The pointlessness of a law degree
What is a law degree for? What is the point of the LLB? Well, if one wants to be a law academic, it is a useful way to start.
It is also as good a degree as any other for doing a range of occupations: a pass in a law degree shows you can study, retain information, and answer exam questions.
Indeed, there are people with law degrees in all walks of life, from social workers to sex workers.
But the one thing a law degree is not particularly useful for is the practice of law. In fact, it may well be the last degree one should do if the ambition is to be a practising lawyer. There is little or nothing in a standard law degree which equips the average lawyer with the knowledge or skills of everyday legal work. Most professional lawyers have had no need to look up a law report for years. It would be odd that anyone actually paid to provide legal advice would ever read a learned journal article.
If one wants to learn how to use documentary evidence, then do a history degree. If one enjoys words then study and enjoy literature or languages.
If one really wants to draft complex contractual documents then learn to write computer code, which is a very similar activity. And if one wants to know how to construct a compelling argument then do a degree in philosophy. But do not waste three years of your life on a LLB, for there is nothing in answering the clever questions of law academics that will get you very far in in a courtroom or with a client.
A law degree can even be worse than useless. For the budding civil litigator, it provides the misleading impression that for a case to get to court and be “reported” is anything other than an anti-commercial disaster for all involved. Almost all civil litigation can and should be closed down before a judge should be bothered for his or her decisions. For the wannabe criminal lawyer, a law degree hides the fact that almost all cases will depend on the evidence and points of procedure, and not on what is said in Clarkson and Keating.
However, it is the non-contentious lawyers who suffer the most from wasting years on a LLB. For example, hardly anything a commercial solicitor does draws on their academic studies. The average contract law course for example tells one absolutely nothing about how to draft a clause or a schedule. Those weeks of studious navel-gazing about the postal acceptance rule or whether consideration means the same as an intention to create legal relations provide no assistance in putting together a sales or distribution agreement. The only thing an LLB contract course and typical contract drafting and negotiation have in common is the word “contract”.
The best reason for doing a law degree in the current economic climate is that it cuts out an expensive year of having to do the conversion General Diploma in Law. One may also impress a law firm or chambers at an earlier stage so that they will offer you funding for the vocational course. But the academic study of law is like reading sheet music without an instrument: one can more or less make it out, but as with music, law only comes alive in its performance.
David Allen Green is media correspondent of The Lawyer and writer of the Jack of Kent blog
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Readers' comments (90)
Oscar Boothby | 17-Feb-2012 12:16 pm
It is quite interesting...
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D-Notice | 17-Feb-2012 12:18 pm
The best reason for doing a law degree in the current economic climate is that it cuts out an expensive year of having to do the conversion General Diploma in Law.I agree, it's also - speaking from experience - a hard-core cram of 2/3rd of a law degree in a year.
Although it's actually known as the "Graduate Diploma in Law".
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Ben | 17-Feb-2012 12:20 pm
I suspect your general point about the fitness of the law degree is valid. You've stretched your point a little far though. I very much doubt that my history degree (I took the GDL route) is of more use than a law degree would have been. And of course, as you say, the law degree would have been quicker and cheaper.
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David Johnston | 17-Feb-2012 12:26 pm
Spot on.
Can someone also please let the students whose parents aren't equity partners already know quite how excessive the hot housing and cramming has become before during and after the terms - there is no level playing field here either.
There are more law graduates now outside the profession than inside it - and guess what - they're busy having even more fun...
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Robert Black | 17-Feb-2012 12:28 pm
I was for years a court practitioner and a part-time judge (as well as being a law professor). I found what I learned in my law degree very useful in practice (and I found myself reading law reports and learned articles in the course of that practice virtually daily). But that may be because I'm qualified in the Scottish system rather than the English, and am an advocate rather than a solicitor.
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Anonymous | 17-Feb-2012 12:42 pm
I agree with many of your points here, but I'll take one piece of bait...
Surely, learning how to read a case carefully and extract the various principles and arguments is a valuable skill for solicitors and barristers, and one not readily obtained by, as you suggest, doing a history degree.
I realise that that skill isn't going to be used daily by most lawyers, most obviously non-contentious lawyers, but trainees are often required to research case law, and I can't imagine budding barristers will get very far without it.
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Ben H | 17-Feb-2012 1:04 pm
I'm in the final year of my Law degree and have long suspected the pointlessness of it in relation to a career in law. This is especially so since I did a few vacation schemes - there, the students on non-law degrees were just as capable of doing the work given to us as those of us on law degrees.
In the same way that A-Levels are little more than a stepping stone to university, a law degree is only a stepping stone to a career in law and certainly not a foundation for it.
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Anonymous | 17-Feb-2012 1:08 pm
I also can appreciate the underlying point here, although it does depend upon the area of law that you are working in.
As someone that does a lot of commercial contracts, it is often surprising/alarming to see how few lawyers actually have a solid grounding in fundamental contract law principles, which can leave their client very exposed in a negotiation.
The prime offenders are often non-law graduates who have missed some of the basics in the deluge of information in the one year crammer...
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JGC | 17-Feb-2012 1:12 pm
This guy totally misses the point. Sure I could have studied any degree, topped it up with a GDL and still bagged a training contract.. but I didn't, because -believe it or not- I'm actually interested in law as a subject.
Law degrees aren't pointless, they just rank equally with any other degree. Firms don't care what degree you have as long as it shows the skills they're after. Take whatever you enjoy. Hell you're spending enough money on it.
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JCG | 17-Feb-2012 1:18 pm
Law degrees are not solely intended to teach students how to be lawyers. Unlike the GDL or other comparable courses, a law degree should seek to place the law in its political, social, historical, and economic context, so naturally it imparts information that is not directly relevant to practice as a lawyer. Many would consider that to be a good thing (especially given how early a student can begin to specialise in the English education system). Sometimes, the extra breadth and depth of knowledge provided by a law degree equips a lawyer with a greater degree of versatility in his/her dealings with the law, but that's a point on which it will be almost impossible to find a consensus. The article raises some interesting wider questions: Should university-level degrees be more vocational? Should they exist at all? And are universities here to provide education, or training?
Unfortunately, as usual, DAG overstates his case in an attempt to be controversial. I don't think of my law degree as "worse than useless" and, I suspect, DAG is not similarly dismissive of his own.
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