Nor do you point out, which one might have expected, that the New York requirement has no effect on you at all, because Columbia already requires you to perform 100 hours of pro bono legal service, under supervision, before graduation. You are therefore arguing, with great solemnity but not much novelty, that there is educational value in what we require more of.

Your first graf says that the educational effect of required pro bono work "will contribute to legal expertise in ways very similar to the traditional lecture method." In graf three, you "safely assert that my pro bono work contributed to my legal expertise in different but similar ways to traditional lecture," but you don't show either differences or similarities, or explain why differences cropped up between the grafs.

I don't understand this in graf four:

It would be a vast oversimplification to suggest that, like most other pro bono projects, RCP benefits indigent criminal offenders. RCP offers a unique perspective because it allowed us to work with clients who had formerly interacted with the criminal system, successfully completed their sentences, and were now working to expunge their names. Most young attorneys likely have not worked with criminal clients who have successfully completed their sentences.

So what? I don't understand why the "vast oversimplification," even comes up: who said something about indigent criminal defendants? Most pro bono work is done for people who can't get lawyers, and in the US, indigent criminal defendants are provided lawyers at public expense. Why is the difference "vast" between working with criminal offenders and working on purging the records of ex-offenders? Why is filling in these particular forms for people "a unique perspective"?

I am mystified by the comment that "as a prospective client, I would hope that my attorney had early experiences with clients so that she approached her legal education having been informed of its practical importance." Grammar aside, why the hell would you be thinking about your lawyer's first year in law school, which has no relevance at all to you, rather than your lawyer's subsequent experience and present fitness for the work you need done? Do you really think that the "practical importance" of client service escapes the working lawyer unless she did some form-filling for clients in her first year?

Essentially, this feels to me like the pro bono activities report you filed when you got back from spring vacation, with a paragraph at the top saying you're going to talk about it in relation to something in the news, and a conclusion saying you're not going to discuss the issues raised by the news.

This is not a revision of your first essay, but rather a complete substitution. So no self-editing has yet occurred. This draft feels, as the first did, like a beginning requiring much work until ready. The first decision is whether this about what you did on spring vacation, about requiring pro bono service of law students rather than providing civil legal assistance to the poor, or about why live-client representation is educationally valuable for first-year students. You can't make all three work in 1,000 words.

The first path, which the current draft primarily treads, can be successful if you toss out the "activities report" bureaucratic language and the uncritical tone. Is your activity beneficial because there is an actual client, in some way that a simulation would not be equally beneficial? Is it the editing under supervision that is good for you, or some other aspect of the workflow? Are you better off doing the extremely limited work your actual development so far prepares you to do, with live clients your mistakes may injure, or simulating more sophisticated work under the supervision of teachers who can help you in a setting where there's no actual client, whose interests professional ethics require them to put before the educational value of your experience?

The second path requires you to ask why we don't give the poor real lawyers, rather than law students, to serve their needs, and whether requiring law students to perform pro bono service is really a way of letting real lawyers off the hook.

The third path requires you to explain why doing something before you're ready to do it is better than getting ready to do it, or why (on Deweyite grounds, for example) there's no distinction between doing something and learning effectively how to do it. I believe strongly that people should be taught in law school how to be lawyers when they leave. I don't believe, equally strongly, that having them represent clients in their first year contributes at all to that exercise. So I'd like to read a careful, thoughtful, powerful argument about why my second belief is hampering my first.

It would be beyond the scope of this paper to argue whether consumer protection is sufficient justification for the current licensing regime. Instead, accepting as given that consumer protection is sufficient justification, the question of the appropriateness of the additional New York pro bono requirement becomes whether the requirement will improve the legal aptitude of new practitioners. From the perspective of a student who has completed a year of both traditional schooling and forty hours of pro bono work (I argue from this perspective because this is the area where my insight may add value), I can safely assert that my pro bono work contributed to my legal expertise in different but similar ways to traditional lecture. If consumers would be better protected by attorneys who have (1) a greater breadth of practicing experience, (2) interacted with legal customers prior to finishing their legal education, and (3) networking contacts from other areas of the legal community, then the pro bono requirement can be justified under the same consumer protection theory as the other Bar requirements are justified.

The week that I spent writing expungement petitions in conjunction with the Record Clearance Project (RCP) at San Jose State University offered me a practicing experience that I likely would not have experienced elsewhere. While opponents of the new requirement would likely argue that nearly all attorneys voluntarily complete some degree of pro bono work, and that all pro bono work is largely the same, that argument would miss the fact that different pro bono work offers different experiences. It would be a vast oversimplification to suggest that, like most other pro bono projects, RCP benefits indigent criminal offenders. RCP offers a unique perspective because it allowed us to work with clients who had formerly interacted with the criminal system, successfully completed their sentences, and were now working to expunge their names. Most young attorneys likely have not worked with criminal clients who have successfully completed their sentences. Now having worked with several, I have faith in the potential for true rehabilitation for previous criminal offenders. Different pro bono projects offer different nuanced experiences, each of which contributes context to the student’s legal studies.

In addition to the unique aspects of its practice, RCP contributed to my education because it allowed me to interact with clients while I was still in my first year of law school. While many young attorneys will perform direct client services during their two summers of law school, I consider this opportunity so central to my legal education that I would consider my own education inferior had I not had client interaction so early on. Law students do not study in a vacuum. Their study habits are informed by the social reality around them. It is easy for a 1L at a privileged school to focus incessantly on the “unfair” aspects of law school (see my first draft). However, my interaction with indigent clients and, more importantly, their trust in me to do the job, radically changed my perspective in the classroom. Instead of trying to learn material for its own sake, I began to approach the casebooks as a source of power that I could eventually use to benefit others. The previously abstract idea of stigmatization from criminal conviction became clear and practical. As a prospective client, I would hope that my attorney had early experiences with clients so that she approached her legal education having been informed of its practical importance.

Finally, RCP contributed to my legal education by offering me a legal contact outside of my law school. While mentorship opportunities are abundant at Columbia, students are expected to seek them proactively. While this feat is by no means impossible, time allocation influences the decision and the student chooses whether to forgo other opportunities in order to work closely with a mentor. Pro bono work, because it necessitates supervision by a licensed attorney, requires the student to interact closely with an established attorney. My close interaction with my supervisor has offered me a close legal contact which has already proven valuable in my legal education. I am substantially more comfortable with close scrutiny of my writing and my legal work generally, which made me much more comfortable in the classroom after I finished working with RCP.

This paper is not intended to be a policy argument suggesting that New York’s new 50 hour pro bono requirement is desirable legislation. I argue only that, if we accept consumer protection as a legitimate goal of the legal licensing regime, then pro bono work likely contributes to consumer protection (via attorney qualification) in much the same way that traditional lecture does. The three central benefits of my RCP experience likely apply generally to pro bono work, and they almost certainly helped to improve the quality of my legal scholarship.

This draft is puzzling, oddly argued and wildly vehement in the wrong places. Why bother arguing that the (essentially irrelevant) federal loan guarantee is the source of an obligation to teach well placed on law schools? If teachers can't find any other obligation to teach their students than the presence of government regulations reducing friction in the lending market, it should be apparent that there will be much social stress on other problems before one comes to the psychological discomfort produced in grade-grubbing Harvard, Yale or Columbia law students.

The wildness of the panic about debt, moreover, seems to me equally strained and unbelievable. If one didn't want to contract so much debt straight out of college, one could attend a cheaper law school, or work and save in order to pay more of one's own way. Once could, as I have suggested, work more effectively and profitably while in law school. Law school debt is smaller than most lawyers' home mortgages. If one were worrying about household debt levels in America—and one should—the debt levels of young lawyers would not be anywhere near the most worrisome.

But the essay's position isn't even that the debt is the problem. The problem is that the debt prevents the student from learning because the student is too worried about getting good grades. This, again, presents a tangle of confusions. Don't students who don't owe money worry about grades? Don't students who have no debt neglect the long-term educational benefit of mastering material in order to cram for the exam?

So it begins to appear as if the point about social responsibility and the point about the debt are both diversions, and that the real issue is about how learning is prevented by the exam. But isn't the point of the "issue spotter" that lawyers need to know the law comprehensively, so that they can translate what they are told by clients, witnesses and others into the physiology of claims and defenses: rights, duties, liabilities, immunities and privileges? The exam, in that sense, is a simulation of lawyers' experience, testing the budding lawyer's ability to translate from the factual language of life into the concepts and vocabulary of law, seeing what's relevant, discarding what is not, capturing a snapshot of the process from which all counseling, advising, litigating and legislating springs. The way to prepare for the exam is to learn the law, to read cases and see how facts are translated into the concepts of law, and to learn all the hallmarks of the issues that will arise in the analysis of situations presenting the fundamental forms of civil liability.

Which makes it appear that the point about the exam interfering with learning is also, partially, insubstantial. The essay, in short, reproduces its real subject, which is the paralysis of thought induced by panic. For myself, the real subject seems to be the unavailability of counseling and advising to help the student understand both her intellectual situation at the outset of law school and his material professional prospects in a changing society.

I don't know what to do with this draft in order to make it better. It seems to me to want fairly severe editing, to isolate the argument that really matters to you from the surrounding arguments pointed in other directions, and to present that argument coolly, without overstress, in its own social and intellectual context.

The First Year, They Scare You to Death

-- By AlexBuonocore - 16 Feb 2012

The Law School as Publicly Responsible

Mr. Morningside's Expensive Time

Law school is incredibly expensive. Tens of thousands of students pay tens of thousands of dollars of tax-payer secured debt to these institutions. These institutions, on the rationale of preparation, exclude thousands of the most expensive young adults (in terms of total societal cost of education) from contributing to society for the majority of three years. Assuming that these students would be contributing to society in some ways otherwise (perhaps a more difficult assumption since 2008), every second that a law student is not contributing to either her own development or the development of the law is deadweight loss to society. Given the amount of resources allocated to these students, both before and during law school, these wasted moments are incredibly expensive. Given this reality, it is striking how much time is wasted in law school in the form of uncertainty. Let me illustrate hypothetically. Robinson Morningside is a first year law student at Columbia Law School. For nearly a year before stepping foot into Manhattan, Mr. Morningside hears from friends, relatives, and the national media about the importance of first year grades. He becomes convinced that, if he does not get an A- in torts, then upon death he will pass a small fortune of interest-accruing, non-dischargeable student loan debt to his heirs at law. The problem, however, is that Mr. Morningside has no idea of how to score well in torts. He learns that the final exam is in the form of a three hour “issue spotter,” and he begins to abhor hours in the classroom because the professor never discusses how to do well on the actual test. Mr. Morningside quickly recognizes that any bit of information that cannot be squeezed into an issue spotter answer is all but irrelevant to his goal of achieving high grades. The law student spends hours and hours worrying about this mystical test and what he should write on it. These incredibly expensive hours could have been put to any number of different uses, including learning the law.

The Origin

Law students are advised not to worry about grades or job prospects, and yet they all do. The explanation comes in the form of the mountain of dollars that it takes to attend an American law school. A student borrowing two hundred thousand for law school (assuming absolutely no previous debt) will owe $2300 a month in debt payments over ten years at the federal subsidized interest rate of 6.8%. The non-dischargeable guarantee of owing nearly thirty thousand dollars a year in debt payments after graduation dramatically alters the student’s approach to law school. Law students generally were not professionals in previous lives. Many attend law school three months after graduating from undergraduate. Taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, without ever having earned a salary, creates incredible anxiety for the student. All of a sudden, the student needs the $160,000 salary upon graduation. The student needs to be in the top third of his class. The student needs the A- in torts. With a six figure Citibank in his dresser drawer, Mr. Morningside does exactly what we don’t want him to do. He busies himself worrying about the issue spotter, and the subtleties that make up the law pass right through his ears.

The Waste

The student, the schools, the courts, and the law firms all suffer as a result of this deadweight loss. Instead of learning the cases, the theories, or doing socially valuable pro bono work, our law students worry about their debt, their tests, and their interviews. If schools are socially responsible and firms are interested in acquiring higher quality talent, then perhaps they should consider a completely alternative evaluation system to the issue spotting exam. That is, if they actually do wish to reward the careful and rigorous study of law that we all presume makes a great advocate.

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