Why We Don’t Need More STEM Grads In Law Schools
And why we do need lawyers learned in the foundational works of civilization
Pity the law school deans who must confront the reality that our best and brightest no longer want to attend law school. The effect of this reality is, as with most other things in law, spread unevenly. The schools on the top rungs of the place-to-go ladders still have plenty of applicants who get perfect scores on their admission exams. They perform well as undergraduates (which is to say, what passes for outstanding in today’s hyper-inflated measurement systems), fill shelves with honors and awards, and engage in the usual extra-curricular activities known to add gloss to otherwise bland resumes. Enough of these candidates still apply to the top law schools, if not the middle and lower tier schools, to fill the pipeline for the top echelon of law firm jobs and clerkships that serve as finishing school for lawyers.
But, the real law school dean of the 21st century is on the prowl for the elusive candidate: the STEM graduate who, instead of continuing in some STEM field, becomes a law student. These students are game worthy of the hunt. They can do a lot for a school’s reputation as a place that has a pipeline for those lawyers who will fit best within an increasingly techie world. These are the individuals who can kick a school up the U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of law schools.
It is easy to appreciate the value STEM graduates can bestow upon an institution. But, is it right to encourage a disproportionate number (assuming we know the right number) to attend law school? Is it right that we should rely more heavily on STEM graduates in the pipeline?
In this post, I want to take a contrarian view; an admittedly romanticized view, of where we should look for at least a large dollop of our future lawyers. I will argue that instead of STEMmers, we want lawyers who have received something akin to what was called a classical education. The modernized phrase might be “foundational works of civilization.” To determine whether we can get there, we should ask whether our educational system is up to the task.
A Persistent Problem
The National Center for Education Statistics published The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2011 in September 2012. The numbers were stark: at both the 8th and 12th grade levels, only 27% of students scored “proficient” or above. “Students performing at this level have clearly demonstrated the ability to accomplish the communicative purpose of their writing.” For Reading, 37% of 12th grade students scored “proficient” or above. Based on the results of the 2016 ACT exam, one of two popular college entrance exams, 40% of the test-takers lacked the writing skills necessary to “complete successfully a college-level English composition class.” The punchline: students enter college unprepared to read and write. Not a good start.
What about college graduates? Do the additional four to six years of post-secondary education fix the problem? Not according to an NCES study. In its 2005 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, the proficient literacy rate was just 25%, slightly lower than the proficiency rate at grade 12 in 2011.
Not only does it [the National Assessment of Adult Literacy] find that the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, but it also reveals that just 25 percent of college graduates — and only 31 percent of those with at least some graduate studies — scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” from a literacy standpoint, which the government defines as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”
According to a study published in 2016 by Central Connecticut State University’s then president John W. Miller, the United States ranked 7th in the world for literacy. Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland ranked ahead of the United States. The bad news does not end with that ranking. As Annie Holmquist reported in her article “Americans Don’t Read… and That’s Affecting Our Elections”:
- 14% of adults can’t read.
- Only 13% of adults can read at a proficient level.
- 28% of adults didn’t read a book in the last year.
- 50% of adults can’t read a book written at an 8th grade level.
Everywhere we look, the facts are disheartening:
In 2016, ACT discovered that first year college students overwhelmingly struggle in distinguishing between fact and opinion.
The second punchline: having entered college unprepared to read and write students exit college not much better off. It is from this pool that we draw applicants for law schools.
Reasons Johnny Is Unprepared
The declining state of education in the United States is a complex topic. It isn’t a condition that falls solely on the shoulders of one group. Schools certainly share some of the responsibility. But, so do legislators, parents, corporations, and many other individuals and institutions. Education in the United States is a complex, multi-faceted problem. Even a quick glance at the countries ranking ahead of the United States in literacy highlights a key difference: the countries scoring higher than the United States are much smaller and have more homogenous societies than the United States.
With those explanations and excuses in mind, we can dig a bit deeper into part of the problem. What is it that we expect of those students in high school and college? It turns out, not much. Three key things are absent when we look at the curricula and they may give us clues about Johnny:
- Students don’t read high quality literature.
2. They skim.
3. They don’t memorize.
College professors aren’t ignoring these elements when constructing their courses. But, the modern student (and parents paying part of those college bills) are more interested in the diploma and employment possibilities than in basic skill learning. Those professors run into barriers. Taking a stand is difficult when the standards applied all around slump. C+ is the new A-.
There are programs here and there fighting the trend by going back to classical education starting with students just entering school. These schools also tend to emphasize religion (catholic schools are among the leaders in the field) so quality gets mixed with theology. But, early results support the benefits of basics.
Classifying The Modern Law Practice
It has become a cliché to say that the practice of law is changing. It has changed and the evolution from the Dickensian practice (Jarndyce v. Jarndyce) to what is now widely called “NewLaw” will continue for decades. The picture of a one office law practice with a lawyer settled in front of a roll top desk has given way to the image of the laptop enabled, latte drive legal engineer and the virtual law practice.
If the technologically-enabled lawyer is the lawyer of the future, then it follows that technology-friendly students will better fit the demands of this new world. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that STEM grads are perceived as having had more demanding undergraduate educations and will do better in the “rigorous” environment of legal education.
The solution of more STEM graduates in law schools seems like a win-win. The students score better on law school entrance exams (the current LSAT or the new entrant, the GRE). They come prepared to pick up disciplines becoming popular in legal practices, such as data analysis, the use of metrics, technology. They also come with “process” orientations and lack fear of techies.
This is one view of the future of law and a popular one for placing students today. But in my neo-romanticized future of law (and here, I’m putting an asterisk next to romanticized) it is a transitory view. The technological lawyer is a diversion, a sideshoot on the main evolutionary tree and the more successful evolutionary path will be my neo-romanticized lawyer.
Governance In A Hybrid Society
If we want to know what types of lawyers we will need we can start by asking what types of problems they will be asked to solve. Then, we can work back to what skills and experiences will best prepare them for the tasks ahead. I will note here that Stuart Russell describes this as human thinking, compared to what artificial intelligence software does. AI software starts from the present, evaluates multiple futures, and then moves forward along the most promising path. This disjunction in approach is a major reason why AI is not close to achieving artificial general intelligence. Human thought is, in a way, more elegant than the brute force thought employed by AI.
Looking forward and reasoning back, society is moving towards a hybrid future. AI will co-exist at many levels with humans. Technology writ more broadly already co-exists with us and in more dimensions than AI. CRISPR, 3D printing, nanotechnology, and other emerging technologies are changing our lives. What it means to be “human” is changing (or not, maybe questioned). Each step rasps against laws, values, and systems that never contemplated what they are being asked to govern. How to bridge from the past to the future will be a task that ensnares present and future generations of lawyers.
Building those bridges will go far beyond technological chops. These are the big, thought-provoking questions that require an understanding of us as humans, societies, cultures, and all the other topics not covered in the typical STEM curriculum. Indeed, this is where the STEM students are ill-prepared.
We will need lawyers skilled at turning big ideas into executable code, both human and machine readable. But that skill, like so many other skills, will be concrete and have a short shelf life. Already, we see Google and other companies developing software that can develop software — software write thyself. This has been the past trend with such tasks. When I first started programming, you hand coded each line. Today, great libraries exist (thank you, GitHub) where you can freely get chunks of code that you plug into your program. In another 10 years, many expect the demand for computer scientists to subside because the computer itself will be the scientist.
Back to our bridges. This is where the human element still shines. The biggest question now, and I think going forward, will be the values question. How do we as people capture and express our values in ways that can marry human plus technology? How do we check the scope of AI such that humans control what is right, what is wrong, and how to integrate across a globe our notions of values without creating an existential risk for all of us? There are technical dimensions to the questions. The questions for lawyers, however, should involve common law, civil law, Sharia law, natural law, and the swirling values within and outside those and other law systems. Should they extend further through what sociologist Cornelius Castoriadis calls the “social imaginary” and on into what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the three dimensions of the modern social imaginary: 1) the liberal economy, 2) the public sphere of newspapers, feuilletons and political speech, and 3) the citizen state and civil society more generally.”
Governance Needs Big Thinkers
My neo-romanticized future needs thinkers uber-extraordinary when it comes to the big picture. It needs individuals who have taken to heart the study of our societies, civilizations, inter-cultural machinations. It needs the modern equivalent of the student who came through classical Greek and Latin training, read the Great Books, and became our intellectuals of the day. While I am willing to forego every prospective law student learning ancient Greek and Latin (and other languages), the stories told across time layered the foundation for where we are today. If you don’t know and understand the stories, how do you understand today’s problems? How can you possibly tease out common values across peoples? Can we have someone in this category who isn’t competent in Go (taking us beyond Western Civilization into other cultures)?
I can see the range of reactions washing across faces. Many are wondering if some of my recent health challenges have led to an over-indulgence in powerful pharmaceuticals. Others think I am starting to show signs of dementia. Many of the rest have a mixed look of disbelief and “so this is what doddering fool means.” Bear with me.
Albert Jay Nock is a name not widely known beyond economists and libertarians. According to Wikipedia, he was “an American libertarian author, editor first of The Freeman and then The Nation, educational theorist, Georgist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century.” He was, interesting for those my generation, also an influence on William F. Buckley, Jr. For our purposes, he also was the author of books on education. One of his two 1932 education-themed books was the Theory of Education in the United States. The book is based on his 1931 The Page-Barbour lectures at the University of Virginia.
Given Nock’s self-description as a rebel, a child of the left, and someone who spoke what we call today “truth-to-power,” that he even gave these prestigious lectures at such an establishment school is fascinating. Nock took the opportunity seriously and raised challenges to education that were and are highly provocative and relevant today.
He argued (remember, 1931) that higher education should not be available to everyone and that such denial did not violate the idea of equality. Some people are more educable than others and by opening the doors of higher education to those less educable, the state had turned education (by which he meant the foundations of civilIzation type of education) into training. He would have been appalled at the state of education and training in 2018.
Nock argued that education needed to return to the layering process it had used for years to teach students. This process involved working one’s way through the great texts of time, understanding how ideas evolved and built upon one another, and seeing how the heroic struggles of our time played out on the pages. It was this layering process, this understanding of how the many parts fit together, that led to the deeper understanding of our communities and world. And, that deeper understanding is what prepared us for the tasks ahead.
“Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind — a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations. If I may paraphrase the words of Emerson, this discipline brings us into the feeling of an immense longevity, and maintains us in it.”
Nock believed that true education was needed for the type of higher-level thinking an educated person could handle:
“You may perceive at once, I think, how different would be the view of contemporary men and things, how different the appraisal of them, the scale of values employed in their measurement, on the part of one who has undergone this discipline and on the part of one who has not. These studies, then, in a word, were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity.”
Go to the college or graduate school classroom and you will not see many students who attempt this type of education. But, when you are talking about determining how to build societies of humans and AI, having it would — I think — be more beneficial than understanding how to put a loop within a loop using Python.
More significantly, we have seen a shift that makes it hard to envision how today’s students without this education will succeed in integrating values, humans, and AI. Students have become disassociated from the community. Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, has identified this disassociationtheme. In a review of Deneen’s recent book, Why Liberalism Failed, David Gordon says, “[Deneen] has with great force identified a fundamental tendency of our times. Destruction of traditional attachments to family, local institutions, culture, and virtuous behavior isolates individuals and makes them dependent on an all powerful government.” We have generations of isolationists and we need a generation of collaborators, coalition builders, and community supporters.
The Three Futures
This brings us to what I’ll call three futures of law, each of which will benefit from lawyers with skills tailored to that future. Here, we break from the past of training every lawyer the same way, as if lawyers and needs were fungible units. We begin to think of lawyering as requiring varying combinations of skills that are targeted at tasks yielding outcomes that are “fit for purpose” — that match what the client needs.
First, we have a high need for “draught lawyers.” These lawyers efficiently marry human with machine to produce the standardized, systematized, routinized legal work making up the bulk of the market for legal services. Second, we have a much lower need for neo-romantics. Any system has only so much high-end design work. We need lawyers who can operate in that space. Finally, we need bespoke lawyers. Legal services in this range still are more human than machine. They demand higher levels of skills, human and technical, than the draught lawyers have available as they must provide a unique combination to the client for each matter.
Using Stuart Russell’s human thinking approach, we now ask: what type of lawyer will best fit the needs of each future? More particularly, do we need more STEM graduates to provide that type of lawyer?
For draught lawyering, I think we need what many law schools today attract, and then proceed to mangle. We need individuals who like implementing, prefer simple to complex, and view lawyering from a technical rather than intellectual perch. These are the lawyers who facilitate the day-to-day ordinary commerce among humans (and now AI) in our society.
For bespoke lawyers, I think we also need some of what law schools attract, and then again proceed to mangle. We need individuals who want to be the modern day version of the lawyers we always have aspired to train in law schools. In effect, we need the same input we thought we were getting decades ago. The mix adjustment in those decades has tilted towards people who can embrace technology. These students can hand the intellectual and technical, but the final spark may still be missing.
For the neo-romantic lawyers, we need individuals who were attracted to law at the high end of the lawyering profession 100 years ago. These neo-romantics dream of better societies functioning smoothly. They understand the perils of missteps in a world where the margin for error is measured in fractions of a millisecond. They move fluidly from the present to the deep past and back again. This is a law school applicant who exists today in short supply if at all. These are the individuals who we look to for our intellectual leadership.
But, do we need more STEM graduates? No. We need more lawyers who can embrace the technical, but they don’t need to be STEM graduates to do so. We also need more lawyers who can work with individuals in many domains outside of law, including STEM, but they don’t need to be STEM graduates to do so. Siphoning STEM graduates into law seems to help only when the specifics of STEM are necessary to the law, such as in intellectual property. There, as far as I know, we do not face shortages any more.
Will it hurt us to have more STEM graduates in law? Yes, oddly, it will. Any time we distort the input needed we set the system up for failure. If we don’t need the skills STEM graduates bring, then many things happen. First, more things look like nails. Remember the saying, “if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.” STEM graduates will channel what they see through their backgrounds. Rather than seeing matters as they are, we risk pushing our future more toward nails. Second, we waste valuable STEM skills in an area that doesn’t need them. As a lean thinker, that offends my “respect for humanity” philosophy. Let STEM graduates be STEM graduates and go where there skills are more useful.
Let’s take what we do have, the draught-ready lawyer coming our way, and re-invent our training. These lawyers need a very different training regimen than the one currently in place. We could lower by quite a bit the cost of training these lawyers, while simultaneously improving the quality of the result.
We have been set on training bespoke lawyers for 100 years. We can improve, but this is the place closest to our traditional views of training lawyers. It is the one where we feel most at home.
And for the neo-romantics. We need to develop new paths to law school. We need more of those who are well-positioned to handle those questions that will demand the most from us as people and lawyers. These are, in Nock’s words, the lawyers who will exhibit the “inward and spiritual grace of maturity.”
If we want to show leadership — if we want our law schools to show leadership — then I hope we can do this. Let’s reach out through the ranks of our undergraduate institutions and find the precious few students who have the talent, desire, and will to use their four college years in pursuit of that foundations of civilization knowledge. Let’s give them path to the best we can offer. And then, in law school, let’s not abandon them with a “you’ll figure it out” approach. Let’s take them through the toughest we can offer. Let’s show what seven years can really do for this lawyer and for society. If we do that, then we can truly say we are professionals.
N.B. — An article that may interest those who favor the foundation of civilization approach.
