There’s an old saying that a town that can’t support one lawyer can always support two. Or put another way, “If a town has one lawyer, he starves; if it has two, they both get rich.”
There’s still something to the premise that lawyers thrive on each other, but much has changed since the late President Lyndon B. Johnson used a variation of the phrase in a swearing-in ceremony for an attorney general and his deputy in 1965.
For one thing, there are a lot more young people taking out big loans to go to law schools that, in the opinion of some, are producing too many lawyers at taxpayer expense.
Ken Walley, a Jackson attorney, puts a different spin on the value of a law degree in a recent op-ed column in The Clarion-Ledger in response to another writer’s column touting the advantages of getting a law degree.
Some may believe that Walley just doesn’t want the competition, but his argument makes sense, especially in view of the proliferation of student loan debt and the money being pumped into higher education through loans and grants, which in turn are fueling the rise in the cost of college and professional schools.
Walley’s column argues that a previous column titled “Is Getting a Law Degree Still Lucrative?” used “sales pitches that law schools have been promoting for years to convince kids (usually 20 or 21 when they apply) to spend hundreds of thousands of federal student loan (read: taxpayer) dollars on a degree that there is little demand for. For instance, the article quotes Deborah Bell, interim dean of the University of Mississippi School of Law, who said there are a lot of careers that a law degree can lead to. I have great respect for Professor Bell, but she is wrong. A law degree does one thing: It qualifies you to sit for the Mississippi bar exam. It does not qualify you to do anything else.”
Walley concedes that “it is true law graduates go into nonlegal fields, but most of them entered law school wanting to practice law. They seek employment in other fields because they can’t find jobs as lawyers. It is also true there is an unmet demand for legal services for deserving Mississippians, but these people are not underserved because of a lawyer shortage. They are underserved because they have no money and the budgets of legal-aid organizations are almost nonexistent. A new crop of law graduates with six-figure student loan debts isn’t going to be able to spend time helping the poor.”
Walley concludes that the government “is shelling out about $160,000 per actual lawyer produced when this state probably has 2,000 more than it needs. According to The Wall Street Journal, 40 percent of all student loans are not currently being paid back, and the numbers for law schools shouldn’t be very different. No bank would ever loan a 21-year-old with no job experience or collateral $100,000 to start a business with slim prospects. No bank would stay in business if 40 percent of its loans weren’t performing, but that is exactly what our government is doing, and you, the taxpayer, are on the hook for it.”
