Balkinization  

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

The Joy of Money

Mark Graber

I've seen some version of the following post on a number of blogs recently (I stole this from the highly recommended ACS blog). "Irell & Manella and Quinn Emanuel have announced a raise in first-year associate salaries to $135,000. Higher salaries may induce more young lawyers to choose firms over public and non-profit jobs. " Folks, let's be realistic here. The vast majority of full professors at respectable universities (though not Harvard) who are in the social sciences and humanities do not make $135,000 (I'm nowhere near that). I have many good friends, 50ish, who teach in the public school system who make even less. Yet all of us live in housing that is not about to be condemned and manage to both feed and put clothes on our children. In short, the rest of the world does live or would live quite comfortably on a public interest law salary (such income is an unrealistic fantasy, even for most Americans). One virtue of a free enterprise system is you get to start at $135,000 if that is what someone is willing to pay you. Athletes do even better. But let's not fool ourselves. If a raise from 130,000 to 135,000 convinces a late 20 year old to forego public interest law, there was not much of a commitment to public interest law in the first place.

Comments:

sorry to disillusion you, mark, but when i was in law school, the top ranked in the class generally went where the top dollars were. very few went into public interest law. they were generally considered, with the exception of a very few idealists, the ones who couldn't land jobs anywhere else. considering what we have all seen coming out of law school these days, i highly doubt that the situation has changed any.
 

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