Do you mind letting us know about what has stoked your ire?
lawyers run this country (e.g., congress). i have acquaintances & friends who are/were lawyers. frankly it scares me to think that smart people who don’t know much about the world (aside from law obviously), but can argue about it in a sophisticated manner, call the shots. on a personal level it is kind of irritating talking to prominent yale educated lawyers, they think they are the shit. they have the g-mojo for sure, but they also seem not to know jack (again, excepting the law) in relation to how smart they are, but are pretty unaware of this. so i checked out some law review articles to make sure that i wasn’t totally off base.

so they overshoot how haughty they’re supposed to behave.
*shrug* yeah. haughtiness is an issue. but MDs have it too. my main beef with lawyers is their aspiration for public service makes me nervous (a much, much, higher % of my arrogant J.D. acquaintances aspire to this than my M.D. ones).

Then again, there’s Bill Frist.
the quantitative comparison is pretty lopsided though.
In my experience, lawyers are pretty good at recognizing what they don’t know within the law domain. It’s interesting that they’re not always so good at recognizing what they don’t know outside of it. I wonder if the problem lies in the fact that they’re smart people (often pretty well read) who’re victims of the narrow scope and practical focus of professional school education.
well, this is kind of true with most ‘professions.’ robert conquest once said that ‘people are always reactionary about what they know best.’ whether the details of the sentiment are correct, the general tendency toward precise and coherent conceptualization in one’s one domain vs. sloppy reasoning is pretty common.
At least they’re not economists, though. Economists don’t just think they know everything; they actually think they learned it through studying economics.
sure. though i would offer that quantitative economics at least has something cogent to grasp on to and reject.
in any case, the main beef isn’t that lawyers don’t know material outside law. it is that they dominate the anglo-saxon ruling caste.

I think scientists make terrific lawyers – able to cut to the chase more efficiently than those trained in the humanities (this is a broad generalization). While most science grads are still not rushing to get into law school, because of the boom in the biotech industry, ensuing patent law issues and bigger bucks, some are.