Democratizing the Legal Profession: Why Entry Barriers Need to Go

What does "capable" mean in this context? Not to have had the education is apparently no limitation on one's capability. Were you just as "capable" before you entered law school as you will be when you leave?

Moreover, this can’t be done at any school. For a law school to be ABA accredited, it must have a specific type administrative structure (e.g. the right distribution of authority between the dean, faculty, board, and other administrators), have certain grading practices, have a minimum amount of career advisors, use certain admissions tests, release data about its students to the ABA, and much more. Does attendance at a law school with these arbitrary requirements really bear a significant relation to one’s ability to provide satisfactory legal services.

Yes. I have been doing the work of teaching people how to be lawyers for far longer than you have been alive, and I doubt have any doubt about that. Perhaps you could give at least some sort of reason for believing otherwise, beyond the "just asking questions" pose in use here?

Is a student unable to achieve a satisfactory education at a school that doesn’t require the LSAT yet still has the same academic rigor as schools that do?

What does this mean? LSAT is an "aptitude," not a skills test. Whether it exists or is in use neither drives up the cost of legal services in society nor affects the quality of lawyering. But that's a red herring, is it not?

Does graduating from a law school with a sufficient level of administrative bloat really have anything to do with how competent of a lawyer one will be?

So perhaps you could have cited some and discussed the quality of the analysis involved. This is not, I must say, an accurate description of the bar exam, in my experience. I didn't memorize anything for the exam. I left my clerkship on the 14th of July. I moved house between cities, moved into my law school office, read through a compressed set of rather lousy bar review materials once, and took the exam on July 28th and 29th. I passed because half of the exam is guess-corrected multiple choice, a kind of exam I had been taking successfully since age 6, combined with four simple essay questions (which would also be well-designed for you, as citing cases and other materials is not allowed). After reading legal materials for thousands of hours over most of a decade, including five years of law school and PhD preparations in the history of US and English law, about fifteen months of law firm and in-house law practice and two years of clerking (one year in a NY federal district court)—were a cinch. Projecting law student anxiety onto the bar exam is absurd. Claiming that it sets an unreasonably high threshold for intellectual competence is only slightly less ridiculous.

One way to improve the draft would be to put it in some touch with professional literature. As far as the reader can tell, you've just made it all up: not even your numbers have sources. Perhaps the point is that access to low-quality rhetoric and scant research is better than access to no blather at all?

I doubt that you would write the same piece, replacing "lawyer" with "doctor." Whatever the effect on excluding Jews from medical practice—which has been outstandingly unsuccessful for most of the last 2,000 years, despite the prevalence in many European times and places of regulations to prevent Jews from practicing medicine at all—I doubt that anyone would assert that abolishing medical licensing would improve public health. The implicit premise, therefore, is that the harm that incompetent, dishonest, or chaotic lawyers can do to their clients is sufficiently less serious than the harm done by doctors that we could afford to bear it, or rather, to impose it on the people who would be left to the mercies of the quacks, while those who could afford it chose the lawyers with licenses subject to rules.

In fact, this libertarianism of the "let them eat cake" version (which also assumes, that childcare should be completely deregulated, that environmental and workplace safety regulations drive up prices and "handcuff" businesses), that securities regulations don't help investors enough to justify the impediments they impose on the clever, shifty geniuses of the Sam Bankman-Fried version, and so on serves basically to remind us that grinding the faces of the poor is good work whether you went to Harvard or not.

So the other best route to improvement here, I think, is either to cop to the general libertarian delusion that we have no responsibility to one another, or to explain why law practice is uniquely subject to the benefit of radical deregulation, why—that is—no proof of initial and continuing education, no character investigation, no proof of diligence and some minuscule demonstration of the ability to write coherently should not be necessary to hold oneself out as a legal representative, when it is necessary to the task of selling real estate and life insurance, notarizing documents, or embalming and burying the dead. Should lawyers be less regulated than veterinarians? I don't think you seriously mean to propose this, but if so, you should say precisely why.

I also think that it would be more useful to you in your professional education to write about what you intend to do in your practice than to proclaim thin reasons why the public should be uninterested in your competence to do it. You will fear malpractice, I should hope, just as every lawyer does. You will, I presume, exert yourself to do the best for your clients, and to avoid at all costs cheating them or harming them through negligence. So why don't we leave behind the question what steps the public ought to take to hold you to those commitments, and concentrate instead on helping you to achieve them.