Response to MR comments

Thanks for the comments over at MR.

My post was probably a bit cavalier about the difficulty of become a legal academic. One interesting comment on the advice post was that I’d be better off making decisions “on the margin,” i.e., continuing education as long as I enjoy it.

Others thinking about law school might be interested in the book “Law School Confidential,” which I’ve found to be very helpful. Law school has been my tentative plan for a year or so, but I was tempted to do economics instead. I now think I should resist this temptation.

Yes, the debt of law school is an important consideration. And I don’t care enough about money to sit through a soul-sucking job for the first eight years. So my thinking is that I should try my best at the LSAT, aim for a good public law school like UT Austin, and if I get in, do a good job. If I have an extraordinary, heretofore unknown talent for law, then maybe I’ll do the academic thing. Otherwise , I’ll try to avoid the rat race and get a legal job where I sit at a desk and deal with books rather than make speeches.