“What should a wholly selfless young attorney do with herself?”
Discussions about legal careers typically distinguish first and foremost between public interest work and private practice; for example, Harvard has separate career placement offices for the two categories. But, beyond the rare heretical argument that private practice is in the public interest, the law school conversation doesn’t go much beyond a division of legal careers into “good” and “evil” (or simply “greedy”) that closely tracks the amount of money one makes and, thus, the line between public interest work and private practice. Let’s set that aside. I’m interested in considering instead, with an open mind, which careers are “gooder” and “eviler.” In other words, what form of legal work gets the highest social return to investment of labor and human capital? What should a wholly selfless young attorney do with herself?
The idea that one should focus not merely on doing good* but on creating the maximum amount of good from a given input (an expenditure of labor or widgets or money) has become increasingly prevalent in philanthropy and reflects the influence of welfare economics on the nonprofit sector. “High impact philanthropy is the practice of making charitable contributions with the intention of maximizing social good. The aim is to make the biggest difference possible given the amount of capital invested.” This utilitarian idea applies the concept of economic efficiency to non-profit-seeking activity; the thing to be maximized is some conception of social good or aggregate utility rather than profit, but the intellectual framework—the focus on trade-offs, opportunity costs, cost-benefit comparisons, marginal analysis, and so forth—is the same.
A simplistic example: Suppose Ms. Philanthropist is deciding whether to contribute $1000 to an elite law school or to a food bank that is running above capacity. We can assume that giving to the law school is a good act—it produces (let’s suppose) benefits in the form of slightly greater comfort or aesthetic pleasure for the students—yet the same amount of money could go a lot farther if spent instead on low-cost food for very hungry people. So compared to some baselines, the law school donation is a good act—it’s more beneficial than doing nothing, or than doing something destructive. But compared to a more efficient use (one that does more good with the same thousand dollars) like giving to the food bank, it’s actually wasteful.
In other words, it’s “wasteful” in terms of opportunity costs, like a skilled neurosurgeon working on an automobile assembly line, or like a scientist who could find a cure to cancer mowing his own lawn instead of putting in another hour at the lab. This type of waste may be more difficult to see than the explicit waste that occurs when, for instance, a boatload of grain is dumped into the ocean, but it is really no different, though in my examples the wasted resource is different—labor and human capital, which could be translated into lifesaving operations or drugs, rather than grain that could be turned into food.
Now suppose that instead of $1000 Ms. Philanthropist has a bunch of debt and a shiny new law degree. What advice would you give her?
In for-profit markets, basic economic models predict that the “invisible hand” will lead individuals to allocate resources, including labor and human capital, in the most efficient way. The relevance of those models to reality is debated, but to my knowledge no one has even suggested a mechanism by which the non-profit private sector could allocate resources with comparable efficiency. Price and profit drive the invisible hand, but they are absent from the non-profit sector. So the attorney who just wants to get rich can simply go to the job that will pay her most, while the one who wants to do the most good for others is in a quandary.
Discussions of legal careers do at times assay the comparative values of different career paths. For instance, some say that public defense work is no more than a “band-aid”—it treats mainly the symptoms rather than the causes of over-criminalization and racial and economic inequality—in which case a capable attorney’s decision to pursue a career in public defense (rather than striking at the roots of the problems) is wasteful in the sense explained above, even if it is (as many would say) more valuable than a life spent as a corporate tax attorney. Whatever you think of these particular claims, the way of thinking I’ve described deserves a bigger place in career planning for oft-directionless young lawyers and law students. And so I welcome speculation as to best use one can make of a law degree.
* I’ll conveniently ignore the fact that the concept of social “good” is contested. Any attempt to say just what I mean would be counterproductive, since it’s doubtless the subject of overlapping consensus.