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Comment by mhays | Hacker News Reader

To cite my own experience, I pay around $30,000 a year for my instate J.D. program. My school-appointed mentor, who graduated in 2004, paid $4,000 a year.

I see this as unfair, not only in the sense that my generation has to take out extraordinary loans to access education, but also in the sense that I am forced to pay $100,000 just to participate in our justice system. And I am one of the lucky ones benefiting from a lowered in-state tuition.

But I am not worried about me. I am worried about my friends who have accrued crippling debt in their quest to be a high school teacher, or some other valid, yet low paying, profession. I am afraid these people will never pay their debt off.

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My school-appointed mentor, who graduated in 2004, paid $4,000 a year. I see this as unfair, not only in the sense that my generation has to take out extraordinary loans to access education, but also in the sense that I am forced to pay $100,000 just to participate in our justice system.

Abraham Lincoln could become a lawyer simply by studying books from the library and passing the bar exam. No tuition was needed. Virtually all professions should have entry based on passing tests and paid apprenticeship. There is zero reason why entry needs to be mediated through expensive academic institutions staffed by professors who are generally not practitioners. If people want to go to law school as a luxury, that is fine, but it should not be required to participate in the justice system.

California does not require a JD to take the bar exam. Instead you can apprentice with an attorney or judge.

As an alternative to taking out massive student loans, you can enter a part-time program and work full time to pay your tuition. That is what I did. I worked full time as a paralegal and went to school at night, then studied on weekends. I only took out one small loan to take time off to study for the bar exam and pay the associated costs.

>There is zero reason why entry needs to be mediated through expensive academic institutions staffed by professors who are generally not practitioners. If people want to go to law school as a luxury, that is fine, but it should not be required to participate in the justice system.

I would have agreed with you before I came to law school, but now I see why having intense legal training before being able to practice is required.

Being an attorney requires a very specific type of thinking which is somewhat different from normal human reasoning. It is less about understanding what is wrong or right morally, and more about knowing who or what sources have power, what laws and rules are relevant, and which levers should be pulled to argue for your desired outcome. It is this "thinking like a lawyer" that law school purports to teach, maybe even more so than the actual law itself.

Being an attorney is a huge responsibility, and I think the American Bar Association is right to set the bar high for prospective attorneys. My only gripe is that this bar seems to be not only ability and knowledge based, but also intensely financial as well.

Are you still in law school? I've been practicing for about five years and still haven't come across a time where something I learned in law school was useful/necessary. Especially for transactional lawyers, it really already is basically an apprenticeship system where you learn everything you need to know on the job while supervised by more senior lawyers.

And yet, programmers, with far less forgiving requirements, manage to accomplish as much against far more objective requirements. Your comment seems to convey your field is riddled with political bullshit.

>And yet, programmers, with far less forgiving requirements, manage to accomplish as much against far more objective requirements.

I am unsure what you mean by "far less forgiving requirements." My client may go to jail, or have something else taken from them with the force of law. The stakes are very serious.

I'm also unsure how one can calculate who accomplishes more, since the two professions accomplish very different things. Does your sentiment stem from a distaste for lawyers, or for our legal system more broadly?

>Your comment seems to convey your field is riddled with political bullshit.

I'm sorry that I gave that impression, and I'm sorry you feel that way. Participating in a system that imprisons people and forcefully takes away assets by court order is inherently political. I suppose if you took to studying law and our legal system, you would soon see that as much is it is "riddled with political bullshit," it is also riddled with people trying to make the right decisions.

Good comment, unlike mine. Sorry for that stupid post, too late to delete it. I was drinking when I wrote that...drunk people make incoherent, illogical statements at times...

>>Abraham Lincoln could become a lawyer simply by studying books from the library and passing the bar exam. No tuition was needed.

Yes, but I have a feeling that the legal field was several orders of magnitude less complex during Lincoln's time.

10 year income based and non-proft/govt based forgiveness.

Well I am not sure if the USA needs anymore lawyers.

If I were in charge I would make the tuition $500,000 pa and use the money to pay court appointed defence attorneys a decent wage and give them a reasonable workload. Fewer lawyers and more justice.

You have missed mhays' point. Focusing on what you perceive to be a problem of an abundance of lawyers detracts from the essence of the issue. Namely,

"... in the sense that my generation has to take out extraordinary loans to access education..."

Unless you think every field has an over supply, what is the point of your comment?

Of course I don't think every field has an oversupply of graduates (most recent graduates do though), but I do think tuition fees can be used by society to encourage people into areas we need rather than in areas we don't need more people. Discouraging more people from becoming lawyers and encouraging those that do to work in areas we need good lawyers is a double positive from my perspective.

I'm not sure if having a justice system run entirely by children of the wealthy would result in more justice... because that's what you're going to get if tuition costs $2mil.

I am glad to see at least some people bothered to respond to my proposal rather than blindly down voting. Actually if tuition was $2 million and the only decent paying law jobs were in the public defenders office all the good people would rack up big debts and then go and work there. We would end up with fewer lawyers over all and those that we did have would be working in the areas we need more lawyers.

I understand all the negative feelings our society has towards lawyers, and I don't blame anyone for having them. But there are a lot of us who are entering the profession because we have a sincere desire to do good.

I also think that if you talk to those interested in justice equity, especially public defenders, they will tell you that, while there may be too many lawyers in some places, there are many, many underprivileged communities that are underserved by our legal system.

This is exactly my point. We have too many lawyers in areas we don't need them and not enough good ones in the area like public defenders that we do. We would have no problem getting good lawyers in the public defenders office if the job payed well and they were given the time to do their job well.

Money is only a barrier if you aren't significantly wealthy. That's tautological enough that you should understand why your proposal doesn't help anything.

Sure it would be a barrier - that is the whole point. We need to stop training so many lawyers and have the ones we do train be well paid in the positions where we need good lawyers (i.e. public defenders). My proposal solves both problems :)

High school costs doesn't imply high pay afterword. And I don't see how having fewer people with in depth knowledge of our legal system will make it harder to exploit and manipulate.

Fewer lawyers means less law suits.

The manipulation of the legal system comes from the law being made so complex that only lawyers can understand it. If we had fewer lawyers we would have a simpler legal system.

Simple isn't always better.

This is true, but when you have legal system so complex that nobody even knows how many laws there are and everyone is breaking at least several every day you know there is a great need for simplification. I am in favour of few laws and more justice.

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