a great professional choice.

In medicine, residencies matter, and good ones in specialties are competitive. Income ranges for MDs vary tremendously by specialty, with GPs / FPs closer to the bottom.

In computer science, the current hawtness is a FANG pedigree, though the bloom may be comming off that rose. (I've been predichoping that for a decade, salt appropriately.)

I'm not sure what the situation for hard engineering (EE, ME, civil, aero, petroleum, etc.) is, though I'd suspect there's benefit to a larger firm initially. See the MBA route through McKinsey or Big N consultancies for example.

Not in computer science. In the valley, Stanford and UCB graduates are common. I know many self-taught ones that get just as much respect.

It's tangential but what a confusingly written article, it could have very well been machine translated and I'd have been none the wiser.

The jump from bringing up Zelensky not dealing with Donbass situation as per agreement to Macron and him exclaiming that he doesn't know where Putin's lawyer learned law is comical in its absurdity too.

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