the Zealous

Why are we like this?
30 Sep 26


Part one of a three-part series asking this question. This is Part 1: No Single Villain.

This month the American Bar Association released the largest study of lawyer mental health ever conducted: roughly 37,000 licensed lawyers across 28 jurisdictions, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders by Patrick Krill and Justin Anker. 47.5% of lawyers report high or very high burnout, and 15.8% report very high burnout. 41.8% drink at risky levels. 41.1% say their legal career has harmed their mental health. More than one in four has considered leaving the profession altogether.

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Why should we care about the Magna Carta?
11 Sep 26

Ask a lawyer where the rule of law comes from and, sooner or later, the answer is Magna Carta. The Great Charter, sealed by King John in a meadow at Runnymede in 1215, sits in the professional memory as the place it all began: due process, trial by one's peers, the idea that even a king answers to the law. Most of us carry that impression without having read a word of it.

Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, brokered the charter to wage peace between an unpopular king and a faction of rebel barons who had run out of patience with him. It promised the church its liberties, the barons protection from unlawful imprisonment, access to courts that would neither sell nor delay justice, and limits on what the crown could extract from its tenants, the whole arrangement policed by a council of 25 barons.

The Magna Carta failed. King John started maneuvering to void it almost immediately, and got his wish: Pope Innocent III annulled the charter by papal bull on August 24, roughly ten weeks after the wax was sealed. Neither side honored its commitments. England then collapsed into civil war. John died 16 months later, mid-war, of dysentery. As peace treaties go, it ranks below the ones that at least held through winter.

The text does not help the legend much either. Most of it is medieval housekeeping. One clause orders every fish weir ripped out of the Thames and the Medway. Another standardizes the measures of wine, ale, and corn across the kingdom. One protects widows from being forced to remarry. Even the way we cite it by clause number is a later invention: William Blackstone imposed the numbering in 1759, five and a half centuries after the fact.

That is because Runnymede was not a constitutional convention. It was a hostage negotiation. John was broke, freshly humiliated in France, and trusted by nobody who had ever lent him money or a castle. The barons had an army in London. The charter was the price of standing that army down, and John paid it the way a man pays a ransom, with every intention of getting it back.

And yet two of its provisions outlived all of that, and they still read like a charter of basic rights:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay, right or justice.

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We may have already passed peak law school
14 Aug 26


Forty percent of ABA-accredited law schools are in severe financial distress. Another 30% are in considerable difficulty. If you went to law school, there's a decent chance your alma mater is struggling to keep the lights on.

Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School who has been tracking law school economics with unusual candor for over a decade, just posted a data-heavy SSRN paper that puts hard numbers on the slow-motion collapse. As he describes it on his blog, what he calls "Peak Law School" hit in 2010, when total JD tuition revenue reached its all-time high. Since then, "JD tuition revenue is down 41% - 24% per capita, with the rest of the decline attributable to falling enrollment."

The culprit, in Campos's telling, is the three-decade pursuit of U.S. News rankings:

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