Law School Lemmings
By Law School Lemmings is a two-month old web site, that features Twitter messages from prospective and current law students. In legal cyberspace, “lemming” has become a metaphor for the behavior of naive mostly young people, who heedlessly hurl themselves into a world of enormous non-dischargeable debt and poor employment prospects.
The site also provides readers with a handy compendium of resources for prospective law students who are willing to research what they’re thinking about getting into before they actually get into it.
The tweets suggest that among the main reasons people apply to law school are:
(1) The belief that people with law degrees make a lot of money, and that they make a lot of money because they have law degrees.
(2) The belief that being a lawyer (a status which the authors of these tweets conflate routinely with having a law degree) is a prestigious social identity.
(3) The recognition that enrolling in law school provides people with a respectable three-year response to the question, “so what are you up to these days?”
(4) The realization that student loans can pay one’s rent.
(5) Legally Blonde. I’ve never seen this movie, which given my professional interests seems like a major oversight (It really is amazing how often it’s cited as an inspirational text by prospective students, usually in the sort of half-joking way that is itself revelatory).
Anyway, the site is by turns mordantly amusing, sobering, depressing, and inspiring — it’s both a reminder of the vast improvement in the quantity and the quality of the information available to prospective law students today (this week marks the third anniversary of the publication of David Segal’s front-page New York Times article, “Is Law School a Losing Game?”), and of the degree to which the facts about legal education and the legal profession are still percolating slowly into the general cultural consciousness.