When Doug Litowitz graduated from Northwestern’s law school in 1988, he got what most of his classmates wanted–a nice-paying job in a big downtown firm. He didn’t like it much, judging from the title of his recent book. The Destruction of Young Lawyers, published late last year by the University of Akron Press, is an attempt to explain why, in Litowitz’s opening words, “lawyers are pathologically unhappy.”
DL: I attribute it to a number of factors, starting with law school. We know from statistics that law students are more depressed than medical students and business students. How do you explain that? Part of it has to do with the way law is taught, which is the Socratic method, which is basically an interrogation where one side knows the answers and asks questions of a side that doesn’t know the answers. You know, like in the movie The Paper Chase–Professor Kingsfield. It just makes people anxious and nervous. There’s no proof whatsoever that it’s a good way of teaching material. Socrates didn’t even use the Socratic method to teach–he just used it to puzzle people.
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ML: How about arguing in front of an appeals court?
Basically law is taught inductively, case by case. You build up grains of sand, or, like an impressionist painting, you build up dots until a picture emerges. It’s a really ineffective way to teach. Say you’re taking a contracts course. You might read one case that deals with an offer, then a case that deals with an acceptance, then a case that deals with consideration, and then maybe a month later a case that deals with a term, and then the lesson that you would put together at the end of the year, looking backward, is: Oh, I guess for there to be a contract there have to be all these pieces.
ML: Explain what you mean by restricting the flow of new lawyers.
DL: Young lawyers cannot hang out a shingle like they used to. It’s too expensive, they have too much debt, there’s too much competition for clients. . . . And they don’t know anything about how to help a client, how to file a motion, how to form a corporation. Lawyers learn these things on the job, not in school. So they get pushed into the big firms, where they’re worked to death.
DL: Yeah, the prevailing ethos among lawyers is that your job is to serve the client, whatever their needs are. It’s not for the lawyer to say that the client is overreaching, or being unfair–your job is just to do what they want you to do. Everything that happened at Enron and WorldCom and all that stuff, that was all mediated by lawyers. All of the dot-com meltdown–everything there, every piece of paper, was drafted by a lawyer.
