I'm presently a school district administrator and am considering applying to (and hopefully completing) law school.
Since I know that there are at least a couple of lawyers hanging around these boards (i.e. Steve Long, for one), I was hoping to get some opinions on this idea.
What are the pluses of attending law school and eventually practicing law? What are the drawbacks?
Even if you aren't a lawyer, toss your opinion out anyway; I want to know what you all think.
I have recently gone back to school as well, university part-time. Expanding your knowledge is never a bad thing. If Law is something you think you might find interesting to study, and later practice...I say go for it.
I never went to law school, however I do teach law from a social science perspective at a University. Perhaps my reasoning will help you out... (not that you will agree with it or that it fits you, but it might be instructive nevertheless)
First off, quite frankly I never thought I could handle the boredom of law school. Blame it on my lack of decent study skills or watching "The Paper Chase" but my basic response when asked why I did not go is "#$@% that noise". Torts and tax law and John Houseman asking me to recite cases from rote scared the hell out of me, not because I cannot do it but because it would drive me right out of my friggin' skull. I am far more interested in the social and political aspects of law. Theories of law are astounding from a philosophical and logic basis. The relationship of law and culture adds another layer. Constitutional Law cases fascinate me, and while that is a course I teach at the university on occasion (the higher ups get most of the interesting stuff, in my profession ugly brown fertilizer most definitely moves towards the center of gravity down an incline in a rotating motion ) even my lower-level courses get a powerful dose of conlaw and constitutional design. They are great stories above and beyond the value they have as precedents; they tell a human tale of the law-in-action (up to and including the politics of the bench) and demonstrate the complexity of legal situations that most of my students try to cast as simple black-and-white circumstances.
None of that stuff is what you do in law school however, which was problem number two for me. Law school does not really touch what I find so great about the law. Or more precisely, you do that stuff peripherally, but it is not the focus of your attention. The most emphasis of any of the above is on constitutional law, and even then many law schools only devote one or maybe two classes to this area in their strict regimen. That made law school very unattractive for me personally.
Third, it is expensive. I busted my ass before I went to Undergrad to make sure I did not have any loans. I worked through grad school in order to do the same. There are some people in this world who will make a lot of money, but I knew from way back I was not one of them. Traveling debt-light is a good thing for John the Penniless and 60K+ in law school loans is too horrific a situation for me to contemplate.
The last point is not as much about my own decision as what I have seen in others. Many of my students either plan to or indeed go on to attend law school, some of them get back in touch with me. The drop-out rate seems relatively high from that somewhat biased sample (which is to say students who bother catching up with their former profs) -- many of them tell me that "Law school is not what I expected it to be" or something of that nature. Some of them stick it out, others decide to leave and move on to something else. One stuck it out through graduation but decided he did not want to become a lawyer after all and instead has become a kind of 'professional clerk' (not officially of course but he spent a few years doing that before we lost touch).
Bottom line: whatever you think, whatever somebody -- including me -- tells you, you might and probably will find the experience to be different from your expectations. I would definitely have a 'back up plan', but then it sounds like you already have a professional career path to fall back on. If it is something you need, I think that you will accomplish it; you have demonstrated amply on these boards alone that you are both capable of critical thought and very intelligent.
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Thinking of law school...
) even my lower-level courses get a powerful dose of conlaw and constitutional design. They are great stories above and beyond the value they have as precedents; they tell a human tale of the law-in-action (up to and including the politics of the bench) and demonstrate the complexity of legal situations that most of my students try to cast as simple black-and-white circumstances.
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