>I just don't see spending 3-4 years in law school as being very exciting.
>And I don't mean my personal opinion of whether I'd go to law school or
>not: I mean that not much exciting work is being done by lawyers. Most are
>tucked-away in cubicles, in government offices, in small one-person
>offices scattered hither and yon. Processing wills. Forwarding escrow
>documents. Reviewing divorce papers. Ugh.
>
>But people should do what really drives them. Anyone going into law this
>late in the boom just to make money is probably going to be in for a rude
>awakening. Ditto for anyone going into it in order to do pro bono work on
>Cypherpunks issues.
Yeah. People thinking about law school should spend some time talking with
currently practicing (or non-practicing) attorneys and validate their
assumptions and expectations before investing years of their lives and tens
of thousands of dollars. The practice of law isn't what it looks like from
the movies and TV - mostly what people don't understand is that the
practice of law is a business, and it's a service business, where revenue
is directly linked to hours of human effort applied to market demand. If
the demand's not there, or the human effort's not there, there's no revenue
- nor if the clients can't pay. Attorneys who make a lot of money do so
only by leveraging the efforts of junior attorneys and support staff, just
like any other service business, and consequently spend a significant
amount of time managaing and marketing instead of lawyering.
None of the prominent Cypherpunk trials have featured defendants with the
budget to hire defense counsel, nor the inclination to turn over strategic
or tactical decisions to their attorneys. Those trials weren't
opportunities to make lots of money, or show off one's learned skills -
they were tar pits of malpractice and resentment.
(That doesn't mean the prosecutions or convictions were necessarily
reasonable, nor that the defendants deserved what happened to them, but
they weren't situations where some Legal Lone Ranger was needed to ride
onto the scene and save the day.)
Even the current prosecution of Dmitri Sklyarov is being handled in a
non-cypherpunk way (and that's good for him) - e.g., no full-court-press on
Constitutional grounds, his attorney is talking quietly with his colleagues
in the US Attorney's office, likely to positive results for Sklyarov.
Firebreathing, Stallman-quoting Disney-DMCA-Adobe-hating activist-lawyers
wouldn't make things better here.
People who want to make money or privacy should look to technology long
before they look to law - law is slow, conservative, and full of fussy
rules. Just write code.
I find that Oliver Wendell Holmes' commentary "The Path of the Law",
written in 1897, is still incredibly insightful and on-topic regarding the
relationship between law, morality, and the utility of a legal education,
especially as discussed on the list. It's available (following a ridiculous
amount of Project Gutenberg legal and marketing horseshit) at
<ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/gutenberg/etext00/pthlw10.txt>.
--
Greg Broiles
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids
