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The higher the monetary barrier to entry to a profession the greater the rents that accrue to those who can afford to get in. Requiring seven years of college m
by barry-cotter 4y ago
The higher the monetary barrier to entry to a profession the greater the rents that accrue to those who can afford to get in. Requiring seven years of college means that very few people who were not born to the bourgeoisie or higher can join, which makes the profession more pleasant for lawyers, who have always been bourgeois. Making a first undergraduate degree mandatory means your colleagues will be more well rounded, interesting people, which makes the profession more pleasant for lawyers.
Seeing a trend here?
- ghaff 4y agoAs it is, there isn't much of a general barrier to getting a law degree/any law degree to the point where the typical lawyer isn't really making a lot of money. The big bucks are going to white shoe law firms in big cities to lawyers who went to top schools (including Harvard) and landed federal court clerkships. While there are respectable salaries among the others, there are also a lot of lawyers doing real estate law in shopping malls that are just getting by.
- hnfong 4y agoApparently (or so I read) there is an over-supply of law school graduates in the US despite the gatekeeping requirements. The only alternative is to raise the difficulty of the bar exam but that might make it difficult for shopping malls to find affordable lawyers...
- ghaff 4y agoA lot of lawyers would probably argue that the bar already doesn't have a whole lot to do with practicing law. What I see among friends with liberal arts degrees from Ivies and adjacent is that, while a few were probably already destined to be lawyers like three previous generations of their family, for most it's something they sort of fell into because they graduated with a classics major and now what? Many never even ended up practicing law--at least not for long.