Legally Blonde ruined law school

You’re not Elle Woods!

At the beginning of Legally Blonde, Elle Woods outshines everyone’s expectations of her in order to chase her man to Harvard Law. By the end of the film, she’s graduated Harvard Law at the top of her class, and has proven herself a capable attorney in and out of the classroom. Although her pre-professional success story might seem like a feminist guidebook to a fulfilled life, it’s more likely to lead countless bright young minds down a path of predictable misery. Elle Woods’s story might seem like the perfect roadmap for someone graduating college, but her unique circumstances make her the exception that proves the rule—law school is a terrible choice for most recent college grads without a clue of what to do next.

When douchelord Warner Huntington III dumps Elle for not being the kind of woman his family would like him to marry, she drops her passion for fashion and forgoes any previous social life (or career in fashion) to chase the clout of a Professional Woman. “Because then my ex will take me back,” is an objectively terrible reason to choose a career; her likeminded sorority sisters even warn her so. Even after things work out for her, at no point in the film does Elle ask herself: “Is this what I want to be doing with my life?” Without an answer to that question, Elle could wake up in ten years as Senior Partner at a Prestigious Law Firm and absolutely miserable. However, with the exuberant confidence Elle exudes at the film’s conclusion, that outcome seems unlikely, though possible. Just because Legally Blonde ended in a storybook ending doesn’t mean that’s the case for most who choose law school on a whim.

Though her dean poo-poos her 4.0 GPA in “Fashion Merchandising,” it only takes Elle a couple of months of cramming  to score a 179 on her LSATs, putting her in the top 0.1% of all test takers. Since most LSAT prep courses recommend at least 250-300 hours of studying, it’s hard to imagine that Elle had enough time to bang out that many hours in her last semester of college. Even so, getting a 179 means Elle Woods was born with the gift of an IBM supercomputer upstairs. No matter how hard most people work—trust me I’ve tried—a 179 is simply out of the question. Related—most people who go to law school don’t go to Ivy League schools, let alone the school with the third lowest admissions rate in the United States.

Granted, with critical thinking as her newfound superpower combined with Elle’s apparent love for proving people wrong, law school, in general, seems like a good fit for Elle; especially since she won’t have to worry about ending up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt if her taste in clothes and vehicles are any indication of her inherited financial situation. On average, students graduate law school with nearly $150,000 in debt. Taking the average earnings with a law degree into account, it will take the average law school grad 18 years to pay off the sum of their debt. Financially speaking, unless you are willing to take on decades of debt (or you come from considerable wealth), law school is an objectively bad idea. In fact, more than three-quarters of all all law school graduates admit that their degree wasn’t worth the price of admission, and one-fifth said that it prepared them for their post-grad career. Further, Elle’s crucial mentorship from Professor Stromwell is markedly uncommon, as only a quarter of J.D. holders said they thought their professors cared about them as people. In law school, you’re more likely to become a statistic about being poor and alone than you are to become the magnificent Elle Woods.

Upon arriving at Harvard, Elle is met with a rude awakening as her easy come easy go glitzy lifestyle quickly becomes a source of comedy for her classmates and professors who pride themselves on their erudite pretensions. However, her raw powers of intellect and intuition quickly take hold, propelling her to the top of her class. Those who don’t genuinely love the law like Elle fortunately does, will be miserably over-inundated with briefs to read and exams to study for. Elle’s fortune is not the norm. Though T1 law schools’ (like Harvard) dropout rates are as low as 2% students without Elle’s processing power and lower LSAT’s often end up at schools with attrition rates over 10%—and some even as high as 25%. If you end up finding out you care more about the clout than the law, a couple years, a couple hundred racks, a whole lot of misery and no law degree is a pretty steep price to pay.

Further, being a lawyer is nothing like going to law school, and the lawyering we see Elle dominate at would be just a small fraction of her professional life. In law school, they teach you to read, analyze, and debate legal semantics. Clients don’t pay you to think, they pay you to “organize.” That means tailoring paperwork based legal solutions for your clients’ specific needs, which, for people who do this for a living, is often more menial and political than intellectually stimulating. Elle’s lightbulb moments in the court room arise due to her extensive knowledge of fashion designers and hair care. Although essential to her client’s defense, it is unlikely Elle will ever again get the opportunity to turn a murder trial on her ability to catch a witness in a lie about a perm. She will most likely spend the next five years doing the grunt work of researching and writing legal memos, drafting mostly boilerplate legal documents, reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents for pre-trial discovery, and preparing senior attorneys for their appearances in court. If she works for a top tier firm she likely won’t see the inside of a courtroom for at least 3 years.

Between 2000 and 2002, law schools’ first-year enrollment increased by more than 10% and steadily rising until 2010. With Legally Blonde dropping in 2001, it’s not hard to imagine its direct impact on young adults who don’t know what they want to do with their lives. It’s incredibly easy to whisper these words of self-assurance, “Well, if Elle Woods did it, so can I.” Importantly, however, most people are not as smart, rich, or passionate about the law as Elle Woods, and have made the enormous mistake of going to law school on a whim.