preLaw - Back To School 2008 - (Page 4) editor TO THE LSAT woes and concerns As a long time Pro-Se litigant who has taken the LSAT twice I find the current state of affairs in law school admissions to be abhorrent to put it mildly. First of all the fact that Law School Services has a monopoly on the only law school admissions test is very disturbing. Second, even Law Services themselves admit in their own material that their exam is not that good of a predictor of how someone will do in law school, much less in real world law practice. As someone who has for years wanted to become a Criminal and Constitutional attorney working as a public defender I find it appalling that there is no way for me to get into law school even though I have actually litigated many of my own cases successfully simply because of a timed standardized test that tells no one anything about my legal abilities. If you are truly interested in issues such as “A balance between scholarship and the educational mission of law school” then at the very least you should be concerned about the people like me who want to go into law for public service reasons rather than to make big bucks who are denied to do so because of LSAT scores. The idea that to sit for the bar exam one has to graduate from an ABA approved law school is truly morally repugnant. The purpose of the bar is to prove competency to practice law. This should not be displaced by law schools wanting to control the profession artificially for their own financial benefit, at the expense of the poor who cant afford paid counsel. There are so many criminal defendants that have really ineffective asstistance of counsel via their court appointed attorneys that some public defenders have actually sued their states arguing that they cant properly defend the numbers of people assigned to them as indigent clients by the courts. Yet here I am wanting to do just that — not practice contact law or transactional law — which most law grads want for the money and prestige factor, but I will never be able to do so because law schools are such scum-bag operations that they lobbied state legislatures into what amounts to “Restraint of Trade” to keep the numbers of law grads artificially low in order to keep prices of law school tuition high and protect lucrative jobs for new grads at the cost of sacrificing the most basic of fundamental constitutional rights of criminal defendants by short changing the system by keeping good people out of the profession. There needs to be a some kind of Rule of Exception made to allow people like myself who do not do well on timed standardized test to be able to enter law school to be given a chance to prove their abilities. Right now there is no leeway no matter how good or committed a person may be to the true spirit of law. I also did really bad on the SAT before entering college, but because of a freshman probation program, I was allowed to go to college and ended up with a 3.0 GPA. Law school needs the same type of probation exception for people to be able to prove themselves. John Williamson Dallas, Texas Got something to say? Email the editor at Michelle@CypressMagazines.com 4 preLaw
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