Understanding the complexities of law: anectdotal evidence from taking the LSAT

About five months ago I woke up to, among other things, a 160 Law School Admission Test score. Amid the excitement of finally getting the score I wanted, after months of questioning whether I could even enter the only profession I’ve dreamed about since realizing the NHL was not my calling, there was one question I could not shake. Why is the law so complicated?

One thing that anyone going through the law school admissions process, or simply engaging in jurisprudence (a fancy word for studying the law, we have lots of those in this discipline) will tell you is that everything related to the law is complicated.

It’s why you’ll have to do well on two tests before you can practice, it’s why 40% of applicants to law school in a given cycle don’t get in anywhere and it’s why you’ll have to take out a reverse mortgage on your house if you get into serious trouble in the future.

Yet none of those anecdotes answers the question “why is the law so complicated?” If anything, they’re self-reinforcing functions of the fact that the law is so complicated. Even what you may think of as the “black and white text of the law” is entirely gray, subject to the interpretation of lawyers and judges alike.

Even worse, the convoluted way our laws are written makes it increasingly difficult for someone who doesn’t have access to a lawyer to understand when they may be breaking the law, and even more difficult to understand how they may be punished for it.

Considering this system was designed by lawyers, there are plenty of well-thought-out justifications for it. No two cases are exactly the same, but the law which must be applied to them is.

So, it follows that the vague way our laws are written allows judges and lawyers to apply the text of the law to the facts of a given situation ad hoc (Latin for “as necessary”), which affords that situation a more complete review than simply determining whether the law was broken.

Vague laws support the adversarial legal system this country must strive for. Convoluted ones, like what you’ll see if you try and read the Minnesota Statutes, gatekeep the process by which justice is meted out.

Convoluted laws serve as the basis for making entry into the legal profession so difficult, which in turn deflates the supply of practicing lawyers. They prevent the common citizen from walking into a courtroom and advocating for themselves, thereby forcing them to either plead guilty or spend tens of thousands of dollars hiring a lawyer who can advocate for them.

They promote this country’s practice of depriving people of color, who make up just 14% of practicing lawyers in a country where they make up 40% of the population, of the justice they are constitutionally entitled to.

Why is the law so complicated? Because you’re not supposed to understand it until you pay hundreds of dollars studying for the LSAT and applying to law schools, borrow hundreds of thousands to attend law school and because if it weren’t complicated, you wouldn’t pay 24-year-olds $160,000 a year to explain it to you.