How to do the most good? Be a corporate lawyer and donate 25% to charity, Harvard Law student opines
Image from Shutterstock.
The assertion is getting a lot of pushback: Want to save the world? Then go into BigLaw, make a lot of money and donate 25 percent to charity. It’s the “greatest utility maximizing option.”
That conclusion, advanced in an opinion column published by the Harvard Law Record, is getting noticed and spurring a debate over whether the proposal is realistic, whether it’s self-serving logic, and whether the critics are missing the point. Criticisms are posted at Above the Law, TaxProf Blog and PrawfsBlawg.
In the opinion piece in The Harvard Law Record, Bill Barlow lists four possibilities for law grads: corporate lawyer, public-interest lawyer, government lawyer and academic. “Decisions, decisions, decisions,” says Barlow, a 2L at Harvard Law. “But where will you do the most good? Conventional wisdom tells you that going into the private sector is bad because you will be working for big corporations that are invariably evil because they are big and because they are corporations. Save the world by going into public interest, fighting for the indigent and the oppressed, or by regulating those greedy corporate types by joining forces with the presumptively beneficent state! Such is the party line.
“If you really want to do good by law, consider becoming a corporate lawyer, making a lot of money, and donating a substantial sum to charity. This is by far the greatest utility maximizing option you have.”
Corporate lawyers who donate a quarter of a $100,000 salary to charity could deworm 25,000 children; pay for surgery to correct cleft palates for 100 children; or distribute more than 3,000 mosquito nets, saving an estimated 150 lives, Barlow says.
Elie Mystal at Above the Law asserts that no one would actually donate 25 percent of his or her corporate law salary to charity and sees a fallacy in the argument that donations can be used to purchase good deeds. Donating money to buy mosquito nets is good, but “you’ve got nothing on the people who spend their time helping to distribute those bug nets, or even the people who teach proper bug net use,” Mystal says. “As a liberal I know that redistributing wealth is the easy part; actually making a difference for the public good is much, much harder. You can’t buy it. You can only work at it.”
A response by Sima Atri published in the Harvard Law Record argued that the important criteria for selecting a job was going into work that you love. “What is not productive in this debate is the complete discounting of all the substantive work being done by public interest lawyers,” writes Atri, a Harvard Law student.
Paul Horwitz at PrawfsBlawg says the critics are missing the point of the article, which was taking a utilitarian approach to achieving the greater good by easing the suffering of others. He goes on to suggest applying a similar analysis to pro bono work.
“I do think that big law firms should get almost entirely out of the business of doing pro bono work directly, with a few exceptions in areas where their existing skill sets would actually render them highly qualified to do that work, and instead mostly pay other, more qualified and dedicated lawyers to do their pro bono work for them,” Horwitz says. “It’s true that it won’t help the happiness, job satisfaction, or cognitive dissonance reduction of the people who work at those firms. I just don’t see why we should care about that all that much compared to doing good for others.”
