DICTA
June 8, 2012 § 4 Comments
- America’s worst colleges.
- Recipe for disaster = Law degree + $150,000 in debt + no job.
- Just a bit of info: there are 10,729 members of the Mississippi Bar, of whom 8,764 are in active practice. There are 1,965 inactive members. On average that’s 106.87 lawyers per county, and one lawyer for every 339.9 people in the state. Of course, lawyers are not evenly distributed among all of the counties (e.g., there are only 5 active attorneys in Clarke County), and the numbers do include members of the Mississippi Bar practicing in other states.
- Should victims in the Sandusky molestation trial be required to disclose their full names on the record? The judge ruled that they must in the Pennsylvania trial.
- Two things I learned growing up: it’s impolite to wear a hat indoors, and never chew gum in church or in a formal setting like a court room. My, how things change over the years. And don’t get me started about driving in the left lane on a 4-lane highway.
- The entire text of Fred Rodell’s then-scathing 1939 assessment of the legal profession, Woe Unto You, Lawyers! is available for you to read or download. It’s quaint in some ways, but scary-true in others.
- Jed Perl reflects on Picasso’s Struggle to Reconcile Feeling and Form, with some thoughts about how the artist whom many revere as the iconoclast of realism might have viewed the work of that supreme realist, Rembrandt.
The Better Chancery Practice Blog 
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/bottom_line/2012/05/how-tough-is-the-legal-job-market-bc.html?page=all
This article reaffirms the state of the legal market.
Minimum wage. Ouch.
Still, I am confident that a newly-hatched lawyer could open a solo practice in a middle-sized Mississippi town and make a decent living practicing people law. Not get rich, mind you. But make a decent living and enjoy community involvement, hunting, fishing, etc.
Now, whether one could cpmfortably service student loan debt on that kind of living is beyond my experience level.
That article on law school debt might be the single most depressing thing I’ve ever read. I’d like to think that I’m going to find a job next year after I graduate, but the thought of what happens if I can’t makes me constantly question my decision to go to law school. I sure hope it was worth it.
Ben … when I graduated in December, 1973, the country was throttled by an economic contraction that was shortly followed by the Arab oil embargo that caused massive fuel shortages. I had to drive to Knoxville to take a bar review course for the Tennessee bar, and I did not even know whether I could find enough gas to make it that far. After passing the bar, I found that no one was hiring, so I took a low-paying job with a small firm until I could find something better.
I suspect the scenario above is what faces many law grads now. The big difference is that tuition was so much lower back in my era, and with the help of family I graduated with no debt. That is impossible for 99.9% of students today.
Times are tough in most fields, and it’s law’s turn in particular right now. I wish you and your fellow law students the best. I still feel that there are opportunities for small-town practice in Mississippi in people-law.