Here is his view, he may study law, feel free to tell him more in MR comments…
Lee responds to my career advice
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Well, here is the question? If being an economist is only worth it if you are in a top ten graduate program, then what do all the other schmucks with worthless PhDs do?
I am currently earning my way into the reject pile of all those wonderful adcoms. I guess Poli Sci will be my future or something like that. Dreams sure do die hard.
I would encourage Lee to closely examine Leiter’s recent report on where tenure-track legal academics went to school and to inspect the faculty lists of a few law schools — count the Harvard/Yale and the non-Harvard/Yale professors. I’m not sure that breaking into the world of legal academia is that much easier than any other.
Law school is a very bad idea unless he goes to a top 14 school, he needs to read my blog post Law school, the big lie.
$100,000 in law school expenditures (before opportunity costs) in the hopes of being a legal academic without a strong interest in the law seems like an extraordinarily poor investment. A white male without a Ph.D. needs top grades at a top-six school to have a real hope at legal academia. Tyler’s advice about taking the legal academic route rather than the economic academic route was no doubt aimed at economics Ph.D.s.
Thanks for the comments. My post was probably a bit cavalier about the difficulty of become a legal academic. One interesting comment on the advice post was that I’d be better off making decisions “on the margin,” i.e., continuing education as long as I enjoy it.
Others thinking about law school might be interested in the book “Law School Confidential,” which I’ve found to be very helpful. Law school has been my tentative plan for a year or so, but I was tempted to do economics instead. I now think I should resist this temptation.
Yes, the debt of law school is an important consideration. And I don’t care enough about money to sit through a soul-sucking job for the first eight years. So my thinking is that I should try my best at the LSAT, aim for a good public law school like UT Austin, and if I get in, do a good job. If I have an extraordinary, heretofore unknown talent for law, then maybe I’ll do the academic thing. Otherwise, I’ll try to avoid the rat race and get a legal job where I sit at a desk and deal with books rather than make speeches.
David is making the best point that I’ve read on this track. Some of the best economics IS in the Law&Econ area. Why? Because this area puts a premium on operational matters (as opposed to existence proofs). Another area where one finds lots of applied work is in the area of Economic History. Who wouldn’t rather take an issue of the Journal of Economic History (or the Journal of Law and Economics) along to read on a cross country flight than the Journal of Economic Theory?
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