Educated Lawyers

Over at the law professors’ blog, the Volokh Conspiracy , they’re discussing the question of why political donations from lawyers are running so strongly in favor of Obama.

One commentator offers this explanation, “Could it be that most highly educated people agree with Obama, are aghast at Bush’s policies, and are afraid that McCain will continue on the same path as Bush?”

He is attacked by other commentators, and defended by yet others, but I was prompted to this question: Are lawyers, in fact, “highly educated”? Half of the smartest people I know are lawyers—I come from a long line of them, for that matter—but I realized I’ve also always thought of the law as something like an un- or even anti-intellectual pursuit: a highly specific application of the mind, rather than the heights of education.

To put the thought more starkly: Law school narrows the mind; education broadens it. Yes? No? Lawyers, of course, can be educated, in the same way unlikely, autodidactical way that truck drivers, engineers, and journalists like me can be educated. But are lawyers “highly educated” merely by the fact of their law-school degrees?

Depends, I guess, on what you mean by educated . Last night, I watched a video of an old roundtable discussion about Plato with Hans Georg Gadamer, Eric Voegelin, Alan Bloom, and Fred Lawrence. Now those guys, I thought, are educated. Maybe even highly educated.