Last week, Obama surprised everyone a little by explicitly agreeing with those who have argued for years now that law school should be two years instead of three. The President and Harvard Law grad is in good company, including Samuel Estreicher at NYU Law, who has been a vocal advocate for the expendable third year. Law School Transparency’s suggested new models for legal education reform draw heavily on the same idea of trimming length to save costs.

Indeed, criticism of Obama for making the controversial (or not?) statement seemed to come from one direction: not from people who disagreed with him that law school should be shorter, but from those who thought he didn’t go far enough: instead of “talking” about changing the structure of legal education he should actually “do something.” And why not go further and make law school one year like the Brits? It all left me wondering–is stripping the third year so widely accepted now that it’s not controversial at all? Is there anyone arguing in favor of it?

I went in search of third year supporters. And guess who is one. Martha Nussbaum–University of Chicago Law professor and one of the most renowned legal scholars on the planet. Nussbaum and Charles Wolf, also from Chicago, argue essentially that such reforms risk making bad lawyers:

Electives typically are taken in the second and third years. Given the general courses that an accredited legal education must include, dropping the third year offers no time for interdisciplinary electives. The new wisdom is that this would be no loss … But lawyers who join firms also need to understand how society works if they aspire to be independent thoughtful leaders of their chosen profession, rather than passive followers of custom. In the life of the firm, a deferential model of lawyering (doing it because that is how it has been done) will further erode professional standards.

I’m not persuaded. The argument assumes that somehow the third year of law school is where one learns to become “independent” and “thoughtful” rather than “passive.” To me, these are the kinds of qualities that are instilled over time through interactions with teachers who teach these qualities through and in spite of whatever substantive material is being transmitted; there’s no reason one cannot learn from a torts professor to be an independent thinker but could from a professor in an environmental law clinic.

I’m curious what those of you who will soon be entering law school think.

People are often surprised to learn certain things about the Law School Admissions Test, in particular that a substantial portion of its content appears irrelevant to “being a lawyer.” A typical LSAT “game” reads something like, “If Frank lets go of his balloon first and Anna lets go of her balloon last, how many different combinations of kids could lose balloons in between?” Imagine sudoku but with words. This, and yet law schools give applicants’ LSAT scores tremendous weight in making their admissions decisions.

But they haven’t always. The test itself is only 65 years old, and the history of the LSATprovides some insight into why, exactly, it can seem to have so little to do with the field of law.

Prior to the LSAT, there wasn’t one admissions test that all law schools used–there were a couple of well-known ones, but their use wasn’t universal. In 1945 the admissions director at Columbia Law School, unsatisfied with the tests currently available, wrote to the President of the College Entrance Examination Board that he wanted to discuss the creation of a new one. When they finally met two years later, they envisioned a test intended to correlate with first year grades “on the assumption that first-year performance is highly correlated with later success in law school and in legal practice.” The key was law school performance, not bar exam passage since, they noted at the meeting, “everybody passes [bar exams] sooner or later” (quote pulled from the same article linked to above). With this goal in mind, they invited Harvard and Yale to sign on to the plan, which they did, followed by other schools.

The LSAT was never intended to measure aptitude for the practice of law; it was designed to measure potential success as a law student based on the belief that LSAT performance would correlate with law school performance, and that law school performance would correlate with one’s professional success thereafter.

So how have all these expected correlations played out?

A 2011 report by the Law School Admissions Council (which administers the LSAT) claims that the LSAT is a better predictor of law school performance than undergraduate GPA, and that GPA and LSAT score combined is a better predictor than either one, alone, concluding that “these results, combined with similar results from previous studies, support the validity of the LSAT for use in the law school admission process.” I know: shocking that an LSAC study would affirm LSAC’s continuing usefulness. But there is also, interestingly, some evidence that preparing for the test itself alters your brain–that learning LSAT-relevant reasoning can actually make you smarter. Silvia Bunge, associate professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute says:

“A lot of people still believe that you are either smart or you are not, and sure, you can practice for a test, but you are not fundamentally changing your brain … Our research provides a more positive message. How you perform on one of these tests is not necessarily predictive of your future success, it merely reflects your prior history of cognitive engagement, and potentially how prepared you are at this time to enter a graduate program or a law school, as opposed to how prepared you could ever be.”

But the process of studying for the text had visible effects on brain connectivity:

The structural changes were revealed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans of the brains of 24 college students or recent graduates before and after 100 hours of LSAT training over a three-month period. When compared with brain scans of a matched control group of 23 young adults, the trained students developed increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain, and between frontal and parietal lobes.

If this is true, perhaps what’s ultimately so useful about the LSAT isn’t how well it’s correlated with first-year grades, or how well it predicts overall success, but how preparing for it actually makes people better at reasoning. That may make them better at the LSAT sure, but ultimately it’s because they’ve been made better thinkers, which we can infer without getting too crazy likely means better law students and lawyers. That would make the LSAT, rather than just a weeding out tool or a litmus test, a kind of phase of legal training, itself.

As for whether doing well in law school makes you a better lawyer, well, a 2010 studydoes suggest that it’s a good predictor of your career: “the consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school–as measured by law school grades–is the most important predictor of career success. It is decisively more important than law school ‘eliteness.’” This should dispel some worry that what school you get into matters more than how you do once you get there (a commonly held viewamong law school applicants).

So if the LSAT is a reasonably reliable predictor of law school performance, and if law school performance is a reliable predictor of career success, can we say that the LSAT can predict if you’re going to be a good lawyer? I’ll leave that one for you to reason out, for your own sake.

We recently took a poll on our Facebook fan page about what field of law our fans wanted to be. Responses ranged from Entertainment to Public Interest to Intellectual Property.

Going to law school is a big decision in and of itself, but figuring out what you want to do AFTER law school can also be a challenge. One decision to think about is whether you looking to work in a big firm or a smaller one. A recent article on Lawyerist.com laid out some important questions for lawyers to ask themselves when considering whether they would like to work for a big firm. It notes:

“For the most part, the bigger the firm, the farther away you are from being in a courtroom (or at least speaking in a courtroom). At the same time, when you do get the chance to talk, you will be extremely well prepared. If you are working in a small firm, or working with one other attorney, you are much more likely to get thrown into the fire quickly.”

So getting into a big firm is certainly a trade-off. Often it means a lot of money, but sometimes it means a year or two in the basement, looking for misplaced commas and other errors in endless pages of contracts. Yes, you’ll lose all color in your skin, but you’ll be able to pay for a great vacation to go tan it back!

If you’re unsure of where you want to land once you finish law school, you may want to consider environmental law. According to this article in the National Jurist, thanks to new EPA regulations and certain oil spills, there looks to be a big demand for environmental lawyers on both sides of the argument. Amber Maclver, an associate at Baker Botts, said “Environmental law attorneys are involved in every stage of a business’s life cycle. As a new attorney, there is a lot of potential to become an expert in a niche area of this practice. This is a great field to pursue with amazing opportunities.”

Whether it’s a big or a small firm, or whether you’re looking to help actors or oil-coated seagulls, there are definitely a lot of options for you and for many of us it’s worth thinking outside the box (or basement).