To the Editor:
I read with interest Samuel Moyn’s “Law Schools Are Bad for Democracy” (The Chronicle Review, December 16). Moyn teaches at Yale Law School, and he’s very critical of what happens there; his subtitle (“They whitewash the grubby scramble for power”) says it all. His critique, while heartfelt, is not, as he himself acknowledges, particularly new; he suggests that gifted young people enter law school hungry for social justice, but, in the end, they sell out, “enrolling in a trade school to solve other people’s legal problems for (often tremendous) pay.”
Perhaps Moyn would enjoy a stint at one of the many law schools that, across this country, already do what he suggests. Our students here at the University of Wisconsin Law School are not queued up to take their preordained place in an elite hierarchy. They come here to prepare to excel at the practice of law. Schools like ours provide law students with the tools to serve clients and drive social change, to resist elite power as well as to embrace it. Students in our clinics do not engage in “increasingly routine clinical self-assignments,” but meet demanding, intellectually and legally challenging client needs with energy, passion and commitment. Whether pursuing a remedy for a wrongfully convicted inmate, helping secure intellectual property protection for a new biomedical device, or helping an undocumented immigrant understand the legal context of an asylum claim, our students seek to build the abilities they need to seek justice for their clients, and to understand the ecosystem in which those skills are brought to bear. After a vigorous immersion in the reality of the legal system, they are ready to engage the system and also to challenge it. They are neither naïve nor resigned to “endlessly reproduce elite ascendancy.”
The law schools at public land-grant universities in this country are remarkable not just for what we teach, but who we teach. Our law students are racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse. Many are first-generation college or graduate students. They come from farm families and urban neighborhoods; they were teachers and nurses, bakers and Marines before they arrived in law school. They need to understand the elite world, but they understand other worlds as well, bringing insight and compassion to the work they do. Far from being cynical about what they have learned and whether they have “sold out,” their families are positively glowing with pride at what our new lawyers have accomplished and what doors their skills and education will open for people like them.
Some of our graduates go on to BigLaw practice, of course, and good for them. Not every lawyer for a wealthy client is a sellout and not every decision made by a high-powered lawyer perpetuates hierarchy. Our graduates become business lawyers and family lawyers, prosecutors and public defenders; they help startups thrive, they found nonprofits and find new ways to meet legal needs and bring civil rights cases. Some run for office, and some join the judiciary; through elected judgeships, the voice of the people is heard on the bench in many state systems around this country.
Our nation’s public law schools and the universities that surround us are engines of access, opportunity, and social transformation. We are proud of our graduates and the clients and communities they serve. And we’re hopeful that, as graduates of great public universities, they will make the change they want to see in the world. We will all be better for it.
Margaret Raymond is dean and professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
