Becoming a lawyer… MAYBE a bad idea? (University options, advice)

i'm answering a question from a long
time viewer in my audience in this video someone who is asking me my opinion about whether or not he should become a lawyer whether or not he should enroll in law school go through the lengthy and arduous process of becoming qualified to be a lawyer and he's asking this not in order to make money but because he's interested in a kind of political activism of taking on a life of greater political responsibilities because in his way he wants to make the world a better place so when answering this question i'm partly just making a reply to him but i'm also going to talk through some issues that will pertain to many different people's decisions living many different lives in many different countries cultures and contexts with many different aspirations to make the world a better place all right the first puzzle that's wrapped up in this seemingly simplistic package like the question should you become a lawyer it seems simple it's very easy to lose sight of the fact that you've combined two different questions here all right one is whether or not it's a good thing to become a lawyer and the other is even if it's a bad thing is it worth doing in order to make the world a better place you see that you see the the justification of going to law school like even if you don't want to go to law school you don't want to study the law you're not interested in law you're not going to enjoy the practice of being a lawyer but you think it's worthwhile because you have this idea about the type of political influence and responsibility you'll have after being learned you have this idea of the options and opportunities you'll have to make the world a better place and then that thought can justify the decision to become a lawyer here right now you can confuse these two and think that what you wanted was to become a lawyer and it's not what you wanted was to make the world a better place what you wanted was to be some kind of political activist and you became a lawyer as a means to that end right so you've got to really question these things separately because for one thing the process of going to law school of studying the law and the ways in which that will change you that's definite right the possibility of making the world a better place it's quite uncertain isn't it if you're talking about that as a role the dice how many lawyers live and work their whole lives and never accomplish anything and never change and they never even have the opportunity to and in most countries it's different from place to place after law school there's a long dehumanizing process of working low-level jobs as a lawyer in canada this is referred to as articling where you are it might be referred to as an internship or whatever or clerking different country but most lawyers who do become powerful or influential they only become powerful or influential when they're more than 60 years old and it's the end of a long boring bureaucratic career playing a very junior and denigrating role in the establishment and that's a role maybe some people would actually desire in and of itself i've had to deal with a lot of lawyers in the last five years i sure wish i had a lawyer who had a fundamentally helpful attitude like a customer service attitude like they're here to help you like okay you want a divorce i'm going to explain to you the process i'm going to answer your question i'm going to help you get divorced that would be a great attitude for a lawyer to have they don't have that attitude by and large but i mean many of these people i mean i sympathize they go into the practice of law and they don't think of it as customer service they don't think of it as being helpful they don't think of it as educating their clients they probably don't think of it as a form of political activism either right the motivations that are bringing most people into law school is what you're going to be sitting next to in the classroom as a brief digression i've mentioned this to my girlfriend many times lately when i first enrolled in university my major was economics and i said to my parents this is half joking but half serious criticism after i came home from class one day i said only now do i understand the market for roof and all roofing at that time was a notorious date rate drug a notorious date rape drug and i was sitting there in the classroom with these guys these guys who chose to go into economics wow the moral character are the people i'm sitting with in the classroom like the people i'm meeting by majoring in economics this is a whole depressing side of human nature i've been blind to before well in some ways it's going to be similar in some ways it's going to be different you are going to meet people who are motivated by money and who are motivated by things far darker than money once you're in that law school in the same way where i was sitting down in this economics classroom like hey guys i'm here to study the philosophy of poverty i'm i'm here i'm interested to make the world a better place like at that time specifically i was interested in questions like why and how was it possible for south korea after world war ii to so rapidly become a highly educated highly affluent society with low levels of crime and you know decent quality architecture running water and electricity while other countries remain mired in third world poverty conditions like what what worked in korea and what i wanted to study these kinds of these kinds of questions i guess what you could call development economics and i have third world economics i was interested those questions within canada too why were our native people or indigenous people living in third world conditions and what we're going to do about it like okay i'm here to study the philosophy of poverty whoa you guys are all here to get rich quick huh and you're uh you're willing to do all kinds of despicable things to get there okay that that may be a call for you but again i'm trying to just disaggregate here two very different questions that get bundled up right which is the process of education itself the career itself the job itself as opposed to this thing that exists in your mind to justify to justify committing yourself to that process and maybe also the many years of working in that career so i i met and spoken to people who said they wanted to be human rights lawyers and then they got a lot less interested when they figured out that oh first you just got to be a lawyer and then when you're in your 50s you start doing human rights law like they have to have a whole lifetime of doing just property law resolving disputes they have no interest in this terrible bureaucratic grind and then once they've distinguished themselves as a lawyer once they've made enough money not even for themselves they've made enough money for a corporation or a partnership that employs these lawyers then they're able to move on to do something there they're supposedly addressing themselves and they they switch out of they realize human rights law is not what they want to do at all if their concern is human rights they're gonna have to find another path to get there and my second my second major point of view i want to want to put this question to you okay um who has more political influence in the world right now the documentary filmmaker michael moore or this lawyer you imagine yourself becoming 10 years from now and i say 10 years intentionally because you will probably be a powerless paper pusher 10 years from now even if again 20 years and 30 years from now maybe you do become a powerful and influential person through the price michael moore is not particularly intelligent really really michael moore is not particularly intelligent he's not particularly well read he's not intellectual what amazing political power and influence he's amassed in his life what a tremendous potential he has to make the world a better place or a different place or to influence politics he's managed to achieve through documentary filmmaking and you know what i don't really think michael moore is the exception to the rule in the 21st century i think he's the rule i think that's the norm now all right um now you could ask a second question what if michael moore had gone to law school and become a lawyer yes she'd be even more influential he'd be even more effective there's no doubt what if michael moore after his second or third hit movie because he had he had a gap of years during these movies he had movies and tv shows what if he had stopped and said okay he's going to take a couple years and go to law school and then come back great question great question and you could ask what if michael moore had gone to law school before his filmmaking career started i think for him financially that would have been impossible basically knows what right but what really is the route for you to take if in this sense you want to be a politically powerful and influential person and you don't want to do it through organized crime you don't want to do it through real estate apparently right you want to be respected for your ideas your opinion your research maybe your critique of what's wrong with political condition like it's something like this that you have in mind implicitly you've got to disambiguate it for yourself what is it you want to be respected for i'm not saying to you that being a lawyer is incompatible with that um i'm saying that being a lawyer might be much more irrelevant to that than you're that you're willing to admit to yourself right even if being a lawyer becoming alert could augment that now i'm not gonna digress into it but it's remarkable that i hear so many interviews with people who became lawyers and never practiced the law or became lawyers very briefly practice the law and then quit in order to do something else entirely to become a political commentator uh megan kelly is an example on the right wing and jane guiger the host of young turks is example on the left wing they both they're fully qualified lawyers and they very briefly pushed paperwork around in the law office and decided whoa this is not for me this is not how i'm going to earn a living and they went into broadcasting political commentary doing something similar to what i do now frankly here on youtube um today megyn kelly hosts a podcast after she lost her job on network television repeatedly shout out to megan kelly you know now it's worth questioning for these people could they have attained their goals and and could they have become better people also to be blunt if they'd had more clarity of purpose from day one and take in a root more like michael moore if they'd been more of a creative person in some sense and why do i raise the question of what kind of what kind of person there it changes you i'm not going to digress into this i've had many many videos talking about if you join the military for five years it changes you if you go to law school and then do the articling i think five years is a conservative estimate in most countries it might be more like an eight year process varies from country to country but let's just say if you spend five years doing this this lawyer thing it changes you and maybe you can tell me that in some ways it's going to make you a better person and you know what there are some ways it's going to it's going to make you worse all right another really interesting example from my perspective is actually the guy who does tmz or tmz um you know a celebrity gossip station but he started he was a conventional learner every so often in his job being a entertainment talk show host he makes references to specific laws that show that he does have that that legal education okay now my third and final point in this video because i think this question should you become a lawyer it involves these three points that may be difficult to extricate and analyze separately in your own mind it comes down to a question of your analysis of your perspective on your own culture and how you fit into that culture to what extent you're a dissident in that culture to what extent you're a conformist the particular guy asking me this question he's writing to me from ireland all right i really do think that the decision to become a lawyer is profoundly different for an irishman born and raised in ireland than it is for a canadian born and raised in canada and if that's hard for you to visualize how would you feel about becoming a lawyer in iran if you're born and raised iranian yeah how would you feel right now about being a lawyer in iraq in post-american occupation iraq well it's a way to make the world a better place right it's a way to right and now you're a part of that political establishment in iraq one of the biggest problems they have is of the police abducting people holding them as hostages and demanding ransom money all right you think you're a powerful person as a lawyer in some ways you're quite powerless in some ways you're much more powerless than a filmmaker like like michael moore all right so i think that suffices for this video um i do think that social media is simultaneously um underappreciated and exaggerated in its political importance and the wonderful thing about pursuing a creative path to becoming politically influential trying to be someone like michael moore is that it doesn't exclude other interests other passions other careers you know probably you could be a filmmaker like that while going to medical school while while going to uh business school gaining credentials in commerce and finance or while uh studying the law it's it's impossible and again it would be possible to be someone like michael moore but he also uh has a law degree but when you are looking at your own culture let's just look at the last 50 years of history in the in the english speaking world and you ask who has made a difference and who has the potential to make a difference now maybe the saddening sickening truth is that it really is people like megyn kelly maybe that's hard for us to admit to ourselves because we'd like to believe there's a meritocracy whereby it's the it's the people who have these credentials uh or even the people who are elected you know who who really matter but you know there are 10 000 anonymous lawyers toiling filling out time sheets for billable hours doing meaningless bureaucratic work and elected politicians come and go and they seem to change almost nothing certainly in all the societies i've lived in in the in the history the chapter of history i've lived through so little change comes that way and yes i don't think it's an exception to the rule i think it's the rule to point to someone like michael moore who distinguishes themselves who earns the trust and respect of their audience then moves on to earn the admiration of millions anyways the real potential to make a difference in this world