Thanks for writing this! I strongly agree with the point that people should only go to law school if they have a pretty good idea of what they want to get out of it, and should not go to avoid making decisions about career paths (though people often don’t realize they’re doing this).
Also strongly agree with differentiating between the very top law schools and the schools just below them. I might go even farther than that. I went to NYU Law, which at the time was tied with Columbia for 4th in the U.S. News rankings. I didn’t apply to Harvard or Stanford because for personal reasons I wanted to be in NYC (I probably should have been more flexible on this). I didn’t get into Yale, which I could have commuted to. I did get into Columbia, but for a variety of reasons (I went to Barnard undergrad, so it seemed likely that NYU would broaden my network more; the Columbia admissions process was incredibly bureaucratic and that had been my experience with dealing with Columbia’s administration as an undergrad as well) I decided to go to NYU.
I regret this a little bit because while NYU is well respected in the legal world, it does not have the same name-recognition as Columbia to non-lawyers, and the vast majority of people I interact with professionally are non-lawyers. When people have little else to go off of (and sometimes even when they have plenty else to go off of), name recognition can do a lot of heavy lifting. Silly though it may be, it can really affect how seriously your legal advice gets taken.
One point of dissent: Even with the caveats you included, I am not sure that reading an unedited legal opinion would be particularly informative—my impression is that most textbooks heavily edit the opinions so that they’re focused on the issue relevant to the subject matter of the textbook. Most opinions are going to have multiple issues to get through (and will generally start with the boring stuff, like whether and why the court has jurisdiction to hear the case and whether/why the plaintiff has standing), and might be way more of a slog than the reading in law school would be. I think a more useful test would be to read a few sections of a law school textbook from a subject that is mostly taught through case law (so not something heavily regulatory). Torts, contracts, criminal law, constitutional law all fit the bill.
Molly, thanks so much for this feedback. You’re right to suggest that folks should try reading an edited opinion from a casebook, rather than a full-length original. Thank you! We’ve updated the post to link to an edited version of the Erie opinion that one professor used in a recent civil procedure class, and we’ve added a similar link to a criminal law case, McBoyle v. United States. The linked versions allow readers to expand the elided sections, so folks who would prefer to see the original text can still do so.
Thanks, too, for highlighting name recognition among non-lawyers as an important—if frustrating and arbitrary—consideration. As a note to folks considering this factor in the future: because it’s tricky and context-dependent to decide out how to weigh this factor against others, we’d be happy to try to connect you with someone in the community who can help you think it through; please reach out!
I’ll push back a bit on your point of dissent. I started reading Supreme Court opinions in middle school and haven’t stopped since. While that may have been useful for me when I eventually attended law school, I think it’s also a great way to wrap your head around how the law functions. It also gives a glimpse into how the judiciary actually operates versus what people read in the news. I start to twitch every June because I know the press is going to butcher whatever comes out of the Court. It seems even worse with Circuit Courts of Appeals decisions. From a general public policy perspective, being able to differentiate between what a judge actually wrote versus what a journalist cut and paste from a partisan group’s press release is essential, in my opinion, for anyone to be a conscientious person in the US and elsewhere (and that cuts in every direction as far as political leanings go).
Back to the practical side, the habit is also an opportunity to get insights into particular fields of legal practice that may interest someone considering law school (or annihilate any interest therein). Finally, depending on the area of law under review, appellate decisions can also make it clear to prospective law students and lawyers how procedure inundates every facet of legal practice.
Oh, I definitely agree there are good reasons to read unedited opinions—if nothing else, they’re great reads a lot of the time! But I think you’ll get a good number of false negatives if you use that as a test for whether you’ll enjoy the reading in law school. Anyone who enjoys reading unedited opinions will probably enjoy the reading in law school. But not everyone who doesn’t enjoy them won’t.
This is a fantastic and much-needed post with loads of consideration. Really great to see, especially with a small but growing legal and legal-adjacent community in EA.
I did a similar route to this but in the UK, so in the spirit of adding context for those who aren’t US-based, I’m going to cover some points in this comment. It’s not agreeing or disagreeing with anything you said in your post, but providing a little bit of info from a different area for anyone from there :)
I did my undergrad in AI, formally the BSc (Hons) Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence. Because of engaging a lot with EA at the tail end of that degree, and due to 80,000 hours publications, I applied for an LLM at Northumbria Law School. A lot of law schools here in the UK are starting to encourage interdisciplinary applicants to fill new skill gaps in emerging areas.
I applied and was accepted for Space Law (LLM), and graduated in 2021. I found it a bit difficult, but law in itself wasn’t that hard and to be honest the biggest change to get used to was going from STEM writing and research styles to legal styles. I really enjoyed it, and would recommend it to others. So if you’re UK-based with a non-law background, there are a lot of places that cater to that.
This is the course I did which I would recommend both as a uni and for the teaching staff who were hugely supportive and really passionate. They included an ‘Advanced Legal Research’ module to get the STEM folks up to speed. I’d say for my cohort it was around 70% of the course were lawyers, 20% computer scientists/engineers, and 10% other. Most people adapted to law well. So if you’re interested in going into an area specialism, it’s a good place to start. This course also did modules on AI law, which I took and would recommend. Very interesting.
The exams were all long essays (which generally we could pick the topic for, lots of freedom), with a final research project (again, you decide). I then went on to do my PhD in law at the same law school, where I’m looking at AI in policing and as evidence. So even as a non-law background person you can still advance.
Downsides are that due to the non-law background, you’re not technically a lawyer. You’ll still be highly sought after by companies looking for information, and because it’s a niche area there’s lots of opportunity for early careers impact, but you’ll need to do a conversion course to be able to give actual legal advice. (Except as an expert witness or general counsel, but expert witness work can be few and far between, with general counsel work preferring lawyers over non-lawyers).
Luckily the UK just introduced the SQE, a new way for non-law folk to qualify as solicitors. There are considerable financial barriers unfortunately, as the exams are horrendously expensive for literally no reason (one is like £2500 to take a multiple choice online exam) so there are real class barriers. You can also take the bar course to be a barrister, but I have less familiarity with that.
For fees, you can get funded quite easily by SFE I found, but can’t speak for those outside of England. As normal in the UK, your loan repayments are only taken as a small % of what you earn over a certain threshold, so you can’t really go broke by going to law school. It’s not a ‘real’ loan, like all educational loans.
So yeah, this post was a great read and it’s cool to see that law school is becoming more explored as a career path. Honestly I kind of fell into it, but found a niche I enjoy with lots of good impact potential so maybe I just got lucky. I’d recommend to anyone interested in studying law not to let yourself get put off by law’s reputation as a fierce and considerably difficult area. I actually found law to be way less toxic than computer science, and around the same in difficulty.
If anyone based in UK wants to ask me more about my experiences, my inbox is open. I only applied for the LLM because I knew a non-law person who did it before me and got to grill them. Or I wouldn’t have likely applied. So I’m happy to pass that baton on :)
Luke, thanks so much for sharing these perspectives—so helpful to have a UK perspective for a topic like this one that comes with so many jurisdictional differences. (I suspect some U.S.-based contributors who are still making tuition or loan payments may have winced at your observation that “you can’t really go broke by going to law school” in the UK…) Cheers!
This is a great post. Thank you for the thorough rundown of the various factors that should go into this decision. I’m commenting as someone who went to law school and became a lawyer, but who has struggled to integrate my career with my interest in EA. I think it is possible that law school can be a part of a great EA career plan, but I would also (as you do) insist that people make this decision after a lot of critical reflection. There is nothing about being a lawyer that uniquely equips you to make the world a better place and my gut reaction tells me that most people motivated by EA should probably avoid it. I’d be very happy to talk with anyone considering taking this path: I would have loved a candid discussion from someone who’s been there at that stage.
Knowing what I do now, and given the development of the EA movement in the past decade, I wouldn’t have gone to law school. I would have tried some other things, knowing that law school will always exist as a Plan Z. Of course, everyone’s circumstances are different, but I think it’s always valuable to have narratives out there (at the risk of overexposing myself).
I was first exposed to the ideas of EA about ten years ago during my undergrad. I was taking senior seminars in political theory and reading Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save, among other texts. They resonated with me, but I struggled with how to figure this into my career plan.
Coming out of undergrad, I didn’t feel like I could practically be very choosy with my career. I was the first in my family to go to university and had to take out loans to do so. I was also struggling with family issues at the time (relating to my coming out as gay) and going through my second serious bout of depression. I had a supportive partner (and still have the same one) who I could live with and lean on for support, but the relationship was new-ish and didn’t feel like something I could count on to support myself in the long run. I was of the impression that I’d fucked up by getting a liberal arts degree instead of one in engineering and I needed to get whatever job I could, ASAP.
I got a job in education policy about six months after graduating, around the same time I’d applied for law school. In hindsight, I’d describe both as panic moves. I needed something to pay the bills over the decades to come. After a lackluster eight-months at that job, I took out yet more loans and went to law school.
I turned out that I actually loved law school. As an environment for intellectual stimulation, I was very happy with it. I got to have diverse experiences, test a few options out and formed some great relationships with brilliant professors. The social life of the school was not really my thing. Life centered around cramming for exams, firm recruitment, etc. Eventually, I found my niche though, and managed to perform well and grow a lot.
But here’s the thing about legal training: the path is long, and if you let it sweep you up, you get on a specific track, and pivot points can be few and far between. By the time I was approaching graduation, I had lined up my articling job (a qualifying work year after law school in Canada) and a ‘prestigious’ clerkship for the year after that. I got offered a permanent government post during my clerkship year, which is where I still work. On reflection, the decade between applying to law school and now has felt very automatic, as would the next few decades if I don’t actively try to change trajectories.
As for the day-to-day work, my job as a government lawyer is not very effective. I earn decent money and donate a big chunk of it, but at every meeting, my EA mind is thinking about the salaries that each attendee is making, how long even small changes can take to make, and how my energy could be better spent elsewhere. I’ve learned the hard way what is obvious in hindsight: being a lawyer is a specific job, concerned about liability and facilitating other ends. It’s not a bad job, but it doesn’t make me (or most lawyers I know) excited to get up in the morning and change the world. In terms of marginal use of a decade in the prime of my life, I think I (and most people) can do a lot better.
I’m at a stage now where the burnout is real (oh yeah, did I mention that lawyering is hard?) and I’m trying to pivot to a role that has more direct meaning. It’s hard. Much harder than it would have been at 22, when you’re the young-adult version of a stem cell who could become anything. So my advice to potential law students would definitely be to (if you have the resources) wait out the discomfort of being in a state of so much potential. Try some things out for a few years before making what is arguably a default choice. Figure out what you’re good at and what makes you tick. How can you be most useful? There is a chance that the answer includes law school. But I think, for most, there’s a more direct path to impact.
Jeremy, thanks very much for sharing your path and this reflection. It resonates with much of what we heard from people in or considering careers practicing law in the U.S.: Even the shortest path to a law degree is long and taxing, and it’s common to spend many years of a career doing work that likely isn’t as impactful as the best realistic alternatives.
Exciting to hear that you’re thinking about a pivot—we’ve heard from other practitioners doing the same, and would love to compare notes and learn from your experience!
Thanks for writing this! I strongly agree with the point that people should only go to law school if they have a pretty good idea of what they want to get out of it, and should not go to avoid making decisions about career paths (though people often don’t realize they’re doing this).
Also strongly agree with differentiating between the very top law schools and the schools just below them. I might go even farther than that. I went to NYU Law, which at the time was tied with Columbia for 4th in the U.S. News rankings. I didn’t apply to Harvard or Stanford because for personal reasons I wanted to be in NYC (I probably should have been more flexible on this). I didn’t get into Yale, which I could have commuted to. I did get into Columbia, but for a variety of reasons (I went to Barnard undergrad, so it seemed likely that NYU would broaden my network more; the Columbia admissions process was incredibly bureaucratic and that had been my experience with dealing with Columbia’s administration as an undergrad as well) I decided to go to NYU.
I regret this a little bit because while NYU is well respected in the legal world, it does not have the same name-recognition as Columbia to non-lawyers, and the vast majority of people I interact with professionally are non-lawyers. When people have little else to go off of (and sometimes even when they have plenty else to go off of), name recognition can do a lot of heavy lifting. Silly though it may be, it can really affect how seriously your legal advice gets taken.
One point of dissent: Even with the caveats you included, I am not sure that reading an unedited legal opinion would be particularly informative—my impression is that most textbooks heavily edit the opinions so that they’re focused on the issue relevant to the subject matter of the textbook. Most opinions are going to have multiple issues to get through (and will generally start with the boring stuff, like whether and why the court has jurisdiction to hear the case and whether/why the plaintiff has standing), and might be way more of a slog than the reading in law school would be. I think a more useful test would be to read a few sections of a law school textbook from a subject that is mostly taught through case law (so not something heavily regulatory). Torts, contracts, criminal law, constitutional law all fit the bill.
Molly, thanks so much for this feedback. You’re right to suggest that folks should try reading an edited opinion from a casebook, rather than a full-length original. Thank you! We’ve updated the post to link to an edited version of the Erie opinion that one professor used in a recent civil procedure class, and we’ve added a similar link to a criminal law case, McBoyle v. United States. The linked versions allow readers to expand the elided sections, so folks who would prefer to see the original text can still do so.
Thanks, too, for highlighting name recognition among non-lawyers as an important—if frustrating and arbitrary—consideration. As a note to folks considering this factor in the future: because it’s tricky and context-dependent to decide out how to weigh this factor against others, we’d be happy to try to connect you with someone in the community who can help you think it through; please reach out!
I’ll push back a bit on your point of dissent. I started reading Supreme Court opinions in middle school and haven’t stopped since. While that may have been useful for me when I eventually attended law school, I think it’s also a great way to wrap your head around how the law functions. It also gives a glimpse into how the judiciary actually operates versus what people read in the news. I start to twitch every June because I know the press is going to butcher whatever comes out of the Court. It seems even worse with Circuit Courts of Appeals decisions. From a general public policy perspective, being able to differentiate between what a judge actually wrote versus what a journalist cut and paste from a partisan group’s press release is essential, in my opinion, for anyone to be a conscientious person in the US and elsewhere (and that cuts in every direction as far as political leanings go).
Back to the practical side, the habit is also an opportunity to get insights into particular fields of legal practice that may interest someone considering law school (or annihilate any interest therein). Finally, depending on the area of law under review, appellate decisions can also make it clear to prospective law students and lawyers how procedure inundates every facet of legal practice.
Oh, I definitely agree there are good reasons to read unedited opinions—if nothing else, they’re great reads a lot of the time! But I think you’ll get a good number of false negatives if you use that as a test for whether you’ll enjoy the reading in law school. Anyone who enjoys reading unedited opinions will probably enjoy the reading in law school. But not everyone who doesn’t enjoy them won’t.
This is a fantastic and much-needed post with loads of consideration. Really great to see, especially with a small but growing legal and legal-adjacent community in EA.
I did a similar route to this but in the UK, so in the spirit of adding context for those who aren’t US-based, I’m going to cover some points in this comment. It’s not agreeing or disagreeing with anything you said in your post, but providing a little bit of info from a different area for anyone from there :)
I did my undergrad in AI, formally the BSc (Hons) Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence. Because of engaging a lot with EA at the tail end of that degree, and due to 80,000 hours publications, I applied for an LLM at Northumbria Law School. A lot of law schools here in the UK are starting to encourage interdisciplinary applicants to fill new skill gaps in emerging areas.
I applied and was accepted for Space Law (LLM), and graduated in 2021. I found it a bit difficult, but law in itself wasn’t that hard and to be honest the biggest change to get used to was going from STEM writing and research styles to legal styles. I really enjoyed it, and would recommend it to others. So if you’re UK-based with a non-law background, there are a lot of places that cater to that.
This is the course I did which I would recommend both as a uni and for the teaching staff who were hugely supportive and really passionate. They included an ‘Advanced Legal Research’ module to get the STEM folks up to speed. I’d say for my cohort it was around 70% of the course were lawyers, 20% computer scientists/engineers, and 10% other. Most people adapted to law well. So if you’re interested in going into an area specialism, it’s a good place to start. This course also did modules on AI law, which I took and would recommend. Very interesting.
The exams were all long essays (which generally we could pick the topic for, lots of freedom), with a final research project (again, you decide). I then went on to do my PhD in law at the same law school, where I’m looking at AI in policing and as evidence. So even as a non-law background person you can still advance.
Downsides are that due to the non-law background, you’re not technically a lawyer. You’ll still be highly sought after by companies looking for information, and because it’s a niche area there’s lots of opportunity for early careers impact, but you’ll need to do a conversion course to be able to give actual legal advice. (Except as an expert witness or general counsel, but expert witness work can be few and far between, with general counsel work preferring lawyers over non-lawyers).
Luckily the UK just introduced the SQE, a new way for non-law folk to qualify as solicitors. There are considerable financial barriers unfortunately, as the exams are horrendously expensive for literally no reason (one is like £2500 to take a multiple choice online exam) so there are real class barriers. You can also take the bar course to be a barrister, but I have less familiarity with that.
For fees, you can get funded quite easily by SFE I found, but can’t speak for those outside of England. As normal in the UK, your loan repayments are only taken as a small % of what you earn over a certain threshold, so you can’t really go broke by going to law school. It’s not a ‘real’ loan, like all educational loans.
So yeah, this post was a great read and it’s cool to see that law school is becoming more explored as a career path. Honestly I kind of fell into it, but found a niche I enjoy with lots of good impact potential so maybe I just got lucky. I’d recommend to anyone interested in studying law not to let yourself get put off by law’s reputation as a fierce and considerably difficult area. I actually found law to be way less toxic than computer science, and around the same in difficulty.
If anyone based in UK wants to ask me more about my experiences, my inbox is open. I only applied for the LLM because I knew a non-law person who did it before me and got to grill them. Or I wouldn’t have likely applied. So I’m happy to pass that baton on :)
Luke, thanks so much for sharing these perspectives—so helpful to have a UK perspective for a topic like this one that comes with so many jurisdictional differences. (I suspect some U.S.-based contributors who are still making tuition or loan payments may have winced at your observation that “you can’t really go broke by going to law school” in the UK…) Cheers!
This is a great post. Thank you for the thorough rundown of the various factors that should go into this decision. I’m commenting as someone who went to law school and became a lawyer, but who has struggled to integrate my career with my interest in EA. I think it is possible that law school can be a part of a great EA career plan, but I would also (as you do) insist that people make this decision after a lot of critical reflection. There is nothing about being a lawyer that uniquely equips you to make the world a better place and my gut reaction tells me that most people motivated by EA should probably avoid it. I’d be very happy to talk with anyone considering taking this path: I would have loved a candid discussion from someone who’s been there at that stage.
Knowing what I do now, and given the development of the EA movement in the past decade, I wouldn’t have gone to law school. I would have tried some other things, knowing that law school will always exist as a Plan Z. Of course, everyone’s circumstances are different, but I think it’s always valuable to have narratives out there (at the risk of overexposing myself).
I was first exposed to the ideas of EA about ten years ago during my undergrad. I was taking senior seminars in political theory and reading Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save, among other texts. They resonated with me, but I struggled with how to figure this into my career plan.
Coming out of undergrad, I didn’t feel like I could practically be very choosy with my career. I was the first in my family to go to university and had to take out loans to do so. I was also struggling with family issues at the time (relating to my coming out as gay) and going through my second serious bout of depression. I had a supportive partner (and still have the same one) who I could live with and lean on for support, but the relationship was new-ish and didn’t feel like something I could count on to support myself in the long run. I was of the impression that I’d fucked up by getting a liberal arts degree instead of one in engineering and I needed to get whatever job I could, ASAP.
I got a job in education policy about six months after graduating, around the same time I’d applied for law school. In hindsight, I’d describe both as panic moves. I needed something to pay the bills over the decades to come. After a lackluster eight-months at that job, I took out yet more loans and went to law school.
I turned out that I actually loved law school. As an environment for intellectual stimulation, I was very happy with it. I got to have diverse experiences, test a few options out and formed some great relationships with brilliant professors. The social life of the school was not really my thing. Life centered around cramming for exams, firm recruitment, etc. Eventually, I found my niche though, and managed to perform well and grow a lot.
But here’s the thing about legal training: the path is long, and if you let it sweep you up, you get on a specific track, and pivot points can be few and far between. By the time I was approaching graduation, I had lined up my articling job (a qualifying work year after law school in Canada) and a ‘prestigious’ clerkship for the year after that. I got offered a permanent government post during my clerkship year, which is where I still work. On reflection, the decade between applying to law school and now has felt very automatic, as would the next few decades if I don’t actively try to change trajectories.
As for the day-to-day work, my job as a government lawyer is not very effective. I earn decent money and donate a big chunk of it, but at every meeting, my EA mind is thinking about the salaries that each attendee is making, how long even small changes can take to make, and how my energy could be better spent elsewhere. I’ve learned the hard way what is obvious in hindsight: being a lawyer is a specific job, concerned about liability and facilitating other ends. It’s not a bad job, but it doesn’t make me (or most lawyers I know) excited to get up in the morning and change the world. In terms of marginal use of a decade in the prime of my life, I think I (and most people) can do a lot better.
I’m at a stage now where the burnout is real (oh yeah, did I mention that lawyering is hard?) and I’m trying to pivot to a role that has more direct meaning. It’s hard. Much harder than it would have been at 22, when you’re the young-adult version of a stem cell who could become anything. So my advice to potential law students would definitely be to (if you have the resources) wait out the discomfort of being in a state of so much potential. Try some things out for a few years before making what is arguably a default choice. Figure out what you’re good at and what makes you tick. How can you be most useful? There is a chance that the answer includes law school. But I think, for most, there’s a more direct path to impact.
Jeremy, thanks very much for sharing your path and this reflection. It resonates with much of what we heard from people in or considering careers practicing law in the U.S.: Even the shortest path to a law degree is long and taxing, and it’s common to spend many years of a career doing work that likely isn’t as impactful as the best realistic alternatives.
Exciting to hear that you’re thinking about a pivot—we’ve heard from other practitioners doing the same, and would love to compare notes and learn from your experience!