Comments on Do We Need More Lawyers?

• Preparatory Work Required
• Posted by William Sumner Scott, J.D. on March 27, 2007 at 5:55am EDT

• Changes to the legal system must be made before the need for an additional law school or the quality of legal education can be analyzed.

  The demand for new law schools is driven by the tremendous profits they generate. In addition, with lawyers among the alumni, favors for the school are easier to obtain.

  A legal system that serves the public must have undergraduate pre-law requirements with heavy emphasis on ethics. Legal education must be brought to focus on public service rather than legal system maintenance.

  Howard Zinn's "Peoples History of the United States" provides background information. The system must eliminate abuse of minorities, sales of pardons, rigged elections, and unprovoked wars. The focus must be on prevention of problems – reduce the drug consumption, divorce and crime rates; provide subsidized housing and medical treatment for the elderly. The elimination of government waste could provide the funds for these endeavors.

  The Telecommunications Act of 1996 must be repealed to return competition to journalism and payment for elections by a tax assessed equally against all Americans to stop politicians from pandering for money must be in place before the question of how many law schools are necessary can be answered.

  William Sumner Scott, J.D.

  Judicial Equality Foundation, Inc.

  wss@jefound.org

• Posted by Stephen Wells on March 27, 2007 at 9:20am EDT

• The right question is not do we need more lawyers but will society gain by having more people with legal training? All law school graduates do not practice law as many go into other areas where they seem to find their legal training very valuable.

• More Lawyers?
• Posted by Mike Licht on March 27, 2007 at 11:26am EDT

• I live in Washington DC, and I'm the only one on my block who isn't a lawyer.

  Don't ask if we need more lawyers. Ask if we need more litigation.

  The poor need lawyers, chiefly to protect them from the lawyers of the rich and the lawyers and administrative judges of the government of the rich.

  Legislators -- those who make the laws -- should be barred from future practice of law, a clear conflict of interest and recipe for unnecessary legal complexity. If that reduces our lawyer surplus, that’s the time to explore the need for new law schools.

• Public Interest Law School?
• Posted by Kenneth Graham , Professor of Law at UCLA Law School on March 27, 2007 at 12:10pm EDT

• I wish the folks at UC Irvine well. But by the time they get through with the American Bar Association accreditation they will find they have another school for Big Business Lawyers---which California does not need.

• replies
• Posted by Larry on March 27, 2007 at 1:31pm EDT

• My first post responded to the op-eds. That didn’t appear. This post responds to the comments.

  Mr. Licht, Maybe we have seen each other. Washington DC, which is the seat of a large central government requires people that understand the law. You should at least be thankful that government operations are overseen by people with the intellectual discipline of lawyers. There is no conflict of interest (yet alone a “clear” one) between serving as a legislature and later being a lawyer. There are not too many people that actually have done this, however. When non-lawyers write laws, they tend to think that there are simple solutions without an underlying theory of what they are trying to accomplish. But, when they realize that their ideas are too hard to implement, they start making more and more “tweaks” to the law until it becomes increasingly complex.

  Mr. Graham, With all respect, I submit to you that training “big business lawyers” and training “public interest lawyers” are not mutually exclusive. If a law school wants to encourage students to practice public interest law, they should 1) attract highly qualified students; and 2) offer them meaningful alternative to working in large lawfirms for most of their career. The easy way to do this is via debt relief. Public schools are ideally situated to do this.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Graham, most law schools that have declared their committment to solely public interest law have been failures or never risen beyond the lower tiers. Some have gone bankrupt.

  Moreover, to produce *good* public interest lawyers, a school must 1) develop a national reputation; and 2) produce students that can earn the respect of anyone (not just the poor). This usually requires that they give the students the option to practice at large firms and clerk for “prestigious” appellate judges. If they a school doesn’t do this for its students, it isn’t helping them, and its law students whether they deserve it or not, are going to have a lesser reputation.

  Finally, without exception, all law schools claim to encourage public interest work. Some (usually the higher-ranked schools) are better at putting their words into action.

  Whether, Mr. Graham, California needs more or less transactional lawyers, I imagine, is a question for the free market to decide. Unlike criminal practice (or evil most litigation), the transactional market is almost completely drive by the free market. Last time I looked (which was roughly 30 seconds ago), transactions lawyers in California could command well over $600 per hour, so I don’t see any price pressure put on them.

• Just Say No
• Posted by Anonymous at UCI on March 27, 2007 at 1:31pm EDT

• As a graduate student at UCI who is involved in student government, the proposed law school is problematic at best and disasterous at worst. We aleady have problems funding the graduate and professional schools, and the rising costs of a graduate/professional education in the UC system as a whole, coupled with a lack of affordable housing in Irvine, is putting enormous pressure on those of us who are already here. UCI's debt service is enormous, and I believe the community would not be best served by an additional professional school, but by focusing on the graduate programs already in place. UCI cannot, and should not attempt to be, all things to all people.

• law graduates
• Posted by Peter on March 27, 2007 at 3:32pm EDT

• The University of California's first and largest law school, Hastings College of the Law, has a long and distinguished record of providing legions of graduates who serve in the public interest. This may in part stem from its relative independence (it is a stand-alone institution) and location in the heart of San Francisco's civic center. There's nothing like seeing the unmet needs of society on a daily basis for motivating one toward a career that benefits others. I would question whether Irvine's campus could provide the appropriate environment for such "stimulation."

• Already on the books
• Posted by Jack Olson on March 27, 2007 at 4:41pm EDT

• William Sumner Scott, J.D., rather digressed from the question of whether the U of California needs another government law school to what the legal system itself should do: "The system must eliminate abuse of minorities, sales of pardons, rigged elections and unprovoked wars. The focus must be on prevention of problems--reduce the drug consumption, divorce and crime rates; provide subsidized housing and medical treatment for the elderly..."

  What limited knowledge you seem to have of the law, Mr. Scott. Don't you know that the various Civil Rights Acts outlawed abuse of minorities? That sales of pardons and rigged elections are already against the law? I don't know any law against waging unprovoked wars, but I do know that the Constitution gives the power to make war, provoked or not, to the Congress. What do you want, a Constitutional Amendment on that?

  Reduce drug consumption? If you mean illegal drugs, those are by definition against the law. Divorce is legal but narrowing grounds for divorce does not make marriages last longer, it makes divorces last longer. Reduce crime rates? Crime is already illegal, counselor. Subsidized housing and medical care for the elderly? We've already got those. Subsidized health care for the elderly is the exact purpose of Medicare, which with Medicaid pays for the majority of nursing home care in the United States. Where I live, people over 65 get an additional exemption on their property tax and everywhere in the USA they get an extra exemption on their federal income tax.

  Most of the laws you propose are already on the books but even if they were not, the purpose of the legal system is to secure people's legitimate rights, not to redistribute income or discourage divorce. If the proposed law school can support that purpose, it should be built. Frankly, it looks more like academic empire-building at this distance.

• taxes, buildings, and marriage
• Posted by Larry on March 27, 2007 at 5:05pm EDT

• Mr. Olson, I so wanted to agree with you in whole, but I gotta disagree with you on two points. First, you say, “the purpose of the legal system is to secure people’s legitimate rights, not to redistribute income” The problem is that there exists a gigantic body of law (specifically enabled by the constitution that does just that. We call it “tax law.” Every year, a portion of your income and by income is taken away from us, and given (via an incredibly complex process) to 1) soldiers; 2) government workers; 3) contractors for the government; or 4) recipients of government programs. Odds are that about 15-20% of the graduates of any law school practice in this area. Secondly you say that the purpose of law is not to “discourage divorce.” Why not? Legislatures do this all the time. Any limitation on no-fault divorce does just this. For example, one can argue that the effective one-year separation period before getting a divorce in New York discourages divorce, because it makes New Yorkers stop and think whether it is a good idea or not.

  Unfortunately, due to the tax laws mentioned above, as the law stands now, financing for building buildings is easier to come by then financing for a loan-forgiveness program for extant schools. So, as much as I think that states should proceed with caution, I can actually see what the incentive is to build more buildings.

• more legal training is needed at UCI
• Posted by Anon on March 27, 2007 at 5:25pm EDT

• Also as a graduate student in the government at UCI, I agree that the school's finances are in trouble. However, why are these finances so bad? Corruption, improper spending and a lack of respect for the law have led to our financial problems. The students here can't afford to hire lawyers, and OC lawyers won't represent us for free. If there really are too many lawyers, where are they? We need more legal sophistication on campus to get rid of the people who see UCI as a business opportunity and not a place of learning.

• Larry's right
• Posted by Jack Olson on March 27, 2007 at 7:05pm EDT

• Larry, you are right that government to a large extent redistributes income. Whether that is a legitimate purpose of government is another question, but there is no doubt that income transfers are the majority of the federal budget. This is also true for most families since the majority of workers pay more in Social Security and Medicare tax than in federal income tax. I question whether it is right that the average American worker pays more to his government than a medieval peasant paid to his feudal lord, but there is little doubt that the upper class which writes the laws has levied taxes to that effect.

  The question here is whether this law school should be founded. If this question were put to the voters of California, would they say yes or no? I suspect they would say no because they realize that nearly all the lawyers it would produce would represent somebody else's interest against theirs. Why should they subsidize that?

• More Lawyers for California??
• Posted by TGW on March 27, 2007 at 10:00pm EDT

• I think that the Bard may have put it best:
  "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." [Henry VI, Part 2]

  Lawyers need to eat--and buy the occasional BMW. For many of them, that means engaging in litigation. Is it REALLY in the best interest of society for public education to spend large sums of taxpayers' dollars turning out more lawyers when there's no evidence of unmet demand for their services?

  Will UC-Irvine GUARANTEE that it will ONLY turn out public defenders (and other lawyers who will serve the poor) without undue concern for their meager salaries????

• Shakespeare’s villains
• Posted by Larry on March 28, 2007 at 7:50am EDT

• TGW, First of all, that quote from Henry VI, was spoken by one of Shakespeare’s villains who didn’t like literate people, either. Seriously, do you really think that Dick the Butcher has any admirable characteristics? This is like quoting Dr. Evil.

  Secondly, most lawyers are simply not engaged in civil litigation. Third, you are free not to sue people if you do not want to. Fourth, a lot of the “too much litigation” propaganda comes from lawyers themselves who are simply on one side of the litigation, and don’t want people to challenge their clients’ positions. By repeating this line again and again, people who least understand their rights sometimes are lulled into thinking that they should accept whatever hand tortfeasors or insurance companies have dealt them

  The existence of public defenders is conditioned not only on the right to counsel in (most) criminal matters, but on the fact that legislators choose to criminalize things, and prosecutors decide to charge people. Perhaps if we all agreed to make less things illegal, and charge less people with crimes, we wouldn’t need as many lawyers.

  Finally, you can’t “guarantee” that a school turns out a specific kind of lawyer. To be a good lawyer, you have to personally like what you do. If you don’t like it, you end up becoming an investment banker or writing a blog about how you hate your job. While some people become prosecutors as a foray into politics (unfortunately), public defenders have to 1) like the intellectual challenge of criminal law; 2) not hate their clients; and 3) actually like doing what they are doing. Not everyone is built this way, and people usually don’t figure this out until two years into law school (despite what they tell you before hand.) So, no, TGW, there can be no guarantees.

  I have suggested investing money in loan forgiveness programs. Unfortunately, since tax exempt bond finance can’t be used for this, this probably won’t happen on a large scale.

  With all of the propaganda, I still don’t know if this law school is a good thing or not. I don’t know if the voters are in the best position to decide. After all, most voters don’t really care about lawyers until they either a) want their children to be one; or 2) need one. Likewise, a lot of the arguments against the law school involve drawing in lawyers from other states.

• Maybe May Day, not Dr. Evil.
• Posted by Larry on March 28, 2007 at 8:45am EDT

• I’ve just been informed that “Dr. Evil” isn’t the best analogy, because Dick wasn’t the head of Jack Cade’s gang. This is the last time I am analogizing to movies I have not seen. Maybe a better analogy is “May Day” in “A View to a Kill.” I hereby apologize for my pop-culture-to-Shakespeare analogy deficiency.