You have wondered, no doubt, as nearly everyone wonders from time to time, where all the lawyers come from. Was there something you missed–or only skimmed–in sophomore biology? Or health class? Or gym? They seem to be everywhere you look, and yet you never see them reproducing.
According to the American Bar Association, in the fall of 1990 the nation’s 175 ABA-approved law schools welcomed the largest entering class ever (44,104) to the largest total law school enrollment (132,433) in American history. It would be interesting to see these raw figures broken down into motivational categories. But nobody, as far as I know, has ever made any effort to do that–to distinguish between those for whom law school is the triumphant end of a long march, and those who, like me, simply happened to wander in. In every law school class there are accidents like me; you can tell by the glum, dazed, and bewildered looks sprinkled here and there among the go-getter smiles. But nobody counts them up. People in legal education confine themselves to counting warm bodies–“degree candidates”–and they generally come up with 40,000 new ones every fall. All but a handful of these get cranked out at the other end, and that, at least in the immediate sense, is where all the lawyers come from: more than 770,000 of them now. I work that out, by the way, to be 768 miles of lawyers, laid end to end, or 47,000 tons of lawyers.
An extensive survey conducted by the ABA in 1990 found “an astonishing rise” in drinking among lawyers nationwide: 13 percent of those surveyed–20 percent of the women–admitted having six or more drinks a day.
Nothing.
Nowadays I don’t like to think much about how I ended up becoming a lawyer: the cloudy, mistaken notions I had, the silly fantasies I indulged, the contradictions I avoided acknowledging, the obvious questions I never bothered to ask. It’s all too embarrassing. But I will say this for myself: my mistakes were typical. For that reason alone, it may be worth looking into how I managed to be so dumb, and the way I was forced to pay for it.
Why should this admission be humiliating? Because only passive, useless, dreamy, impractical, unrealistic people need to linger in school. The fact that I was all these things was so unmistakable that I couldn’t come anywhere near admitting it. I had internalized the world’s scorn for the timid. But I did not know quite how to be bold.
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I’m sure you see where this is heading. Perhaps you don’t buy any of it. Certainly what I am saying applies to no more than a subset of those who end up in law school. But the fact remains that for many one of the strongest attractions of law school is that it is, after all, more school. It’s a way of avoiding the leap into “real life,” which is an abyss. To those who have left school and drifted a while, it’s a return to dry land, to a sense of solid purpose. Many ex- (or “recovering”) students feel funny, dizzy, aimless outside of school. They are like marchers whom the parade, taking an abrupt left, has scattered into the crowd. There they find things strangely discontinuous, disorderly. Nobody is in step; term no longer follows term; nothing is graded; there is no final, no goal, no progress. There is no point.
