In Defense of the Third Year: A Rebuttal to the President Lauren Gailey
Addressing a town hall meeting at New York’s Binghamton University in August 2013, President Barack Obama said, in what he warned would likely be a controversial remark, “I believe that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years.” As a third-year law student, I would like to offer a rebuttal. It is important to note that the president knows of what he speaks. A former president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama also was a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004. As both a law student and a law professor, Obama undoubtedly observed firsthand the drawbacks to the three-year system: expensive tuition and concomitant student debt loads, compounded by a challenging job market worsened—possibly permanently—by the economic downturn that has plagued the nation since 2008. The president was absolutely correct to point out that debt management is a major concern. It can be crushing, both financially and emotionally, for graduating law students who have not yet found employment or whose salaries will leave them with little disposable income. The “big money,” i.e., that offered by “big law” jobs, is still available as firms continue to compete for top talent, but it is available to fewer graduates as summer associate classes dwindle in response to firms’ fiscal challenges.
From an economic standpoint, reducing law school from three years to two could actually exacerbate the problem. A threeyear commitment operates as a barrier to entry for prospective students, keeping the eventual number of job candidates in check and controlling the supply side of the legal labor equation. Should employer demand remain constant, it would become even harder for law school graduates to find jobs by which to defray even two years’ worth of debt. The concern over debt can be mitigated to some degree if, rather than enrolling in law school immediately after earning undergraduate degrees, prospective law students work for a few years first. This helps them to save money toward tuition and gain valuable professional experience that would make them more attractive candidates to law schools—which might be more likely to offer scholarship money—and prospective employers. The analysis should not stop here. When discussions of the value of the third year of law school focus solely on pragmatic concerns, they suffer from a fatal flaw: They fail to account for the fact that the third year has intrinsic value. As every lawyer and law student knows, law school is what you make of it, and the third year is a microcosm of that phenomenon. It presents students with the chance to refine their skills and prepare for professional life. The unique advantage of the third year is that, unlike the rigid curricular framework of the first two years, the third year is not one-size-fits-all. In the third year, students have the freedom to explore the subjects that interest them, a process that might even lead to the discovery of the practice area that will be their “calling.” They can prepare to enter the profession by gaining familiarity with
As every lawyer and law student knows, law school is what you make of it, and the third year is a microcosm of that phenomenon. It presents students with the chance to refine their skills and prepare for professional life. The unique advantage of the third year is that, unlike the rigid curricular framework of the first two years, the third year is not one-size-fits-all.
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