Atlanta attorney Allen Mendenhall argues here that we’d have the same level of legal competence without law schools and bar exams.
“At one time,” he writes, “lawyers learned on the job; now law schools were tasked with training new lawyers, but the result was that lawyers’ real training was merely delayed until the date they could practice, and aspiring attorneys had to be wealthy enough to afford this delay if they wanted to practice at all.”
Law schooling and bar membership have been means for the legal establishment to assert control over the profession. Because the legal establishment is dominated by people imbued with “progressive” thinking, the result has been detrimental to the interests of most Americans.