Lets Kill All The Lawyers

Law schools are manufacturing more lawyers than America needs, and law students aren't happy about it.

During the recession, the logic was ubiquitous: The economy is terrible—better to wait it out! It is a three-year fast track to a remunerative, respectable career! It's not just learning a subject—it's learning how to think! Law school, always the safe choice, became a more popular choice. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of LSAT takers climbed 20.5 percent. Law school applications increased in turn. 

But now a number of recent or current law students are saying—or screaming—that they made a mistake. They went to law school, they say, and now they're underemployed or jobless, in debt, and three years older.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Serves those parasitic bloodsuckers right. Now if only there was some way to drag down the rest of 'em.

(Some students have gone), perhaps inevitably, to the courts. Kenneth Desornes, for instance, named his law school in his bankruptcy filing. He asks the school to "admit that your business knew or should have known that Plaintiff would be in no position to repay those loans."

Like sharks eating their young.

The students might be litigious—no surprise there—and overwrought. But they've got a point. The demand for lawyers has fallen off a cliff, both due to the short-term crisis of the recession and long-term changes to the industry, and is only starting to rebound. The lawyers that do have jobs are making less than they used to.

Students simply "cannot earn enough income after graduation to support the debt they incur," wrote Richard Matasar, the dean of New York Law School, in 2005. "Even those making the highest salaries find that the debt that they have accumulated while in school may tax them for years."

Many have long argued that lawyers are a drag on society and the economy.

Dan Quayle voiced it back in 1991.

Q. Why does New Jersey have so much industrial waste and Washington, D.C., so many lawyers?

A. New Jersey had first choice.

William Shakespeare beat him by about 300 years.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2). 

Even the Anointed One (now resting up from all that golf on a $200 million per day vacation) acknowledges that lawyers are counterproductive.

"I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers." (Quote from "The Audacity of Hope," p. 10) 

Irony alert - this from an idiot who chose to be a lawyer, who married a lawyer, and who was a law school instructor. Nice to know he (a) has the courage of his convictions, (b) learns from his mistakes, or (c) none of the above.

Early in his successful (!!!) campaign for the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul quoted Thomas Jefferson:

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? "

Paul went on to point out that 36% of congresscritters were lawyers, a fact that helps explain (1) why it's so ineffective, and (2) why it's held in disdain by so many Americans. 

There's an old joke about a lawyer living in a small town and going broke. Then a second lawyer moves to town and they both get rich.

Sad but true.

If you've ever watched daytime TV, and you have an ounce of integrity and self-respect, then your stomach must have been turned by all the ads for lawyers.

Any doubts? Go here and then here and decide for yourself.

There are many lawyer jokes (What's wrong with lawyer jokes? Lawyers don't think they're funny, and no one else thinks they're jokes), but here's one of my favorites.

A grade school teacher asks  her students what their parents do for a living.

Billy proudly stands up and announces, "My daddy plays piano in a whorehouse."

The teacher is aghast and promptly changes the subject. Later that day, she calls Billy's mother and explains what Billy said.

Billy's mother says, "Actually, his father's an attorney, but how can we explain a thing like that to a seven-year-old?"

And another:

Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, an honest lawyer, and an old drunk were walking along when they simultaneously spotted a hundred-dollar bill laying in the street. Who gets it?

The old drunk, of course. The other three are mythological creatures.