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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Well I am not sure if the USA needs anymore lawyers.

If I were in charge I would make the tuition $500,000 pa and use the money to pay court appointed defence attorneys a decent wage and give them a reasonable workload. Fewer lawyers and more justice.

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You have missed mhays' point. Focusing on what you perceive to be a problem of an abundance of lawyers detracts from the essence of the issue. Namely,

"... in the sense that my generation has to take out extraordinary loans to access education..."

Unless you think every field has an over supply, what is the point of your comment?

Of course I don't think every field has an oversupply of graduates (most recent graduates do though), but I do think tuition fees can be used by society to encourage people into areas we need rather than in areas we don't need more people. Discouraging more people from becoming lawyers and encouraging those that do to work in areas we need good lawyers is a double positive from my perspective.

I'm not sure if having a justice system run entirely by children of the wealthy would result in more justice... because that's what you're going to get if tuition costs $2mil.

I am glad to see at least some people bothered to respond to my proposal rather than blindly down voting. Actually if tuition was $2 million and the only decent paying law jobs were in the public defenders office all the good people would rack up big debts and then go and work there. We would end up with fewer lawyers over all and those that we did have would be working in the areas we need more lawyers.

I understand all the negative feelings our society has towards lawyers, and I don't blame anyone for having them. But there are a lot of us who are entering the profession because we have a sincere desire to do good.

I also think that if you talk to those interested in justice equity, especially public defenders, they will tell you that, while there may be too many lawyers in some places, there are many, many underprivileged communities that are underserved by our legal system.

This is exactly my point. We have too many lawyers in areas we don't need them and not enough good ones in the area like public defenders that we do. We would have no problem getting good lawyers in the public defenders office if the job payed well and they were given the time to do their job well.

Money is only a barrier if you aren't significantly wealthy. That's tautological enough that you should understand why your proposal doesn't help anything.

Sure it would be a barrier - that is the whole point. We need to stop training so many lawyers and have the ones we do train be well paid in the positions where we need good lawyers (i.e. public defenders). My proposal solves both problems :)

High school costs doesn't imply high pay afterword. And I don't see how having fewer people with in depth knowledge of our legal system will make it harder to exploit and manipulate.

Fewer lawyers means less law suits.

The manipulation of the legal system comes from the law being made so complex that only lawyers can understand it. If we had fewer lawyers we would have a simpler legal system.

Simple isn't always better.

This is true, but when you have legal system so complex that nobody even knows how many laws there are and everyone is breaking at least several every day you know there is a great need for simplification. I am in favour of few laws and more justice.

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