Legal Training and Practical Experience and Responsibility

[Lord MJ]

Something I was thinking about.

Now I'm not trying to say that Law School education is bad, or that All Lawyers are teh EVILss!!!

However I am starting to think that law school does nothing to increase the maturity or the responsibility of it's students. Those students have to receive that education on how to be a principled person from elsewhere.

In addition I'm thinking about the attitudes of people that come out of law school that have not had any practical experience dealing with people in anything except the petty social interactions they have with people in high school and college, little experience in the professional world, little exposure to culture, little conflict management training or experience, and little exposure to different ideas and ways of thinking.

It seems that people that are ignorant going into law school come out of law school even more ignorant than they were before.

And the reasoning for this opinion is really simple, without practical experience a new lawyer's whole understanding of the world is based on thier limited experience and the law. The law turns out to be the end all and be all in their minds, and when confronted with something that goes against legal reasoning, they will scream "the LAW!" It's no surprise that many of these people turn out to be rights based ethicists because the whole idea of an act that someone has the right to do being unethical is inconceivable to them.

On the moral side, if you have someone that is irresponsible and selfish and you send them through law school, when they come out with their JD and pass the bar the only thing you get on the other end is a much more dangerous irresponsible and selfish person.

Now with people that do have practical experience in leadership, etc. Or people that are deeply principled going into law school, the learning of law can empower them to do great things for the community and the world. They know to use the power that being an attorney gives them for good, and avoids a lot of the stereotypical bas behaviors associated with lawyers.

Does my assertion have any merit?

Also do other disciplines suffer from this?

I would argue to some extend engineering doesn't largely because responsibility, ethics, and standards are beaten into engineers because, oh shit, people die if engineers fuck up. So if you send a screwball into an engineering program he will more than likely either come out of the program as a responsible person with a degree, or he will come out a screwball failure with no degree. Some may slip through the cracks but it is a lot rarer.

(I am of course in no way implying that engineers don't need exposure to culture, ethical thought, conflict management, practical experience, before they get their certifications, I'm just saying that they are less ignorant that the equivalent lawyer without those aforementioned things.)

[Darth Wong]

It's a pretty tall order to expect any kind of school to impart social values to its students.

Having said that, the legal profession has a really warped view of ethics. Rather than placing the good of society first, it places the good of the legal profession first. That's why it's considered ethical for a lawyer to withhold evidence due to client/attorney confidentiality even if public safety is directly at risk: the protection of client/attorney confidentiality protects the long-term interests of the legal profession, while keeping a murderer off the streets only affects the public good: an obviously unimportant concern.

[Superman]

Another thing to consider is that a certain type of person goes to law school, or any other school for that matter. My wife works with a bunch of mechanical engineers, for example, and almost every one of them look and sound like they came out of the exact same mold (no offense, D. Wong. Not saying that's a bad thing). When I worked as a correctional officer, a lot of cops I worked with looked like they were too.

There is a certain amount of conditioning that might occur, but I think one's personality has a lot to do with career choices in life. Even if a law school had some kind of extensive social training program, it would be pretty difficult to change who someone is.

[Ford Prefect]

Maybe how they teach law in other countries is different to here. I just spent the last couple of months getting it drummed into to me that as a potential lawyer I have a professional duty to the community, and that my duty to the client is second to my duty to the court. I had it explained to me repeatedly that when a lawyer gets overzealous in their defense (or prosecution), they've stepped over a line; because here at least, it is not considered a lawyer's job to 'win'. It a lawyer's job to protect one's client to the best of their ability, regarldess of who they are. However, if they were to admit to having commited a murder, or a rape or what have you, as a lawyer, I would be entitled to inform them that I can no longer stand in front of the judge and say 'the defendant pleads not guilty'.

While this is what is 'supposed' to happen, it's extremely idealistic (it is also the sort of image I want to live up to, because I like Atticus Finch way too much). In practice, corruption is rife, especially where larger law firms are concerned, like the crap that has been pulled with tobacco companies. Speaking to the Director of Public Prosecutions last week, he was of the opinion that when a lawyer gets more concerned with how much they're earning than how well they're performing, there's something seriously wrong. This is why there's something intrinsically wrong with law as a business; there is something honestly creepy about the time sheets that firms in my country use, and the sort of mindset that would have to go with it.

On less of ranting tangent, my current law lecturer is of the opinion that even his long experience of the issues and difficulties involved in being a lawyer, including all the mistakes he had to make and lessons he learnt could not possibly be conveyed to us purely through schooling. It just isn't possible to teach life lessons to a bunch of students in such a short period of time as a university education, given you have to cover shit like contract law and tort as well.

[Lord MJ]

I guess it is unreasonable to expect schooling to impart social values on to people, but then again in my experience I learned a lot about how to actually behave responsibly in a team environment, and how to treat people right, and how to serve the community via the National Society of Black Engineers by serving on one of its boards. I wouldn't say I "learned" these things since I already knew them already and it seemed obvious to me already, but having leadership training gave me an "authority" to appeal to when arguing with people that are clueless about behaving in a responsible matter. (I know the appeal to authority is a fallacy, but in the real world you can come up with the most logical, reasoned, and fact supported argument in the world, but if the only authority supporting what you're saying is yourself, nobody is really going to listen to you.)

So I feel that if I were to go through law school and actually make it through I would come out more principled than before.

However people that don't have a clue about behaving responsibly and are at the same time ignorant of how things work in reality tend to come out even more screwed up and more dangerous than before after becoming lawyers. Since now we have someone that has no concept of being a decent and responsible person, but is fully versed in the law and is fully capable of using the powers that being a lawyer grants them for their own ends.

I once was arguing with a lawyer that tried to claim that a person is not responsible or accountable for the harm that they do if the action that causes the harm is something that person has the right to do. And argued that nobody ever has any obligation to put any interest ahead of his own self interest. Argued that is was perfectly fine to take advantage of the flawed patent system as an attorney in order to get rich regardless of the harm done to others (basically saying if someone has a bogus patent as a result of flaws in the system, namely the patent office doing a crappy job in evaluating the patent before issue, it is obvious it's bogus, but the law as it stands today is on his side and he feels he can win regardless, then "All I can say is chi-ching!" Going further to say "while people are calling me an scumbag attorney, I'll be happily be cashing my hefty paychecks!"

Of course this person never learned anything about responsibility, care for one's fellow man and one's teammates, conflict management, etc. In fact when I tried to explain some of these principles, this person acted like I was in whole another world and that that I was disconnected from reality, and reiterated a bunch of rights based ethics BS. Fresh out of law school with no training in responsibility but with full knowledge of the law, a pretty dangerous combination.