School Debt and Lawyers Who Do Good

Of all the odd voices to start such a fight, it was former Vox founder turned outcast Matt Yglesias.

I’m for a modest student debt forgiveness program (which I think is what Biden will do) but as you shift from “modest” to “total” debt forgiveness you are increasingly talking about helping dentists and lawyers rather than sympathetic cases.

At this moment, you wonder, “how often have I asked myself, ‘what does Matty think of this?'” before realizing that the answer is never? As an aside, why people find it valuable to express things they’re for or against as opposed to why they’re for or against it is a mystery. But I digress.

In other words, $10,000 worth of forgiveness would be a game-changer for a community college graduate but it genuinely doesn’t do that much for you if you followed up your Brandeis education with a Yale Law School degree and then sociology grad school at Harvard.

This is what law might look like to some, but not to most lawyers. We didn’t go to Harvard (unless your name is Ken or Elie), and we didn’t get a gig at Biglaw with a starting salary of $185,000. Most of us went to Brand-X law schools and got tossed out into the world of too many lawyers and not enough jobs. We learned this hard lesson following the recession of 2007, when a generation of lawyers were lost and went on to do whatever they could to pay off their school debt, but it wasn’t law.

But that lesson appears to have been forgotten, as a new generation of students went to law school, not to become overpaid Biglaw benchwarmers but “public interest” lawyers. That’s what they call themselves because that’s what they fancy themselves. They wrap it around themselves to bask in the warmth of their self-righteousness, that they have become lawyers to serve goodness and social justice. And because of that, they are special, and because they are special, they deserve special treatment.

Something like 95% of law students go to law school wanting to do public-interest law; 5% actually do. That’s not because of some nefarious PMC socialization. It’s because we come out with $100-200k in loans. Get rid of them and suddenly we can afford to leave BigLaw.

What they refer to as “public interest law” is what used to be referred to as public defense. It’s not exactly a new practice area, a subgroup of criminal defense notable for too many clients, too little pay and an opportunity to gain a lot more experience than any biglaw tool. It was once the niche filled by the handful of passionate baby lawyers together with those who couldn’t find gainful employment. It’s now a very hot niche among the Harvard and Yale types.

Whether the percentages above are remotely accurate is hard to say, but not really important enough to waste time figuring out. There is a strong interest in baby lawyers to serve a higher good than line their pockets upon graduation, and that’s a wonderful thing. There is a strong need for quality representation in public defense, and it’s great to see students from top schools competing for the handful of woefully underpaid public defense jobs out there. Whether they have such enormous debt isn’t clear, but no doubt some do.

But if so, then these bright-eyed, well-intended law students chose a path knowing that they would be assuming debt to take on a mission that would never be sufficiently remunerative to cover it and provide them with a decent lifestyle. In a sense, it’s like giving to charity and then complaining that the charity isn’t giving you value back for your money. You knew it was charity in the first place. What did you expect?

Seeing a small fire burning, Matt Bruenig poured gasoline on the conflagration.

This percentage is way overstated. But still the actual constraint here is that there actually is not a large market for “public-interest law.” Law schools and law students should be less dumb about who legal services consumers actually are.

If what he’s trying to say is that there isn’t a large market for public defense, then he’s just unaware as a privileged kinda guy about what Gideon means, how we’ve failed it and how many poor people get dragged into the well on a daily basis. But then, what it appears he’s confusing, perhaps because the practice area name of “public interest law” is nonsensical, is that it’s a self-sustaining practice area like Mergers & Acquisitions, Personal Injury or Constitutional Contract Law. That’s not at all what’s happening or where the need is.

For the past generation, we’ve recognized that law has become so integral to society that there exists a serious Access to Justice (A2J) problem for people who can’t afford a lawyer or choose not to allocate their very scare resources to get representation. To pretend this isn’t a huge problem is delusional.

What it is not is a sustainable practice area for baby lawyers who want to be “public interest lawyers” because they can’t earn a sustainable living doing this. There have been many attempts at addressing this problem, none of which have worked because they were based primarily on the fantasies of well-intended academics and techies, who believed they could reinvent the future of law. Nobody wanted what they were selling, so now it’s apparently forgotten by all involved.

Are the new generation of “public interest lawyers” entitled to special consideration for their dedication to social justice, or are most baby lawyers making dentist-level fortunes sitting in Biglaw libraries and their cries of poverty and entitlement a cover for giving baby lawyers about to live the good life a free ride on the backs of plumbers?

And why doesn’t anyone consider where all the money from these outrageous and fiscally-illiterate student loans went? It’s bad enough that law students who choose to dedicate their careers to the public good can’t figure out that they’re not going to earn enough to carry their debt load plus eat on occasion, but if anyone owes them a refund for their good works, what about those law schools with huge endowments that foster their ideological passion while never forgetting to send them tuition bills?