Letter to the Editor: Graduate Law Schools, Lawyers, and the Public Interest

As a lawyer, I could not agree more with John O. McGinnis and Russell D. Mangas’s “First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Law Schools” (op-ed, Jan. 17). Law should be studied as an undergraduate major, the way it is in many other countries, rather than at law schools that follow four years of undergraduate study. Law schools teach most students so little that they could easily learn more in a couple of years of undergraduate study.

At Harvard Law School I learned about trendy ideological fads and feminist and Marxist legal theory. But I did not learn the basics of real-estate and family law until I took a commercial bar-exam preparation course after graduating from law school. I learned more practical law in one summer of studying for the bar exam than I did in three years of law school. Students should not have to attend law school before taking the bar exam.