The dangers of directing talent to law school

It would be a beautiful thing, if it weren't so sinister, how every smart, sharp, critical, good writer, intelligent student is always told to go to law school. This is called the state defending itself. You don't want overly critical people to go the direction of saying, maybe we should dissolve the state. Maybe we could do better. Maybe we could have a better system. You want those people bound inside a system that they can't see a way out of, and that they don't want to see a way out of, because it creates for them the kind of life that they would have in a post-revolutionary experience that they could lead. It could be a bloodless revolution. I'm not ruling that out, but history shows us that that's pretty rare.

Maybe these days something could happen, an intellectual revolution, but regardless of tabling what kind of revolution it would be, it's always better for the state to preserve the status quo. You take your most creative, most thoughtful, best with language, most inquisitive and inquiry-oriented people, and you tell them that what smart people do is they go to law school, where then they are turned into tort writers, turned into legal writers, turned into people who think that the best expression of intelligence is within the bounds of this game, within the chalk lines on this playing field that we call the law.

And we get them to accept things like, well, you know, you can't really have justice. You can have legal remedies, but you can't really have remedy. And this is the sad way that a system that's bucking up against its own limits prevents itself from collapsing. So instead, encourage creative students to do other things. Don't encourage them to go to law school, encourage them to study the law as a scholar. Encourage them to create an NGO or work for an NGO and do other things that might not precipitate the collapse of an unjust and horrific system, but won't really prop it up as much. The less smart and articulate people we have in the law, the better.