COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF GOING TO LAW SCHOOL

The most recent number of the Journal of Legal Education (November 2013) contains several articles from a “SYMPOSIUM: IS LAW SCHOOL WORTH IT?”  Good question. No doubt. However, it reminds me of the question “Are children worth it?  For the overwhelming majority of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century prospective parents the answer is resounding no? A few decades ago. Yale Law School’s John Langbein wrote an article convincingly demonstrating that parents who lose a child (in a wrongful death situation) are, from a strictly economic perspective, better off. It is very, very expensive to raise a child. Children constitute a huge opportunity cost. There are tremendous savings in not needing to spend on a child. But the point, for most who think about it, is that it is not economic loss that the parents’ suffer, it is something else that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, something that defies cost-benefit  economic analysis. I will leave it  to you to define what that something else is. Not to compare a foregone legal education to the loss of a child, but perhaps, just perhaps, the important value of a legal education is something more than a job and earning capacity. It is a sad state of affairs when men and women are reduced to being simply economic man and economic woman. It is a sad state of legal education when what were students are no longer free to explore different intellectual paths because it is all about get a job, get a salary. Sad, pathetic and boring. But worse yet, not in the best interest of the legal profession. Not in the best interest of society. Shakespeare scribbled, “First we kill all the lawyers.” Well, the lawyers are not being killed off. But they are being made into intellectual zombies. The living, but intellectual dead.