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So I'm a software engineer at a no-name startup for nearly 5 years. And recently I suddenly have an interest in learning law. Has anyone gotten on this path or have opinions about this? I suppose in my fantasy future, I would be doing appellate law and someday argue Supreme Court cases, but everything I read up shows that law is a high-stress, singular life. What are pros and cons here? What are things that should encourage me and what are things that should discourage me? If someone wants to pour a basin of water over my head on this whole romantic notion please feel free.
Not always, but by far the best path to that point is to graduate from Harvard, Stanford, or Yale, maybe Chicago, to clerk for a Circuit justice (and then, if possible, a SCOTUS justice), and go to work at a large law firm. The first step is to take the LSAT. If you can score 175+ (less if you are an underrepresented minority) then at least that step is not impossible. But if appellate law is the only thing that really interests you, then you should probably just not go to law school--unless, perhaps, you are extremely well connected. Even if you go to Harvard, the odds of ever actually arguing interesting questions in front of the Supreme Court are quite low. Even arguing in front of state supreme courts is pretty unusual.
If you're sufficiently interested in law to accept a career well short of your fantasy future, then you might as well take the LSAT and see how it goes. STEM majors actually tend to do very well as it is for the most part an obfuscated psychometric, despite the recent removal of the logic games portion. If you do poorly, then you can turn your attention elsewhere. If you do well, then you can decide whether to take the next steps of figuring out plausible schools to apply to. But bear in mind that law careers have a "bimodal distribution" between highly compensated "BigLaw" attorneys and the rank-and-file of family and criminal and liability lawyers who are (often at best) comfortably middle class. You could easily end up spending 3 years and $100,000+ to take a pay cut and spend the rest of your life refereeing messy divorces.
I am a lawyer, but I only practice on rare occasion. I left behind full time law practice to become an academic philosopher. I find it much more fulfilling than law practice, and I get to argue about whatever issues I want with people who are actually a lot smarter than the median SCOTUS Justice. The pay is terrible and it's unlikely I will ever make a meaningful difference on actual public policy, but that would probably be true even if I were a powerful appellate attorney.
I still remember one of my TAs in law school (a step below HYS) almost taking a swing at me at a cocktail party when he solemnly told the group his life goal was to argue in front of SCOTUS, and I gave him the piss-take that given he was Kenyan, his easiest route wasn't through a big-law litigation firm, but to move to some former Confederate state capital and join the AGs office, where he would be a novelty both for the quality of his law degree and intellect and for the color of his skin. Become Mike Huckabee's token black friend and they'll put you up for promotion right away, and those states are always getting into some cockamamie case around wanting to execute a black man that they would love to have a Black Attorney to argue for them.
He said he wanted to do it with integrity, I said that there are only a little over 100 lawyers who argue in front of the SCOTUS any given year, and there are about 1,000 students graduating from HYS every year. There's not a lot of room at the top.
@lollol
Don't become a lawyer to argue about the constitution, unless you are either very rich and connected or want to be a PD and argue about very particular types of constitutional law. Or I suppose if you're a true outlier genius, where getting a 180 LSAT is trivial for you without practice, and you figure to be top of class at HYS given your resume.
It's not the worst thing in the world to do with your time, law school is actually quite pleasant in my opinion, but the industry is about to go through major shifts related to (a new variety of) LLM in the workplace. So it may not be the source of major job security in the immediate future, regardless of how things ultimately turn out.
yeah, seems like the plan is at least try the LSAT once but if I don't get above 170, there's no point.
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