Antonin Scalia, Commencement Address at William & Mary Law School,Reflections on the Future of the Legal Academy (May 11, 2014):

What I want to discuss with you briefly—and I promise to be brief—is whether (to be blunt about it) you have essentially wasted one of your three years here, and could have done the job in two. It is a current proposal for reformthat law students should be permitted to sit for the bar exam and otherwise be eligible to practice law after only two years of study. …

I vigorously dissent. It seems to me that the law-school-in-two-years proposal rests on the premise that law school is—or ought to be—a trade school. It is not that. It is a school preparing men and women not for a trade but for a profession—-the profession of law. One can practice various aspects of law without knowing much about the whole field. I expect that someone could be taught to be an expert real-estate conveyancer in six weeks, or a tax advisor in six months. And maybe we should train such people—but we should not call them lawyers. Just as someone might become expert in hand surgery without knowing much about the rest of the human body, so also one can become expert in various segments of the law without knowing much about the rest. We should call the former a hand surgeon rather than a doctor; and the latter a real-estate conveyancer, or H&R Block—but not a lawyer. …

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