"Lawyers in the United States today are competing against nonlawyers, against non-Americans, and against nonhumans."

Professor Jim Chen, who taught Mr. Gillette and me everything we don't know about constitutional law, has some thoughts about the future of the legal profession and legal education:

In our time, the free movement of labor, capital, and information has created a global economy that moves by the gigahertz.  In this economic milieu, education is worth what its purchaser can earn with it.  The legal profession, and most of all the educational branch of the profession, owes society a far more practical response than painful expressions of longing for a golden age that never was.  The putative prestige of the legal profession was always as arbitrary and illusory as the promise of gold as an inherent store of wealth.  Lawyers and their teachers must learn that theirs is no longer a professional guild, but a competitive trade.  Legal education is what enables students to earn a living in life, and nothing more pretentious.

Read the whole thing.

Experts & the Constitution

Last week I promised a post (the post, really) on the interplay between expert opinions and judicial opinions. Here you go.

"If they decide [the Obamacare case] by 5-4, then yes, it’s disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud. ..."

"...Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t. What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty."

That's Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar, emoting (perhaps sarcastically?) about the possibility that the Supreme Court will find the individual mandate to be beyond Congress's power under the Commerce Clause.

This gives me something to be thankful for: whichever way the Supreme Court decides the Obamacare case, my life will not be rendered a fraud. This is one of the advantages, I guess, of actually practicing law instead of sitting around thinking about it all day.