What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering

With appropriate replacement of nouns, similar arguments can and are made around CS education in the US right now.

All the same considerations apply: theory vs. practice, writing capability, principles vs. application, never-ending desire for more practical capabilities on the part of new grads.

Well in one sense this research is government subsidized, because it's paid for through tuition that is paid for through government-backed student loans. On the other hand, the government recoups that money so the actual subsidy is much smaller than the $575 million figure.

That being said, I think there is one very salient aspect to the whole law review system, which is that it engenders participation by a much broader cross-section of lawyers than is the case in other academic fields. Law reviews publish students and practitioners in addition to professors. You see articles not just about abstract theory, but the mechanics of some new tax provision. Even at big law firms some partners take the time to publish, not just articles but books. This is far better than say CS academia, where most articles are math-wankery that everyone ignores.

His examples aren't even all in law, to make it worse!

For example, he mentions a paper entitled "What Is Wrong With Kamm's and Scanlon's Arguments Against Taurek" from The Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy as an example of ivory-tower lawyering. But this paper is written by Tyler Doggett, a philosophy professor. He isn't even a borderline law/philosophy prof: he doesn't have a law degree (he has a philosophy degree from MIT), and he doesn't teach in a law school (he teaches in UVM's philosophy department). So it's not clear how his publishing output is relevant in any way to law school curricula.

Weirdly sloppy researching/writing. Though it does open a small window onto just how dishonest that type of "quote 'incomprehensible' academic papers to show how out of touch they are" argument often is: the people making it rarely have a good-faith interest in understanding the papers they're citing, and instead quote random things without reading them.

"If medical schools took the same approach, they’d be filled with professors who had never set foot in a hospital."

Amusing, because med schools are filled with professors who have never practiced. They're called PhDs, and account for a huge majority of faculty at medical schools. That's why doctors have to do residency and medical rotations.

Asking "why do we need lawyers" is like asking "why do we need CPAs?" Or "why do we need programmers", for that matter. In modern society its just the product of division labor. Some people specialize in the complex field, then advise other people. They leverage the economics of the fact that their knowledge can serve multiple clients who have similar problem, so the clients don't have to learn the law themselves.

It's not the phrasing that makes the law complex. It's the fact that the law is a mechanism through which we mediate human interaction, and the interactions of modern society are phenomenally complicated. E.g. the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which is still basically "the law" in the area of antitrust, fits in just a few pages: http://www.linfo.org/sherman_txt.html

It's not dense legalese. "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal." That's the gist of the Act. Yet, many lawyers make their living specializing in this law. Why? Because restraint of trade is hard to define precisely (if the Act tried to define it precisely, it would be dense legalese, like the Tax Code). Courts navigate antitrust suits largely be looking at what they've done before (consistency of result is often more important in law than getting the 'right answer', which may very well not exist). Lawyers help their clients navigate through that web of precedent.

It used to be the case, a hundred years ago, that law was unnecessarily complex. You had to plead cases in this highly stylized format, etc. That's all gone now. Courts will go to great lengths to make sense of a complaint written in crayon. What's left is a lot of necessary complexity. Look at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/#chapter_vii

Again, it's not dense legalese. "A summons must be served with a copy of the complaint. The plaintiff is responsible for having the summons and complaint served within the time allowed by Rule 4(m) and must furnish the necessary copies to the person who makes service." When law students take civil procedure, the greatest source of complexity actually ends up being complexity inherent in our federal system: choice of forum, choice of law, etc. Under what circumstances can a California court exert jurisdiction over an Alabama resident? When does a federal court have to apply state law? Which state's law?