The American Bar Association thinks that the U.S. government should give law grads a bailout by letting them convert their private loans into government loans. (source)
The American Bar Association thinks that there is a crisis in the profession caused by too much debt.
Yes, the ABA — that festering slop bucket of do-nothing bozos who stamped their seal of approval on every head injury clinic that wanted to call itself a law school, as long as its faculty and administration dropped to their knees and fellated the ABA’s absurd “educational” requirements. The ABA, the same organization that gave accreditation to Liberty, Regent, and Ave Maria indoctrination centers for the developmentally disabled. Yes, that same ABA.
This is the same ABA that will not allow schools like the Massachusetts School of Law to bear the accreditation title because of outdated standards that have nothing to do with the quality of teaching at the school. Mass law is cheaper than most public law schools and churns out students who are taught by adjuncts — meaning people who have a goddamned clue how to practice law. The ABA prefers that professors have no connection to the actual practice of law, and does not count a professor as a full time faculty member if they maintain a practice. Because…. well, who would want to learn to do a thing from someone who actually does that thing?
This is the same ABA that said that there is nothing wrong with outsourcing legal work to the same boneheads in India who answer your customer service calls.
And now these ‘tards think that the problem is that law students have too much debt. Of course there is too much debt. I don’t disagree with that. However, what else do you expect when the ABA gives its blessing to any law school that can write its name or color within the lines, and then this blessing gives lawyer-hopefuls access to gobs of loaned cash? Its as if you had a loanshark standing outside every single casino in Las Vegas. The problem is that anyone with a pulse and a 140 LSAT score can get into Regent School of Law or the international association of imbeciles academy of legal studies, because the ABA gave those idiotic places their accreditation – -thus giving their students access to guaranteed loans which are… wait for it…. now biting them in the ass.
If you took out $200,000 in loans to attend the dope smoking academy of law, and now you can’t find a job, well I do feel for you. But for the ABA to point the finger anywhere but in the mirror requires a pair of balls that are so big and shiny that they would change the gravitational pull of the earth, while reflecting so much sunlight that it would set fire to your eyes if you gazed upon them.
I have a better idea.
How about we just disband the ABA? They must be the most worthless bunch of do-nothing abject imbeciles in the history of any trade association. I don’t even know what you need to do to run for president of the ABA. Do you actually need to be retarded? If that is not a requirement, I would like to run for president of the ABA on a platform of “once elected, I will disband this organization as the greatest epic failure in history.” A little over the top and hyperbolic, but it would be nice to finally rid this profession of this parasitic organization of idiots.
Anyone with me?
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MR writes:
“I would like to run for president of the ABA on a platform of ‘once elected, I will disband this organization as the greatest epic failure in history.'”
Wasn’t that your platform when you ran for president at GULC, got elected, and immediately skipped town? :)
It was not my plan to disband GULC!
Well, when the government does not allow student debt to be BK’ed away, then lenders have no incentive to discriminate on who they lend to. Every prole with a 123 can run up a mountain of debt to become a prestigious lawyer. Given most kids are idiots and pick worthless undergraduate degrees, Law becomes the default back up option. Hence the glut of lawyers.
123 LSAT that is
I totally agree with Securityeven’s hypothesis regarding the “glut of lawyers.” The funny thing is that the high cost of law school should make a lot of people hesitate, but the majority of potential law students are convinced that their starting salaries will be so high they’ll be able to deal with hundreds of thousands in loans. Of course, these applicants must not have an internet connection, because anyone can easily Google their way to thousands of depressing blog posts regarding how shitty the legal job market is at the moment.
Nowadays, I honestly feel that if you don’t get into a T14 and/or get a full ride elsewhere, you have two viable options:
(1) Retake the LSAT, hope you get into a T14 and/or a full-ride next year.
(2) Go to the cheapest ABA-accredited school you can find and make sure to do exceptionally well there.
Since there don’t seem to be a lot of good jobs floating around, the T14 crowd tends to have dibs on getting a decent starting salary. They use a lot of their wage to pay off debt. The rest of us tend to get lower-paying jobs, which is perfectly fine if you don’t have a lot of debt to pay off.
I am not sure that I agree that the debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. Or… if you do get your student loans discharged in bankruptcy, that’s fine, but it should mean no bar admission for you.
I would, however, be okay with it being dischargeable if a) no bar admission, and b) not everyone was guaranteed a student loan. Banks should evaluate a student loan the way they evaluate a business loan.
But, i still think we’d be better off without the ABA.
Where’s the poll option for “Intellectual Property Laws”, stuff like the DMCA and so on? Most of the current glut of lawyers seem to be chasing trademark, copyright and patent infringement lawsuits more than anything else.
Lets file this under “retarded comments”
Not addressed here is the simple problem of misperceptions about how much attorneys earn. From the sacrifices that people make for this profession, you’d think it was like finance or entertainment, as far as what the top earners make. But legal work is merely skilled labor; it’s almost impossible to “get rich” by working for your money. $100k per year is not worth 80 hours per week, unless you just really hate your life already and desire to have no free time. But too many political science majors with no marketable skills enter law school thinking that’s what they want, and by the time they realize it isn’t, there’s school debt and home debt and your nice car that you got to feel less miserable going to and from work in the dark every day … and it goes on.
[…] for as long as the legal academy is run by people who wash out of practice after 16 months, the ABA keeps accrediting every head injury clinic that calls itself a law school, and the government keeps backing loans so that the morons who attend them can sit at the roulette […]
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