Katie Zacharia seems to have set a record for shortness of stay in the press secretary role. It’s probably one of the most pressured and stressful jobs in government, and she simply was not up to the task:

Zacharia held her first brief press briefing on Tuesday, just one day after she started the job, and came under scrutiny after she had represented herself as a lawyer but acknowledged this week that she did not pass her bar exam following law school.

Zacharia’s first White House press briefing lasted less than 15 minutes, during which she took only a few questions from reporters and couldn’t answer one about whether the U.S. had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine.

It’s that part about being a lawyer that interests me – for personal reasons. I, too, am a law school graduate but not a lawyer. The Zacharia flap brought back a ton of memories, few of them good.

Why did I even go to law school? The main reasons were threefold: I was aimless and undirected even in my senior year of college, my father was a lawyer (a real one), and I took the LSAT test and did very very well indeed. That last bit told me I could pretty much write my ticket to any law school in the land, and so I did and was admitted to an elite law school. I had mild dreams of Clarence Darrow-like defense and eloquence in my head, dreams of which I was disabused rather quickly – in fact, my very first day of class.

I was forced to confront the fact that I was very shy and hated being put on the spot in front of a crowd. Yes, I should have thought of that to begin with, but somehow I hadn’t. During my second year, I spoke to a professor who had been assigned to me as an advisor, and said I wanted to quit. It was the first and last time I ever spoke to any advisor there; although nowadays they have plenty of them, back then you were pretty much on your own. He talked me into staying by pointing out that I still didn’t know what else I should do, and that at the time I was in the middle of my second year. Only one and a half years to go and I’d have a law degree. So why not stay?

You might answer: “money.” Didn’t law school, especially an elite one, cost an absolute ton of money? These days it certainly does; according to Google AI:

According to recent data compiled via U.S. News Best Law School Rankings and Above the Law, annual tuition and fee rates for top-tier private programs include:

– Columbia University: $88,390 per year
– New York University (NYU): $87,214 per year
– University of Chicago: $84,906 per year
– University of Pennsylvania (Carey): $84,492 per year
– Duke University: $81,829 per year
– Northwestern University (Pritzker): $80,583 per year
– Stanford University: $79,707 per year
– Yale University: $78,961 per year
– Harvard University: $78,692 per year

Total 3-Year J.D. Cost Estimates

– Tuition and Fees (3 Years): A standard three-year Juris Doctor (J.D.) program totals roughly $230,000 to $265,000 in tuition alone.
– Full Cost of Attendance (3 Years): When adding rent, meals, health insurance, and books, the complete 3-year price tag often scales between $330,000 and $390,000+.

That’s sobering. But it’s nothing like when I went to law school. My tuition was $2K a year, which in present-day dollars would be about $18K. Not the least bit comparable to today’s tuition. What’s more, my rent was $65 a month. So it was not that much of a hardship for me or my family, unlike today.

Back then, also, I was told – although I don’t know where this statistic came from or whether it was correct – that about half of the graduates from elite law schools never practiced law. Nowadays, the percentage is smaller, but nevertheless sizeable percentages leave.

To be blunt, I found law to be very very very boring, except for certain pockets that were interesting. Might I have found work within those pockets? The main one was jurisprudence, or philosophy of law, and the only job that might lead to was to be a law professor. I had neither the grades, nor the inclination – nor, to be frank, the sex chromosomes (law professors were male in those days) – for that job. Now, strangely enough, jurisprudence is a topic I do explore with some regularity on the blog.

So does it all work out in the end?