Why doesn’t EA have many career opportunities or recommendations for law students (especially outside the U.S.)?
Three reasons:
Lawyering is highly-specific. Lawyers can do three things no one else can: notarize documents, provide legal advice, and become judges. All the other work—policy-making, legal research, and advocacy—can be done by others with enough motivation, organization, and search-engine savvy. As such, most of the work lawyers could be done without the cost, stress, and time of going to law school. As such, 80K sparsely recommends it, let alone tailors careers to that skillset.
Lawyering is problem-responsive. Budding organizations past the start-up stage—like the EA community—have little need for lawyers if they’re not running into legal issues. It makes more sense for most mid-sized organizations to hire lawyers as needed instead of hiring them in-house. Only the largest EA Orgs, like Open Phil or CEA, find a regular need for lawyers.
Lawyering is geographically constrained. Lawyers are licenced in specific jurisdictions, creating an institutional barrier to in-depth collaboration. Legal professionals and academics that do collaborate either work on broad, sweeping analyses that day-to-day organizations are still figuring out how to implement, or they work on re-orienting cultural motherships over years of concentrated effort. These problems are hardly tractable (drawing little 80K attention), but their nature is unlikely to change.
Why doesn’t EA have many career opportunities or recommendations for law students (especially outside the U.S.)?
Three reasons:
Lawyering is highly-specific. Lawyers can do three things no one else can: notarize documents, provide legal advice, and become judges. All the other work—policy-making, legal research, and advocacy—can be done by others with enough motivation, organization, and search-engine savvy. As such, most of the work lawyers could be done without the cost, stress, and time of going to law school. As such, 80K sparsely recommends it, let alone tailors careers to that skillset.
Lawyering is problem-responsive. Budding organizations past the start-up stage—like the EA community—have little need for lawyers if they’re not running into legal issues. It makes more sense for most mid-sized organizations to hire lawyers as needed instead of hiring them in-house. Only the largest EA Orgs, like Open Phil or CEA, find a regular need for lawyers.
Lawyering is geographically constrained. Lawyers are licenced in specific jurisdictions, creating an institutional barrier to in-depth collaboration. Legal professionals and academics that do collaborate either work on broad, sweeping analyses that day-to-day organizations are still figuring out how to implement, or they work on re-orienting cultural motherships over years of concentrated effort. These problems are hardly tractable (drawing little 80K attention), but their nature is unlikely to change.