I don’t think as many “smart people” go to law school any more. Pretty sure law school enrollment has been on the decline for awhile.

Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. aren't seeing a drop in the quality of applicants. I get the impression there's a very elite group that Musk would consider "smart" - and they have no issues getting into a T-14 law school.

So what? That’s not “too many” - the collective enrollment per class of those 3 schools is like 1000 students.

There are fourteen T-14 schools, not just three.

Still don’t see your point. We need some lawyers. We don’t need millions. If the only law schools that existed were the T-14 where aggregate enrollment is like 4000 a year then that’s hardly “too many”

If all the lawyers in the world lost 10 IQ points, which were redistributed to the non-lawyers, who would lose out?

I argue that law is an adversarial profession - what matters is if you are smarter than the lawyer in the other side of the courtroom. If everyone was less good, outcomes would be much the same, and we as a society could redistribute those smart people to engineering problems where those IQ points will make the difference between inventing something useful or not.

As an attorney who has seen what actually happens in the courtroom, I can tell you that the smartest lawyer does not always win the case, and that judges will often go out of their way to help lawyers who look like they’re tangled up. Being on the right side of the law often helps more.

That doesn't quite answer his question though, the issue here is that quality of lawyer can be counterproductive towards finding the "correct" decision.

It's an effect on the outcome that's orthogonal to the actual facts of the case itself. Unless the guy with a public defender has as much of a chance as the guy with a legal team with a million dollar budget. I'm a little doubtful that that's the case right now.

Objective correctness is impossible to reach in a legal setting because it requires the fact finder to have unfettered access to all the facts, and for the law to be so strict that it cannot possibly be subject to interpretation. In the absence of these things, the adversarial system is the best system we know to approach the correct answer. Consequently, there is some error that we have to accept if we can't think of a better approach.

I'm not sure that the trials of either a wealthy defendant with deep pockets or an indigent defendant with a public defender significantly affect whether the finder of fact can obtain objective Truth with a capital T. The outcomes may indeed be different, but I also think it's orthogonal to the truth as well. They're more the result of the amount of resources you're willing or able to throw at a problem to make it go away.

I suppose that depends on where you live. In Canada, at least, law programs continue to have very competitive entry requirements and the market for lawyers is rather saturated meaning salaries are relatively low for post-graduate professions.

> rather saturated meaning salaries are relatively low for post-graduate professions.

Not a contradiction. This is exactly why the proportion of very smart people going into law is decreasing.

I don’t know if it’s on the decline, but I do know that a whole lot of people graduate college and have a “now what? Law school.” Moment

Maybe 15 years ago. Not today.

You’re wrong. There was a big drop in 2010-2012, but then it started rising again.

Can’t find it for the us, but you can see it rose consistently in ontario: https://www.ouac.on.ca/statistics/olsas-application-statisti...

I’m not talking about Canada

I live in the US and I've seen this anecdotally too. If you're moderately smart, didn't do much in your early career[0], and aren't technical, law school is one of the things people grasp for to level up into a real career.

[0] or took a shot at a career that didn't go anywhere, like in Hollywood or politics or any other industry built on an underclass of lied-to 21 year olds

It’s less common now than 10-20 years ago is what I’m saying. Law school enrollment is down. Graduates have more options like non-technical roles in large tech companies. Students are fed up with debt and law school is notoriously expensive and gets more so every year.

I mean you can look and enrollment figures and law school closures over last few years. This isn’t just a “hunch”.

The whole “I don’t know what to do with my life so I’ll apply to law school” is like a meme from 2004.

Sure yea, no doubt that it's declined. But the parent comment that you disagreed specifically agreed with it declining, and your response was that this isn't much of a phenomenon anymore (not that it had declined).

Here is a graph of law school enrollment. I think it increased a small amount after 2015.

https://data.lawschooltransparency.com/enrollment/all/

hope so - as US legal tradition is pretty much a negative-sum-game

...and they get trapped there! That’s the issue. But then again, if that’s the case are they really so smart?

They presumably wouldn't agree with your definition of "trapped". To reiterate the GP comment, the claim is that going into finance or law is individually rational for many smart people, but globally suboptimal at the levels we currently incentivize it.

That's a harsh simplification. There can be other reasons.

I agree I think it's commentary that other industries should value them as much as finance and law.