The good folks at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons have taken notice of some of the problems in legal education, and today they link to a piece in the Washington Examiner where a Harvard Law grad (natch) argues for abolishing law schools…or, more realistically, for making them optional.

NRO’s George Leef comments, “Law school is a high barrier to entry that does not ensure competence, but simply drives way up the cost of entering the legal profession.”

Fair enough. Your humble Blog Goliard agrees that much of law school is pointless, and that reforms are badly needed.

But is it really a good idea to be reducing barriers to entry to a profession that is already way, way, way, way, way, way, way oversupplied with people?

The bottom line is, it is at once way too easy, and way too expensive, to become a licensed attorney. We need to raise the barriers, while at the same time making them more cost-efficient and also more tightly bound to actual competence to practice law.

My dream proposal would be the following:

1. 1) State bars shall no longer give any weight to ABA accreditation of law schools.
2. 2) Nor shall they, nor anyone else, give any consideration to US News rankings. Anyone who knows anything has known for a long time now that the whole business is fraudulent. Kill the rankings now…kill them with fire!
3. 3) The one-year law school model—which maverick schools were already pioneering, before the dead hand of the ABA started weighing down innovation and diversity in methods and approaches—shall be revived, even by some well-established institutions.
4. 4) State bars shall admit individuals to the bar exam upon the presentation of:
5. 1. a) A diploma from any law school that the bar, in its sole discretion, considers acceptable. The bar could maintain a list of schools considered acceptable in all cases; a list of schools considered unacceptable in all cases (and be bold about it! if a school’s bar passage rates have stunk for years, put them on this list!); and then allow a graduate of absolutely any other institution anywhere to petition individually to have his or her degree accepted.
   2. b) A certificate of completion from a reputable bar-preparation company. As with the previous item, I would suggest keeping a continually-updated list of acceptable and unacceptable firms.
   3. c) Proof of a certain amount of time spent as an apprentice, clerk, intern, or paralegal, accompanied by the endorsement of one of a select number of longtime members of the bar, to whom will be appointed the task of evaluating lawyers-in-training and their readiness to take the bar exam and enter practice.
6. 5) The bar exam shall be made considerably longer and vastly harder; and the greatest share of time (and largest portion of the grade) shall be devoted to applied tests of practical lawyerly skills. (For instance: “Good morning and welcome to day five of the bar exam. Each of you is being handed a packet which contains details of a fictional married couple with children. Your task is to provide the family with appropriate wills, along with any other estate planning and advance directive documents which may be appropriate. These documents will be due at three o’clock.”)

Comment threads and blogs have been exploding in response to Kay Hymowitz’s article in the WSJ. “Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children,” she notes; and that this is no longer the case is obviously and rightly a cause of great grief and frustration for many women.

However, though it seems de rigeur these days to allow the concerns and perspectives of women to overshadow others, let us be sure to take a complete look at the situation from the male perspective; and in particular how much harder it is for today’s man in his 20s to achieve the education, financial independence, marriage, and fatherhood (not mere baby-daddy-hood, which is depressingly easy to attain) than for the most recent generations of his forebears.

Given the following:

1. a) The economy continues to transform in ways unfriendly to the “living wage” and many workers, and the Boomers are busy pulling up the ladder after themselves, making long-term job prospects grim, even for men with multiple degrees under their belts. Also, while women still face subtle discrimination in a dwindling number of areas, non-minority men face overt discrimination in a growing number.
2. b) A high school diploma, while still free through public schools, doesn’t get one very far these days; and as for higher education, even as its returns have diminished its costs have exploded. Many people are now forking over a sizeable portion of their paychecks to the student loan companies well into their forties.
3. c) Student loan burdens are high, and housing is still unaffordably expensive post-bubble, while mortgages have gotten much more difficult to obtain. Taken together with ruinous (and non-dischargeable!) student loans, this makes it notably harder than in the past for a freshly-minted college graduate to find his way to anything more than either a crash pad or moving back in with the parents.
4. d) Cultural cues tell us that immature, foolish, and stupid men are the norm, and manly virtues are either forgotten or proscribed or in a state of complete confusion. The ubiquity of “idiot-man adverts” is just one easily spotted manifestation of this.
5. e) Female empowerment has had certain side-effects; for instance, empowering women to be demanding, self-centered, and unforgiving, with unrealistic expectations; and empowering them to elevate female friends (sometimes along with the ever-popular gay male mascot) above all others—including any man they might marry, whom it is all too easy to relegate to the status of a junior partner.
6. f) Women are much more eager to get married than to stay married. Your humble Blog Goliard knows all too many good guys who married, tried—albeit imperfectly—to please their wives and be the men they wanted, stayed away from the worst vices, had children with them…and then wound up kicked to the curb or abandoned at the wife’s whim. (Refer to e) above: girlfriends are for life, men are disposable.) This is a very, very common story these days.

Given all of this, why not take a slacker McJob, share a crash pad with some buddies, and retreat to a world of videogames, TV, beer, hookups, and porn?