Lawyering to Give
If you really want to do good by law, consider becoming a corporate lawyer, making a lot of money, and donating a substantial sum to charity.
Writing in the Harvard Law Record, Bill Barlow argues that a law student who goes into corporate law and gives 25% of their income to the best charities they can find will do more good than one who goes into academia, government, or public interest work.
Sima Atri responded in the same edition of the Law Record, and Elie Mystal responded in Above the Law a few days later. Both are solidly convinced that this is not an approach that benefits the world, let alone the best approach for a Harvard Law graduate. And both are convinced the arguments are obviously flawed:
Mystal: Itâs pretty stupid. Itâs not absurd enough to achieve Jonathan Swift levels of parody, nor is it thought through enough to be taken seriously.
Atri: I am not responding to this article because I think the arguments merit the time and energy I will spend writing this up.
The main issue seems to be that both responders have dismissed the possibility that someone going into corporate law would actually donate 25% of their salary. This turns the âearn money and give a lot of it awayâ proposal into âearn money and spend it on yourself,â and itâs not surprising that they wouldnât have much respect for someone arguing that you should do this:
Atri: I can bet that almost no one going into corporate law next year is donating 30% of their post-tax income to charity.
Mystal: To even get into this argument, you have to accept the premise that there is any Biglaw associate, anywhere, who is going to give away 25% of their post-tax salary. And you would have to be really dumb to accept that premise. Itâs a dumb premise, even if you assume that Biglaw associates are desperate to make charitable contributions to the world. Between rent and student loan payments, giving 25% away would make it a struggle for most associates to pay all their other bills. People donât bill 60 hours a week working for the greater good of corporate clients to be functionally poor.
Leaving aside that I know several people in corporate law who are earning to give, along with others in finance, teaching, software development, and other professions, theyâre making the wrong comparison. Theyâre saying âconsidering the people I know who are going into corporate law, I canât imagine them starting to donate 25% of their income to charityâ. And they may well be right! The article isnât aimed at people whoâve already decided to go into corporate law, however, itâs aimed at people who want to maximize the good they do. Consider each of the jobs Barlow describes relative to going into corporate law and keeping all the money. Each one has an amount of money youâre passing up in order to do good, and an amount you keep:
| Job | Income Kept | Income Forgone |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Law, donating 25% | $75k | $25k |
| Public Interest | $33k | $67k |
| Government | $40k | $60k |
| Academia | $26k | $74k |
Deciding to go into government law, for example, is like deciding to take a $100k job and donate everything above $40k. If Barlowâs salary estimates are reasonable, someone going into corporate law and donating 25% has much more income left over for rent, student loan payments, and other expenses than someone choosing any of these other routes. Someone with an income of $75k is hardly âfunctionally poor.â
After writing off the idea that people might donate 25% of their income (let alone 50%) as unrealistic the responding authors then seem to just assume that Barlow actually meant a much lower number. For example:
Mystal: I can just imagine a Big Phrama lawyer who spends six days a week to protect the companyâs patent monopoly on life-saving drugs, then cuts a check for $6 for a bug net and thinks heâs done his good deed for the month.
Yes, of course thatâs wrong. Donât just donate $6/âmonth! Barlow is proposing giving 25% of an $100k salary, or $2k/âmonth. But this does get us into their second objection, which is more substantive: corporate law does harm:
Atri: I say this because you are not choosing to go into neutral, apolitical, work. None of us working in the legal profession are. Your firm, Bill, has represented JPMorgan Chase, a bank that backed thousands of predatory and racist loans and helped create the foreclosure crisis. Your firm also (according to its website) âroutinely defends companies faced with serious products liability and consumer fraud claims ⊠involving thousands of claimants.â For those thousands of claimants who were first harmed by faulty products, and then denied any remedy, your charity may be less than appreciated.
Going into corporate law means you should expect to be involved in a range of work, some of it harmful and some of it helpful. All of these situations could be either: patent monopolies are how weâve ended up funding most of our drug research but loosening them up in some cases could be good; product liability and consumer fraud claims can go either way depending on the facts of the situation. But letâs apply a âshow me the harmâ style argument. There are 760k lawyers in the US, and say half of them work in the private sector. Thatâs 390k people. If you expect that someone going into corporate law while donating an amount that saves ~10 lives a year is harmful, then the net harm of corporate lawyers must more than 3.9M deaths a year. This is 14% of total worldwide deaths, and this doesnât include corporate lawyers in other countries. This is enough deaths that it seems pretty clear donating 25% does far more good than the harm you could plausibly be doing as a lawyer.
But what really worries me is when people start going down the path of âmoney doesnât matterâ:
Mystal: People who are actually concerned about the public interest donât think that way. They donât think that currency is the only tender that can or should be offered up in an effort to make things better. They resist the endless attempts to commodify every action or inaction in this country with dollars and cents. The author estimates that you could save 150 lives a year by donating $25,000 to anti-malarial bug nets. Thatâs a great use of your spare cash, but youâve got nothing on the people who spend their time helping to distribute those bug nets, or even the people who teach proper bug net use.
This is wrong in a poisonous harmful way, more wrong than everything else in the piece. Altruism isnât about sacrifice, itâs not about whether you help via time, money, or materials, itâs about having a positive impact on the people youâre trying to help. If spending time distributing nets helps more people than spending time earning money to help fund a local organization that distributes nets then you should do that, but if itâs the other way then you should earn the money and donate it instead. Thereâs nothing categorically better about volunteering over other other ways of helping, and to say otherwise is to make giving about the donor instead of the people who really matter.
So how would I object to Barlowâs article? His estimate of the cost to save a life is too low, but even at a more likely $2500/âlife, donating 25% would be saving 10 lives a year. His dismissals of the value of government, academic, and public interest work are also too strong: while itâs very hard to estimate the benefit of a career in, say, academia, I wouldnât write it off entirely. Ten deaths a year [1] is a steep opportunity cost to balance, but dramatic legal process improvements could probably have a benefit larger than that. So it still might be worth going into one of the other branches of law if you had a strong reason to believe your particular job would have very large benefits [2]. But overall I wouldnât object at all: the simple math of earning to give is very powerful.
I also posted this on my blog.
[1] In fact itâs more like 30, because the comparison for âgo into academia and earn $26kâ should be âgo into corporate law and donate all but $26k.â
[2] After accounting for replaceabilty.
If someone could write a piece making these points in the Law Record or Above the Law, that might be very useful. Especially if they defused the issues from the original piece that Stefan mentions in his comment (for example, mentioning that Mystalâs argument is an understandable reaction to a provocative piece before explaining that the original argument is actually very strong and that Mystalâs response doesnât address the underlying logic at all). I donât know whether one would have to be a legal professional/âstudent in order to write this though. Perhaps Harvard EA knows some Harvard students well placed to co-author something like this?
I wrote to the Harvard EA people, and they didnât know anyone. I wrote to Bill Barlow, and heâs drafting a response.
Great work!
James Ting Edwards is another trained lawyer who could do this.
As someone who is a law graduate working in what might be called public interest law (asylum & immigration law) I agree with your analysis to the extent that if someone considered they were equally well suited to both types of work and ambivalent to a which path to follow this would be a good argument to consider commercial law.
However, while the academic skills of a commercial and publicly funded lawyer might be the same (both might go to Harvard or Oxford and study similar subjects in similar ways) - the specific non-academic skills needed to do these jobs and their actual competencies of the people involved with them vary wildly, such that I would doubt that a successful commercial lawyer is likely to be a successful public interest lawyer and vice versa. (with some exceptions of courseâin particular the very top barristers, the british equivalent of trial lawyers often handle both public interest and commercial work because of their unique skill set).
In the nicest possible way, the vast majority of people I work with, i suspect would not succeed in the commercial worldâthey would not find the work intrinsically motivating or interesting enough to maintain a high level of conscientiousnessâthey would lack the specific social/âextraversion skill-set necessary to succeed in high pressure business environments and so on. I certainly know from trying it out in summer placements that I would not succeed there.
I am sure that in many cases, the vice-versa is also true, many successful commercial law friends would find the day to day work in my area extremely frustrating and would not have the skills to succeed here either (though I suspect it is easier to adapt this wayâplenty of lawyers do move from commercial to public interest workânot many the other way at all, at least in the UK).
So while I think this is a good argument for law students considering their future to bear in mind, I suspect that in many cases it is on the edge because you are overestimating the chance for which a student will succeed in two very different careers.
(Though, I recognise there is a risk that I am overgeneralising from my own and what I know of my colleagues experiences). Edited spelling
Having been an investment banker for many years working with top flight partners in Magic Circle firms in London my particular concern is that it can be very corrosive to long term morality, particularly as you rise to partner level. The moral choices you are often asked by clients to assist them in making in favour of financial return would I imagine affect most people. With the hours that such jobs require, minimising contact with an effective altruism community I would worry about a corporate lawyer losing their commitment to effective altruism as other moral guidance came to the fore.
Interesting to have you take on this as someone whoâs been there David. People are familiar with these concerns of value drift, but I think underrate their application to themselves, because itâs hard to imagine oneâs own values changing at a time when oneâs very absorbed in them. Nonetheless, many effective altruists are currently in a very favourable setting for EA ideas (being students with several EA friends), and itâd be natural for some to drop off when they move to the sort of environment you describe.
That is a well known bias isnât it? I forget the scientific name of itâbut its part of our tendency to see the world as fixed and ourselves in control of our actions that when we see ourselves in the futureâwe fail to imagine changes in our personality and values but instead project ourselves into that time as we currently are, relatedly we consistently underestimate how much we have changed already and how different we are from the people we were in the past because we are bad at noticing how our values and personalities change over time.
End of History Illusion sounds like what youâre looking for.
Thanks for this. Mystalâs article is appallingly poor. I donât quite agree with this characterization of Atriâs article, however:
A major theme in Atriâs article is Barlowâs unnecessarily provocative characterizations of people who choose not to go into Big Law. To some degree I understand that Atri is upset, in the light of sentences like these:
Lots of people whoâve gone into Public Interest, Government, or Academia have a tremendous amount of goodâmore good, Iâd argue, than they could have done at a Big Law firm. Whatâs more, I think that some of them had reason to believe that when they choose their career, given what they knew about their capabilities. Harvard Law graduate Barack Obama is a name that springs to mind. In any case, the burden of proof is on Barlow. He shouldnât start talking in this condescending way about people who donât go into Big Law without giving us very firm evidenceâmuch firmer than the rather shallow arguments that he gives (e.g. âCan poor people eat using your opinion on lawâs impact on poor people?ââthis is below the argumentative quality youâd expect from an effective altruist) - that choosing the Big Law path is indeed the right one for everyone.
Iâm sure some people who go into Public Interest, Government, or Academia are self-important and/âor confused over how they can best impact the world, but there are also morally serious and determined people similar to Obama out there. Hence sweeping generalizations such as this should be avoided.
I agree. The think thereâs a strong argument that you can go into Big Law and still achieve a lot of good; but itâs pretty unclear whether an equally talented and altruistic person would do more good earning to give than going into public interest law. Also, as Alasdair points out below, personal fit is going to be a big consideration.
Once again, I am quite late to the party, but for posterityâs sake, just want to add a few points: First, this is exactly what I do, and itâs just not that hard. Second, I was formery a public interest lawyer (doing impact litigation) and believe the skill set required for that job is very similar to the skill set required for my current job (commercial litigation). Lastly, I am doing what I am doing on the belief that it does the most goodâIâve considered the alternatives! If anyone seriously believes Iâm mistaken, Iâd very much like to hear from them.
Sima makes a jibe at banks
which seems to be a common criticism of EA activities: earning to give is evil, because finance is evil. EAs tend to give a (I think valid) response about replace-ability. But I think EAs should also be aware that Simaâs criticism fails on other grounds tooâbanks werenât racist or predatory, and werenât responsible for the âforeclosure crisisâ.
Jeff, thanks for sharing these articles and your thoughts on this.