Free Or Cheap, No Bar-To-Entry Law School

While I’ve worked in education, I’ve never been formally employed at a university. I received free ministerial ordination through an organization unaffiliated with any faith tradition. After following Josh Kaufman’s Personal MBA blog for years and later reading his book of the same name, it occurred to me that there isn’t much reason not to apply more-or-less the same idea to many other things. But this is especially true of law.

Every US citizen has a duty to be well informed about their country and its law. American law schools are in the powerful position of gatekeeper, barring The People from understanding or participating in a system over which every citizen is technically a co-sovereign.

After some research, I find no actual “law school” dedicated to addressing this. While colleges and universities offer free or inexpensive online courses, perhaps most notably MIT and Hillsdale College, renowned and even merely accredited law schools have a financial interest in limiting access to their programs to maintain their value. The exact opposite is true of institutions with little or no existing reputation for or investment in for-profit legal scholarship. Furthermore, a free and universally open law school would pave the way for the poorest students, native speakers of other languages, single parents, the disabled and so many others who dream of law school but must deal with difficult life circumstances preventing them from pursuing traditional law school.

Do you agree with me? Are you interested in working on this? Are you a Constitution-minded activist, professor, attorney, philosopher of law, judge, seasoned law enforcement officer, legislator or someone with something to teach? Do you work for a college or university that you believe should offer something like this? If your answer is “yes” to any these questions, please respond. I’ll reach back out to you and we can start organizing a more formal working group.

If you found this interesting, my first recommended “course content” links from my next article, “Never Talk To Police.”