Law School
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Exlawdean
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Hello everyone,
I am a retired professor. I taught at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, at USC Gould School of Law, and at the University of Texas (at Austin) School of Law as a tenured, full-time professor. I was also a full professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and at the California Institute of Technology Division of Humanities and Social Science. For six years I was the Dean of the Gould School at USC. I have a lot of experience. I have decided to join this conversation as an experiment. I have seen some people ask questions about going to law school. I can answer, or at least give my opinion about, a subset of these questions. For the most part, my postings will reflect my opinion about law school and law practice. However, many of these opinions will have a foundation in published, empirical research. When the research supports (or impeaches) what I post, I will endeavor to tell you about it. I will start with the most basic and most frequently asked question: Should my child go to law school? In my opinion the best reason to go to law school is that your child wants to be a lawyer. This answer immediately leads to a second question: How can your child know whether they want to be a lawyer? This question is much harder to answer, in part because there are so many different types of lawyers, and in part because the practice of law will likely change a lot over the next decade or two. On the first point consider the differences between criminal lawyers (prosecutors and defense), business litigators, real estate lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers, divorce and family lawyers, commercial lawyers (helping businesses to make routine deals), merger and acquisition lawyers (helping businesses to make existential deals), government lawyers at every level (federal, state, local), and public interest lawyers. This only scratches the surface. These lawyers often have very different lives, and sometimes different levels of stress and satisfaction. In order for your child to even start to understand whether they want to be a lawyer, they should find a way to follow around different types of lawyers to get a decent understanding of a “day in the life” of different lawyers. And your child should not be trying to shadow lawyers when they are 10 years old. Your child should be at least 18 years old before they try engaging in such an exercise. The optimal time to follow lawyers and ask questions is probably when your child is a junior in college. The worst thing is to go to law school without ever having engaged in the process of gathering this information. What about the second issue: The practice of law will likely change a lot in the next 20 years. Everyone has been reading stories about artificial intelligence that include predictions that AI will gobble up jobs in the information sector. That might be true. We all saw how good chess programs got in the space of about 25 years. Law practice is different from chess, and I can’t really say how it will all play out. I would be shocked if you had to be good at programming computers in order to be good at law practice. Every practicing law has experience using computers in their work today. We use Lexis and Westlaw to find sources of law and legal rules. Neither of these tools requires that we be “good at computing.” So, here is my guess. AI will reduce the total number of jobs in law practice over the next 20 years. But if your child is smart and creative, there will be a place for them in the practice of law. That’s all, for now. Feel free to ask questions. I will try to check in at least once a week. |
Anonymous
| Did you practice law? What area? What type of firm or agency? How long? |
Anonymous
| Getting popcorn… |
Anonymous
| Hi Professor Spitzer! |
Anonymous
| Why do law schools do rolling admissions? Don’t they run the risk missing great candidates who can’t apply early? |
Anonymous
| As a parent, my 1st question is how hard or is it possible to get scholarships/FA from a top 14 law school? DC is attending college in the fall at a top SLAC and is aspiring to study environmental science, law and public policies. Any advice will be appreciated! |
Anonymous
| Do you really think a LSAT score tells you anything about a prospective lawyer? |
Exlawdean
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I practiced for a bit less than two years at what was a large commercial firm in Los Angeles in the 1970s, about 2/3 general commercial litigation and 1/3 antitrust. I then became a professor, and worked at that for 43 years. |
Exlawdean
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Law admissions officers are, in general, very smart people who are good at making tradeoffs. Rolling admissions has some costs and benefits. Their mission is to provide the dean, who is their boss, with the entering class that the dean requests. |
Anonymous
| Hi Dean. I’m a NU grad and I’ve been appalled to watch the school let the students bully deans into quitting, leaving the institution worse for the wear. What the heck are schools going to do about student bodies pushing them further and further from their mission? |
Exlawdean
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First, as I emphasized above, these are my opinions. The LSAT score is, in part, an indicator of cleverness. The questions are difficult, and the ability to answer them is indicative of the ability of the prospective student to solve hard questions. LSAT score correlates well with GRE scores, with SAT scores, and, perhaps more importantly, with the ability to pass the bar exam in states with very hard bar examinations (e.g. California and New York). To be clear, I should point out that the correlation data is not just my opinion, but is a set of statistical relationships. Second, there is no doubt that there is also a cultural component to the LSAT. There is also a cultural component to legal practice. Does this disadvantage those without the "right" cultural background? In my opinion, yes. |
Anonymous
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Thank you for taking the time to answer questions here. Other than the GPA and LSAT score, what do T14 law schools look for in a student?
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Anonymous
| I always hear that acceptance is basically LSAT. IME, this isn’t true at all. Can you discuss? |
Anonymous
If my U.S. citizen son gets a 172 on the LSATs and a 7.2 out of 10 at an English-language bachelor’s program at the University of Leiden, what could he be an OK candidate for a law school like the University of Texas law school, or would he have to start lower down because U.S. schools would think of that as a bad GPA? Would a U.S. law school care whether a Dutch university graduate had a Dutch master’s degree? (Dutch people think of someone who has just a bachelor’s degree as a dropout.) |
Anonymous
| 3.9 and 174 waitlisted everywhere in the top 10. Has ED become so necessary that this is the norm now? |