Bad Glacier

Over at Why Law, there’s a post about the question “Why Law?” and wonders why people ask it so often.

First, the reason the question doesn’t really work so well for other graduate/professional programs is that the answer is fairly obvious.

“Why medical/graduate/business school?”
“So I can cure diseases/become a professor/crush the souls of my underlings.”
“Oh. Yeah.”

There are many different paths people can take from law school: corporate, criminal, patent law, politics, and academia, for a few. It’s not as clear-cut as other careers. Of course, I realize there are other things people can do with advanced degrees. I’m simplifying somewhat. But still.

Of course, not everyone cares about you and what you want to do with the rest of your life. Like menagerie said in the comments, some are wondering about their own plans/dreams/thoughts of some kind of graduate school or change of occupation. Other people hear “lawyer” and by default think “ambulance chaser”; they want to understand why you didn’t choose an honorable job like “prostitute”, “crack dealer”, or “repo man”. Personally, I want to know what leads a person to choose law given the relatively high chances of ending up a dissatisfied associate too afraid of a pay cut to leave his job and the 80 hour weeks that accompany it. It makes me feel good when I find someone who sincerely wants to make the world a better place, it gives me hope when I find someone who has a well thought-out plan to become a happy, well-adjusted lawyer, and it helps me feel less alone when I find someone like me, someone who thinks law looks interesting, hopes to find an enjoyable, challenging, reasonably well-paying job, and has absolutely no idea how to go about finding it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 at 7:10 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.