Legal Quandary

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

One of my friends from TVPNU is in town attending some kind of a conference or job fair. We picked her up from the airport on Sunday and were talking about what our plans were after law school. At some point we had this little snippet of conversation:

Friend: You know you can get a PhD in law?

Me: Um, yeah, but why in God's name would you want to?

Friend: Well…to teach. I might do that eventually.

Me: Pfffft. There's plenty of law professors without PhD's now.

Friend: I know, but that's the advice I've been getting from almost everyone.

Now, no offense to my friend, who actually has some life experience, but the whole idea of this just sort of pissed me off. Mainly because I've sat in class with the total tools people this would appeal to.

And because I know what I've been writing on all my professor evaluation sheets is "Please bring in more ivory tower academics with no concept of the real world and unsullied by practical experience. If they could have something akin to disdain for those of us who actually want to practice law, that would be even better."

Comments:
So...very...true!!!

I can understand getting a masters in law (LLM) for a particular subject area. You practice that area so you want to be more qualified.

But why get a Ph.D.??? Bad enough most of my profs didn't have THAT MUCH real world experience (except the night school profs), but the Ph.D. gurus wouldn't know how the real world works if it bit them on the ass!!!

At least with the current system you have to have some experience before you teach.
 
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