Earnest, Young, & Owing: how law students find themselves trapped in a corporate cartel.

• Author: Klein, Avi
• Position: Book Review

The Destruction of Young Lawyers: Beyond One L By Douglas Litowitz University of Akron Press, $32.95

Alger Hiss once remarked to his son that "three years at Lewisburg penitentiary is a good corrective to three years at Harvard [Law School]" It is hard to know exactly what he meant by this--Hiss (codename: Advokat) was, after all, a communist spy--but he was neither the first nor the last lawyer to suspect there was some. thing fundamentally wrong with legal education. As Hiss's behavior suggests, law school has the ability--some might say the intention--to engender greed and intellectual myopia, sometimes from the very first day. Young, creative, ambitious men and women, fresh from four years of liberal arts education, enter law school eager to make a change in the world. They leave as dedicated corporate functionaries, consumed with money and prestige, and fearful of upsetting the legal establishment. Douglas Litowitz, in The Destruction of Young Lawyers: Beyond One L, exaggerates only a little when he says that law school "breaks people.... [I]t is experienced as a trauma, an assault." If law school changes people, it is rarely for the better.

For this reason, popular literature on law school can usually be divided into two groups: the painful memoir and the indignant expose Scott Turow's classic One L--which succeeded in scaring two generations of incoming law students witless, and to which Litowitz alludes in his subtitle--is the former, as is Broken Contract, by Richard Kahlenberg. In the indignant expose pile are books such as the recent The People vs. Harvard Law, by Andrew Peyton Thomas, which accused the school of succumbing to political correctness in its hiring and in its pedagogical decisions. (Turow and Kahlenberg are both Harvard alumni. The school seems to produce a healthy number of both authors and spies--meager evidence, perhaps, that guidance counselors are right when they say you can do anything with a law degree. Litowitz, for his part, attended Northwestern.)

What neither of these two styles of book manages to do, however, is seriously discuss what it is exactly that makes law school so unpleasant. To understand law school--and therefore the grassroots of the legal profession--one has to first grasp the economics supporting it. Here, Litowitz, a professor at Ohio Northern University with a short career in corporate law, stakes out space few practicing attorneys are willing even to survey: The system, Litowitz observes, is designed and sustained by corporate law firms in order to create just the right number of lawyers to fulfill corporate demand, but not so many that the fees of established lawyers are at risk of competition. At the same time, by failing to adequately teach these same lawyers how to actually practice law, and by saddling them with huge debts in the process, the legal establishment "scare[s] young lawyers into cowering submissively before the awesome power of the organized bar and the licensing authorities."

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