Female Law Students Face Greater Obstacles in the Legal Job Market

Three YEARS of private law school costs upwards of $275,000 in tuition and living expenses. A very nice suit is no more than $750. It turns out that men and women don't fit into law school in exactly the same way any more than they fit into the suit the same way. You'd try on a $750 suit before you bought it, especially one that was originally designed for a man! This article was written to enable you to do the same thing with the much more important decision about law school.

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What's a smart girl like you doing considering or attending law school? Maybe you haven't been able to decide what to do when you get out of college, and you think law school will let you keep putting the decision off. Maybe you've been working as a teacher or a nurse, and you're tired of laboring long hours for lousy pay. Maybe one of your parents was a lawyer, or you've always been a great arguer at the dinner table. What are the chances that law school will give you what you want? Should you be going to law school at all? If you do decide to go ahead, there's lots of guidance out there already-magazine publishers' guides to law school, student guides, the catalogs from the schools themselves. Why a woman’s guide to law school? Here’s how the enormously confident and successful female editor in chief of a selective and prestigious state university law review put it: “There’s no question that women have to work twice as hard to get half the respect.” Lani Guinier, the woman President Clinton put up for civil rights chief and then a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Lav/ School (she’s now at Harvard), found that first-year men at Penn were three times more likely to make the top 10 percent of their class than women were. In the fall of ’97, the all-female Mills College in California had a three-day conference to address the problems of women in law schools.

This is a pretty sad picture. If Ms. Editor’s story were the whole story, or if all law schools were the same, women would have no choice but to work twice as hard and expect to be dismissed and condescended to, by teachers and students alike. But Ms. Editor isn’t telling the whole story. She herself says she’s had some wonderful experiences in law school. And she did make it to the very top of the law school heap. Despite the rash of publicity surrounding Guinier’s study, there is a debate among scholars about how big the gap in achievement really is.

For a woman to make it in the law school world, she needs some smart strategies and some good, solid information. I’m going to begin at the point where your thoughts turn to law school, perhaps at the beginning of your junior year in college, perhaps after a few years of working or even after another whole career, whether of wage work or full-time homemaking. You and I will examine the decision to go to law school, its pros and cons, and whom to talk to before you spend another penny, even to register for the Law School Admission Test (the LSAT). I’ll steer you to where you need to go to prepare for the test and the other things that go into constructing an appealing application.

Probably nothing affects the law school experience for women as much as the school they choose. The schools are very different. In recent years, lots of people have examined the experience of women in law school and ranked the various schools, but not according to how likely women are to succeed there. I looked at 158 of the accredited law schools during the year 1997, gathering data on how many women teach there, what percentage of the classes of ’96 and ’97 are female, and how many of the women in those classes are on law review, and then I ranked the schools by status and then according to how well women were doing on all those measures. The main focus here is the ranking I give to the law schools for their value to women. My research has revealed that at every level of status and cost, even among schools with identical median LSAT scores, women rise higher at some schools than others. And fall lower at most.

Compare, at the top of the status ladder, NYU School of Law, with an academic faculty 20 percent women, with the 15 percent female faculty at the equally prestigious Harvard Law School; NYU’s student-edited law review was 52 percent female in 1995—96, while Harvard had only 32 percent women on law review. Compare, in the next status ranking down, the University of Washington School of Law’s 26 percent female academic faculty and 45 percent female law review with Northwestern School of Law’s 21 percent women academic faculty and 27 percent females on 1995-96 law review.

In addition to gathering the statistics available from the public record (most law schools wouldn’t answer questions about their female students or faculty), I’ve conducted scores of interviews with women law students around the country and gathered the growing body of research on the position of women in law schools to paint a detailed picture of law school life. After you have a rough idea where you might be admitted to law school, and after you’ve located your prospective schools on the women- friendly ranking, those stories tell you what else you want to ask about the particular institutions you’re considering.

All the women interviewed agreed that the first year of law school, where the “Socratic” teaching method involves the professors calling on them whether they like it or not, was the most difficult for them. The first year also weighs most heavily on their career opportunities during and immediately after law school and on their self-esteem for a long time after that. As a University of Chicago professor told his first-year class, “Most of the goodies around here go to twenty percent of the class, who emerge in the first year. The other eighty percent spend the next two years licking their psychic wounds.” It’s a dirty little secret of law school life that if you do well the first year, you won’t have to succeed in as tough a situation again for years.

Many women were surprised by how hard the first year was on them. Studies at all Ohio schools, the law schools in Chicago, a national set of testimonial hearings, reports from Stanford—all reflect the disproportionate male participation in the first-year classroom. One University of Minnesota student summed it up: “The first three weeks of class I raised my hand every day and after a while I felt extremely pretentious and now there are only men who raise their hands in class.” Many of the women I interviewed compare law school to a “game” and one that men seem mysteriously to know how to play and want to play.

Not talking in class has severe costs, like not having the professors know you when you need them to write you letters of recommendation for jobs. Making the game seem mysterious is just part of the game! If you know how the game is played, maybe you’ll be more willing to join in. I’m going to tell you what goes on in the first-year classes, so you can prepare yourself for it. We don’t want you to be one of the women students who never talks after the first three weeks. After all, as that old ad for the lottery put it, you can’t win if you don’t play.

Most students of any sex agree that exams are the hardest part of the first year. There are better and worse ways to prepare for your first-year exams. Although women do a little less well in law school than men do, rather than focus on that small disparity, I interviewed women law students who got the best grades you could wish for to share their secrets. You’ll also see what role the commercial aids you can buy will play to help you understand the mysterious body of knowledge the Socratic method of law teaching seems to make so obscure.

Grades, especially the first-year grades, play the largest role in how useful law schools are to many of their students. Students who make it into the top half, and particularly the top quarter, of their class in law school have more job offers from firms that pay bigger bucks and, even if they don’t want to go the big-firm route, have other opportunities, like prestigious judicial clerkships or academic posts, where their less-favored classmates don’t stand a chance. Making law review, or getting to be a staff member of the student-edited journal, used to be just a reflection of first-year grades, and the opportunities went to law review members. Recently, however, the selection criteria have been modified to allow students to try out using a combination of grades and a writing competition, or even writing alone. If you haven’t made it into the thin sliver of your class eligible for law review on grades alone (and some schools don’t take anyone on grades alone), if your school makes everyone surmount both hurdles. If you don’t have the top grades, being one of the group making law review is still a lot better than just being in the undifferentiated 80 percent that professor described.

At the beginning of the second year, the focus turns to getting a job in your newly chosen profession, and there women and men seem to follow somewhat different tracks, with many women forgoing the high pay/high status world of private practice.

On the subject of jobs, you can go to any place in the law from any school, but if you must buck the general expectations of your law school, it’s just going to make your experience more of an uphill battle. More Wall Street practitioners come from Columbia than from Fordham and more public interest lawyers from CUNY Queens than from Columbia. Women already have to “work twice as hard for half the respect,” according to our editor in chief. Why make it even harder on yourself?

To my surprise, many of the women I interviewed did not want to talk in class, edit the law review, or work for a Wall Street firm. They wanted to be left alone in class rather than have to defend their answers in a high-pressure exchange, to have time for socializing rather than edit the law review, and to work in public interest jobs, as union-side labor lawyers, or in firms that don’t require “more than forty hours” a week. One student described her law degree as a credential in the marriage market, which demonstrated she was smart enough to produce genetically desirable children for some traditional male who she hoped would liberate her from working at all. Although they were often silent about their disaffection from the striving world of legal education, these women are acting out a kind of personal civil disobedience in the law school world.

Why Do Women Want to Go to Law School?

Let’s begin before the beginning. One recent study reports that a really big indicator of women’s success in law school is why they went in the first place. As you will see, law school is not for everyone. Before you commit any more resources to the undertaking, let’s look closely at whether you should go at all.

THE IDEAL CANDIDATE

When former lieutenant Carol Counselor, High Status law school class of ’90-something, was an officer in the armed services, the soldiers in her squad got into trouble a lot. The military assigned lawyers to defend them, but the military lawyers weren’t zealous enough to suit Carol. “To help my soldiers,” she says, “I would have to look up the regulations. I often learned I was the only one who actually looked them up. Including their lawyers. When the soldiers were in trouble, I always took more of an interest in them than I had to.”

Even before she went to law school, Carol was on the right track for what lay ahead. Representing her soldiers when the military police—the government—came after them is a model of what lawyers do. People are good at what lawyers do when they are zealous about their jobs—part of that zeal involves taking the legal system seriously, and taking the legal system seriously includes going and “looking up the regulations.”

After leaving the military, Carol enrolled in law school, where she ranked at the top of her class. She soon figured out that, like 70 percent of all women lawyers (and 74 percent of men), she will likely be employed in the private practice of law (The National Association of Law Placement reports 58 percent of men and 52 percent of women starting in firms, along with assorted clerkships, etc. The 70 percent number is long-term.) Although she is looking forward to clerking for a judge for a year after graduation, she’s also glad that as late as her third year at High Status U she can interview with corporate firms and nail down a secure, high- paying job in the future.

Representing people with regard to their government’s laws, and taking the job seriously, whether at a small firm, a big firm, or in solo practice, is what most lawyers do. That’s what law school is best at teaching. If Carol’s story sounds appealing to you, you probably belong in law school.

THE DOUBTING CANDIDATE

Another Carol, Carol Too, wasn’t too sure about law school. Carol Too was a liberal arts major at a prestigious state college. Because her dad’s a lawyer, the possibility of law school was always around. But she wasn’t sure it was a good idea, because “everyone goes to law school, and I knew the law school experience was hard, so if I wasn’t sure, then I decided to take some time off.” Carol Too got a job in a law-related field, working for a lawyer in a nonprofessional role. When the lawyer was appointed to the elite federal appeals court, she followed him there. In his chambers, she met the most brilliant of law graduates, who vie with one another for the prestigious judicial clerkships. Every day they talked about the issues in the cases the judge would be having to hear and decide.

Her exposure to the give-and-take of the legal world convinced her that she would find law school worth the effort. When she got there a few years after college, she “liked it, even my first year.” (But even Carol Too found the classroom a surprise.) If you like the rigor and competition of debating issues, even fairly obscure issues like whether or not people have actually committed them-selves to a contract or what constitutes “custody” such that potential criminals are entitled to be apprised of their rights, then law school is probably for you, too.

What Is the "Law" in Law School?

Chances are most of you don’t know whether you’d like to practice law or not or even what it involves. Unlike the Carols, if you’re lucky and drove carefully, you probably never needed a lawyer before you thought about becoming one yourself. Unless someone in your family is a lawyer, you don’t know much about the practice of law.

For our purposes, law is the way government regulates people’s activities. Criminal law, like the laws against murder and theft, prohibits what may be done, period. The police watch for people who try to kill each other or rob banks, and, if they catch such people, someone like the district attorney prosecutes the offenders on behalf of all members of society. Civil law, like the law against negligent driving, also tells people what the government wants them to do but is usually enforced only when someone affected by the illegal conduct complains. So the law prohibits people from driving carelessly, such as looking at their car phone instead of at the road, but the government, in the form of the judiciary, usually steps in only when the careless driver hits someone. If the victim brings the driver before the court system in what we call a “personal injury” suit, the government may punish him or her by making them pay the victim money.

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Civil law also tells people what kinds of arrangements they can make between them and expects the government to step in and make them keep their promises or at least pay a penalty for breaking them. We call legally enforceable private arrangements “contracts,” and, from the small agreement you made to pay back your student loans to the biggest merger ofTurner Network Television with Time Warner Communications, the government will only enforce private contracts if they meet the legal requirements for contracting that the law sets out.

In modern times, governments have begun to act through “regulatory” laws, which tell people what to do and are enforced by the government without a complaining party, sort of like criminal laws, but which usually carry monetary penalties or orders to obey like civil law. The law requiring automobile manufacturers to put seat belts in cars is an example of a regulatory law.

Law is the business of government, which explains why about half of the nation’s legislators are lawyers and why so many of the residents in and around Washington, D.C., or most state capitols are lawyers. They’re looking after their clients’ business at the place where the laws are made, in part, by trying to influence them in advance.

Every private lawyer, from the lawyer for the bank writing up your student loan agreement to the partner in a Wall Street firm putting together the billion-dollar merger, is doing his job, because people need to know three things about law. First, what does the government require? For instance, the bank will probably need to ask if the government will prosecute its loan officers if they try to extract 100 percent interest from you for your student loan, a practice called “usury.” So the bank hires a bank lawyer to tell them how much interest the government will allow them to charge. Second, how do they convince the government that what they’re doing or did is okay? Someone suspected of murder may find himself attracting what he feels is an unhealthy amount of attention from the police. Unless he’s going to hop into his Ford Bronco and run away, he’s going to need a lawyer to convince a jury that he is not guilty. Finally, people are always dreaming up new things to do, and they need a good estimate of how the government will respond to their new ideas. Maybe there’s never been a media merger as big as Turner and Time Warner. The federal government regulates TV in certain ways. Will the government allow two such media giants to merge or will they apply the laws on the books to prohibit the merger? I bet there were a lot of lawyers around when Ted Turner decided it was time to merge with Time Warner. Many new ideas involve making novel arrangements with others that the government will enforce if one party tries to break their word. How can they make an agreement that reflects what they want and that the government will enforce?

Many critics of the law school curriculum decry the emphasis on learning what the government will or will not allow, as if life were as simple as yes or no. They report that women have a harder time thinking in these off/on ways and emphasize that when people—or institutions—come into conflict or desire to cooperate, there are many ways that a lawyer can resolve the conflict into cooperation or enable the cooperation without conflict. If these critics had their way, the “law” in law school would include these strategies for mediating conflicting desires and needs, as well as simply deciding them. Here and there people of this persuasion are having an effect on what is the “law” in law school, using arguments of gender as well as broader arguments about the well-being of society, although this position is by no means common.

What Is the "School" in Law School?

Most legal education is intended to teach you these three things about the law. If you decide to go to law school, you will learn a sample of what the law requires or will enforce, like that there is a law against killing your spouse or that some kinds of agreements have to be in writing. Courses in the substance of law include criminal law, contracts, property, wills and estates, and tax. Second, law school teaches you something of how to convince the government that your client is doing what the government wants, like Johnnie Cochran convincing the jury that O. J. Simpson did not kill his wife. Courses in this process include civil procedure, criminal procedure, evidence, and trial advocacy.

Third, law school teaches you how to figure out from what government did in the past what government is likely to do in a new case. This third piece of legal education is often called “legal reasoning,” or “legal process” and is usually a part of each of the substantive classes (and sometimes the subject of a special class all its own). For example, the class in contracts will use existing contract law to teach you what it takes to make a valid contract (the substance). The contracts professor will also ask you to figure out from the existing law of contracts what a court might do when confronted with a new situation. For example, existing contract law of infancy might require a party to be eighteen in order to conclude a valid contract. Obviously, the law developed to protect very young children, and their families, from being stuck with purchases they weren’t old enough to decide about—or pay for— by unscrupulous merchants. Think of how unfair it would be if someone could bind a thirteen-year-old to pay for a thousand- dollar stereo he or she just “couldn’t resist” at the mall when their parent was not around. A law professor might ask you to figure out whether the law of infancy applies to void a contract for a stereo signed by a mature thirteen-year-old with a mental age of nineteen.*

Law schools present this “legal” thought process as if it were new or unique to the law, but reasoning from old premises to new cases is as old as the Greek philosopher Socrates.

The answer is probably that the contract is not binding, because the law presumes a lack of seasoned judgment at thirteen and does not look behind the chronological age. More of this later! This is the reason first-year teaching is called “Socratic”). The only difference is that most undergraduate educations are devoted to transmitting a body of knowledge, like the law schools transmit the substance of law, rather than teaching undergraduates about the process of reasoning to new cases. So most new law students experience learning “legal reasoning” as new. Many law school guides emphasize the importance of a knack for playing mind games; for example, can you see how the principles behind the contract rule might apply to the puzzling problem of the rare, mentally capable youngster? Women often find such games sterile and too abstract, but are eager and talented problem solvers in day-to-day life.

Curiosity is a great asset in law—and law school. UCLA’s second-year student Diane Information, for instance, looked up magazine articles about law schools and catalogs at the public library. “I love libraries,” she says. “I just like to know stuff.” Since law school teaches how to make arguments from old cases to new ones, if you’re a good arguer and would like to know how to persuade the government to do what your clients want, you should also do well in law school. A second-year UCLA student, Ms. Persistence, boasted to me that she never had a class in her undergraduate years at a large state school she didn’t get into. “If there was a class I wanted, I just went and saw the professor every day until they let me in.”

Unlike most students in California’s public university system, Persistence graduated early, completing her undergraduate education in three and a half years. When the time came for job interviews at UCLA School of Law, Persistence saw all the firms she was entitled to under UCLA’s interviewing system and shanghaied the other interviewers in the hallways or at their lunch breaks. When she settled on a prestigious San Francisco firm, she turned away loads of other offers.

Since law ultimately rests on nonlegal assumptions about what makes a good society (for instance, we want people to be able to buy and sell things without subjecting everyone to a psychiatric evaluation, so we just draw a bright line at eighteen for capacity to contract in most cases), if you have an analytic bent, and love to figure out what a rule really means and therefore to be able to predict what the government is likely to do in a new situation, you’re a good candidate for law school. UCLA moot court finalist Ms. Policy says, “Why not say something wrong in class? Maybe in being wrong you can say something valuable and maybe figure out a policy reason why your answer is really right.” Remember our contracts problem of the mentally mature thirteen- year-old? The courts would probably refuse to consider the buyer’s mental maturity, because very few people want sellers to sell stereos to youngsters, who are usually immature and impulsive, and then try to stick them with the purchase by demanding a test of each teenager’s mental age when the teenager comes to his or her senses. As a policy matter, the lawmakers have decided to protect the majority of impulsive teenagers with a hard-and-fast rule, even if it means that a few stereo merchants are going to have to take the stereos back from the handful of youths who are mentally old enough to make decisions of that magnitude. The really hard problem is whether the courts will enforce a contract in a closer case, say by a sixteen-year-old who actively misled the seller into thinking he was older. Policy would think this was fun to try to figure out.

Show Me the Money

One thing that will help you feel comfortable in your law school education regardless of your curiosity, argumentativeness, or problem-solving inclinations is if you like money. If you aspire to earn a very good living, like women who have worked at crummy jobs for a few years after college, you will tend to be more goal- oriented about law school. Ms. Older, age forty-seven and living in a law school dormitory, went to law school for one reason:

“California public employees haven’t seen a wage increase in years.” A student at Minnesota said, “I couldn’t make a living in my undergraduate subject.”

The National Association of Law Placement reports that in 1994, lawyers in private practice averaged starting salaries of $50,000, although the Princeton Review correctly notes that a few high numbers probably raised the average.

Nonetheless, a majority of starting lawyers made more than $40,000. In 1993, a survey of women practitioners in Colorado, far from the highest- end legal market in the United States, revealed a salary range from $30,806 for a lawyer with one to three years’ experience to $102,500 at more than twenty years out of school. The Colorado numbers reflected substantial disparity between men’s and women’s compensation; still, Colorado’s women lawyers made a lot more money than someone with a history B.A. can make driving a cab. And salaries have gone way up since 1993.

If you’re in it for the money, you won’t see law school as defining you as a person. If you get into a more prestigious law school, even if you don’t have great grades there, the status of your degree will give you a shot at a good job in practice. UCLA’s intrepid arguer went from making the minimum wage slinging hash the summer before her first year in law school to making $1,300 a week the next summer at an L.A. law firm. At the lower-status law schools, the students of both genders are often the first generation of their families to get a higher education, and even a modest middle-class life seems good to them.

You Don't Have to Practice What You Learn

But even if law school’s for you, you still must decide if you are a good candidate for the private practice of law. As my favorite client, the president of a local bus drivers’ union in California, described a good job, “You stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer and you stay clean.” Practicing law usually meets that standard.

There are two things about practicing law that many of the women I talked to find unattractive. First, you may have to work very long hours. Second, you may have to represent really icky people. A recent survey of eight large New York firms revealed that 41 percent of women associates worked between forty-one and fifty hours each week and another 41 percent worked fifty hours or more. Averaging fifty hours at the office every week doesn’t leave a lot of time for sleeping, dressing, eating, commuting, running errands, and having a social life. UCLA’s Ms. Persistence, for instance, simply eliminated from the firms she would work for during the all-important “tryout” summer between the second and third years a very well-known San Francisco firm that required its first-year associates to bill 2,400 hours a year. To bill 2,400 hours, you must bill forty-eight hours a week, assuming two weeks of vacation, and to bill forty-eight hours, you must be in the office much more. She didn’t want to spend fifty or sixty hours a week at the office.

Then there are the clients. Remember the tobacco executives who each stood up in Congress a couple of years ago and swore that cigarettes were not addictive? Every single one of them had a lawyer, probably more than one. Many legal matters involve a more powerful player and a less powerful one or someone trying to accomplish his own goals regardless of the cost to society. Polluters have lawyers, people who want to fire their African American and female employees have lawyers. Criminals have lawyers. Many of the women I interviewed hoped to avoid making a career as the lawyer who helps people increase their power over hapless subordinates by going into the jobs called “public interest.” But a lot of the clients in public interest jobs, like the criminals public defenders represent, aren’t all that appealing either.
I actively tried to meet women who were destined for their 70 percent majority jobs in private practice, but I still saw a lot of female law students trying to find places in the world of public interest or government. As of 1991, the Law School Admission Council found that, regardless of what fate held in store for them, only 45 percent of women first-year students aspired to private practice or business. An almost equal number hoped for government or public interest work. By contrast, the same study found almost 60 percent of men looking to private practice or business and only 32 percent thinking of the public sector.

Ms. Union, a third-year student at an Ivy League school, for example, never wanted to be a traditional private practitioner. She has taken a job in private practice, but in a firm representing mostly organized labor (called a “union side” labor law firm), which she perceives as a public interest job because even organized workers on the whole are less powerful than their employers. Through her law school’s public interest center, NYU’s Ms. Interest found a public interest internship with a Prisoners’ Legal Services Project and a summer job with the Justice Department to her liking. At Minnesota, Ms. Rights, a first-year student with an interest in international human rights, specifically went to law school because so many of the issues she cared about were tied up with law, like international conventions and immigration law. Half my interview subjects at UCLA were anticipating working with such institutions as the office of the public defender (public defenders still represent criminals, by the way) or the California public counsel.

It's Hard to Be a Lefty —

Especially in Law School

Although some so-called public interest jobs like Ms. Union’s union side labor job are technically in the private practice, most are not. If you do not expect to practice law in a firm or a business, you will be a distinct minority in law school. Being a minority is generally not a big advantage in any society. So most law students hoping to do public interest work are swimming upstream. Even if there were no such thing as gender discrimination or favoritism in law school, not wanting to go into private practice is sort of like being left-handed—you will seem a little different, and most services are not going to be oriented to your special needs. Women are also a minority of law students—as of 1994-95, women were a minority at 88 percent of American law schools. A woman law student who is also a law student who doesn’t expect to enter the private practice of law is a minority of a minority.

Not surprisingly, many of the women I spoke to in this minority/minority felt unsatisfied with their experience. One public- interest-bound lawyer described herself as feeling very out of place at Columbia, because, she said, her classmates were all going into corporate law, and she felt the law school did not enable students easily to find work in other areas. She recommends that instead of just blindly picking a law school, a woman with public interest aspirations ask the admissions office what careers the graduates choose and specifically about public interest law, like being a public defender or working in public policy.

The American Bar Association’s Official Guide to Approved Law Schools contains an entry, “Type of Employment,” which reveals the initial placement of the most recent graduating class from each law school. Only a few of the schools (Northeastern, CUNY Queens, St. Thomas, Northern Illinois) reflect a “public interest” placement of more than 5 percent in the ABA guide, although the number goes up to more than 20 percent if you add in “government employment,” which conceals a lot of jobs traditionally regarded as “public interest.” Another way to tell how supportive a law school will be for a public interest career is to ask if your prospective law school is one of the over seventy law schools that belong to a public interest consortium started through NYU. It is important to note that only one of the dozens of public interest—oriented women I talked to regretted going to law school. They think they can make law school work for them. They just recommend that new students like them try to find the friendliest place within an unfriendly system.

That being said, I would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that there are big costs to passing up the high-paid, high-status jobs. First, money is definitely an asset in our society. One of my interviewees said she didn’t need a lot of money—“only enough to buy a nice house in San Francisco,” one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. And in a market-oriented society like America, money buys much more than material things. It buys security, power, and, later in life, after the sixty-hour weeks, some leisure. I wonder how many of the idealistic public interest students I interviewed are actually thinking their boyfriends or husbands will fill the money bill, although they’d be reluctant to admit it. In an effort to avoid going into debt that would force her into a high-paying firm job, a midwestern school’s Ms. Daughter found a man to support her—her father! But she had to pick a law school her father would pay for (the school is his alma mater), and she found it less than ideal. Having someone else pay your way can have a lot of hidden costs.

Those Who Don't, Teach

A handful of my subjects went to law school with an eye to teaching law, or later developed an interest in teaching in order to avoid the conflict between the fifty-hour weeks at a New York firm and a poorly paying public interest job. State University’s Ms. Editor started out to law school because she was interested in discrimination and sexual harassment law. She worked for attorneys who usually represent the women claimants in such suits. After two years of law school, Editor, like at least half of the female law review editors I spoke to, hoped to stay in the academic world. Interestingly, law school turns out not to be such a great preparation for teaching. Since law school classes are so much bigger than most academic Ph.D. programs, they turn out far more candidates for teaching than there are places. Accordingly, an increasing number of the desirable entry-level academic law school jobs (as opposed to jobs in the practice clinic or teaching legal writing) require both a law degree and a Ph.D. in something like economics. As Pamela Gann, the well-respected dean of Duke’s School of Law, put it in the National Law Journal a year ago:

There are too many look-alikes with the same excellent credentials. Increasingly, legal education is becoming interdisciplinary, and those who want to get ahead of the competition would do well to have an advanced degree in a related field, such as economics or public policy.

Two of the three aspiring academics I interviewed had figured this out and were in joint programs, both in sociology. Another would-be teacher was increasingly coming to grips with the reality and was thinking of settling for a less prestigious teaching post.

Whatever

A lot of you are probably thinking of law school because you can’t think of anything better to do, or you think you can make better wages than the pink collar or generic humanities jobs you’re holding. Ms. Daughter’s tuition-paying dad always said being a lawyer means you can do anything. The Pre-Law Companion, published by the Princeton Review, a company that specializes in test preparation, says that “a large percentage of top business executives are lawyers.” But most chief executive officers of American corporations are not lawyers: they are, surprise, engineers; after that, the largest percentage went to business school. Once in law school, Ms. Daughter learned that legal education and practice are actually quite specialized. The specialized education and practice are difficult, intense, and extremely competitive. Viewing the competition from comfortably beyond the finish line, Ms. Editor observed that “the people who go to law school as a general, vague, ‘viable career option’ are far more miserable and shocked by the intensity of law school than the people who know they’re going for a highly competitive, technical education.”

Some women go to law school because they believe that a law degree would add legitimacy to their opinions and beliefs. One of the women I interviewed had managed a bunch of liberal political campaigns, and she was frustrated with her lack of impact. Such women observe that lawyers seem to command a lot of respect when they speak, and these women were tired of being ignored when they tried to make their opinions and beliefs felt. To some extent, they were correct. Lawyers get attention. Partly that is because they occasionally have a lot of money, and people with a lot of money often get a lot of attention. For the most part, lawyers get attention because they know some technical information that is occasionally desperately important. You may remember Barry Scheck, the previously unknown DNA-expert defense lawyer on O. J.’s “dream team,” who discredited the evidence that it was O. J.’s blood around his ex-wife’s murder scene.

Scheck commanded the undivided attention of the nation for that brief time, and he still makes TV appearances now and then. But the reason the nation was riveted on Barry Scheck for a few days in 1995 was not that he possesses unusual moral insight, political savvy, social graces, or opinions worth having. He just knew a lot about DNA evidence and the art of cross-examination, which, if you were O. J. Simpson, was desperately important at that moment. It did not, however, entitle Scheck to hold the floor at cocktail parties or political conventions. (Indeed, Scheck’s later performance at the disastrous Boston nanny murder trial led me to believe that his strategic judgment wasn’t all that terrific either.) So women who go to law school to obtain a credential to legitimate their opinions on subjects other than the technicalities of legal education are probably going to be disappointed.

Moreover, in a world of lawyers, a law degree does little to add heft to a woman’s voice. As Stanford Law School professor Deborah Rhode put it, law school faculty meetings too often resemble that cartoon of a room full of surprised-looking men staring at a single woman. “Good point, Mary,” the man in charge is saying. “Now we’ll just all wait for a man to make it.”

Clarence Darrow. President Abe Lincoln. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Teddy Roosevelt. Charles Dickens. Ambassador Pamela Harri-man. Law can be a good job and a good life. You can have a good life if you didn’t finish law school (or even start). Even the most dedicated and successful lawyers probably wanted to be firefighters or rock singers when they were young. Now that you know what the possibilities are, you can make a good decision. 

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