Its bullshit that people need to hire lawyers to solve their problems. Its ridiculous that the law is written in such confusing and arbitrarily convuluted language that ordinary people can't understand their rights or laws that are meant to protect them.

I'm not sure I agree with this statement. I do agree that it would be nice if everything was simple and understandable, but I'm not at all comfortable with the implication that the world is particularly able to offer that simplicity.

In every field of human endeavor, we hire experts to handle things we do not have sufficient time, inclination or intelligence to learn how to handle on our own.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive to make the system as reasonable and accessible as possible, but the logical extension of that is not the elimination of subject matter expertise. You can no more do away with lawyers as with programmers or chefs.

That fundie guy uses the education he has recieved in science to (attempt to) dismantle its core assumptions and prove that his view of the world is correct. If I can do something analagous with my law degree, without convincing myself along the way that my core assumptions about humanity were wrong, then I will consider this lawschool thing a success.

I think this is a noble effort, but i worry that the last statement shows what I consider a flaw. If you are able to convince yourself that your core assumptions were wrong, then why should you consider that a failure? It implies that your current beliefs are absolutely correct, and that modifying them is unacceptable. This is a dangerous starting point, of course.

Without question, we can't just accept everything foisted upon us without analysis, else we end up as sheep. But I should think that the metric must rather be that we allow change at all times, after careful consideration. That is, the only failure possible is a failure to adequately try to understand the reasons we think a certain way.

The People's Law Student: Why am I here?