Teach a man to amortize and he'll be liquid forever

On the one hand, I agree with ai that there's something a little fishy about the latest City Journal tirade, this screed denouncing law schools for sponsoring left-leaning legal clinics. The comedy begins in the first sentence, which Heather MacDonald opens with, "To understand how politically one-sided law schools are..."

That's right: The American legal profession is dominated by bleeding heart liberals. City Journal has the goods.

The thing you've got to love about conservative unrealism is its endless creativity.

On the other hand, underneath the rhetoric the article has at least one promising suggestion. Namely, that legal clinics might do more good if, rather than serving as a nexus for political advocacy, they instead focused on providing legal services for low income would-be entrepreneurs. For example:

Yet only a handful of law schools would have any interest in providing legal assistance to Shawna Spencer, an inner-city Chicagoan who hopes to turn her passion for shoes into a booming business. Already overextended on every possible credit line, Spencer couldn’t afford an attorney to negotiate a lease for the shoe store she wanted to open. Fortunately, the University of Chicago Law School offers one of the few clinics to take struggling for-profit entrepreneurs as clients. "I couldn’t have opened without my 'attorneys,'" Spencer says of the Chicago law students.

For the most part, the pro bono legal services available to low income folks are crisis centered. And perhaps it ought to be said that such services are desperately needed. But it's also true that one of the underlying factors that deepens vulnerability to such crises is a lack of access to the kinds of routine legal expertise that higher income earners take for granted. Legal clinics could provide a resource which helps to level the playing-field. At the very least, the idea is worth looking into.