high cost of law and the lack of diversity in that the law profession. brian: deborah rhode, author of "the trouble with lawyers." why are you one? [laughter] deborah: well, i went to law school at the height of the civil rights movement, and i wanted to help save the world. so i thought maybe i could fight poverty or racial injustice and look where i ended up. brian: stanford law school. deborah: writing about social injustice. brian: go back to a new first -- when you first got interested it.

where were you and what actually got you connected to the civil rights movement? deborah: i read a book by richard cougar called "social justice" which was about brown versus the board of education and it was a gripping narrative. and i thought, that is what i wanted to do. brian: where were you? deborah: oh, i was a high school student in chicago. brian: was there any person in your family -- deborah: no. brian: nobody in your family was a lawyer? deborah: no, nobody thought it was a good idea. brian: where did you go? deborah: i went to yale law school. brian: what was it like at the time? deborah: there wasn't a lot of women. in my class, there was maybe 13% women. most of the great lawyers were, of course, all men. brian: what did you notice about being a woman in law school at yale?

deborah: how little notice i gave to it, really, and this is in retrospect. what is startling to me now is just how law and life were. there was discrimination everywhere, but it wasn't often talked about in law school. brian: did you have any women professors? deborah: no. brian: let's talk about it today. let's talk about the numbers. deborah: it has changed dramatically from when i went to law school. brian: why are women half of the law school? what changed? deborah: the culture. you know? and expectations about women and the profession and of course, the law itself, it was the product of some early efforts to create as a discrimination

lawsuits for women, and that was sufficient. so we are a litigious bunch and we sued a lot of people to open some doors. and the vietnam war brought a lot of change in deferment, so the president of harvard was famous for saying "now we have the blind, the lame, and the women." boost schools got a big during that period. brian: how long have you taught in the classroom? deborah: oh, about 35 years now. brian: what do you notice about women law students versus men law students? what is different? deborah: they don't talk as much, especially in big classes. and that is not just true at stanford, but it is across a variety of institutions and pretty much every study that has been done about classroom participation that it varies

somewhat in size to the class, but in general as sheryl sandberg would say, women don't lean in and they are not vying for your attention. brian: what about you? deborah: i never talked in law school in a big class. brian: is there a difference between how the men write and the women write? deborah: no. i don't see a gender difference. little classes, the classes i know. but i don't see a gender difference.

brian: your book is called "the trouble with lawyers," which we will get to in a minute, but i want to show you video from an author who went to harvard law school and he now just writes for a living, and i want to hear him back in 2007 about what he says about being a lawyer. brian: now why did you leave law? >> i was about the worst person ever suited for law. i went into law school believing that lawyers did what they did on the television show "l.a. law." there were romantic, spectacular cases every week and it involved celebrity cases and it was all very glamorous and romantic, and when i got to law school, it took me about two or three days to realize that much of the practice of law was about dotting the "i's" and crossing the "t's" and all of that. being careful and avoiding disasters. i stuck out the degree but i was fundamentally as miserable as a person could have been.

brian: he is actually from chicago also and he practiced law in chicago also but he has not done that for a long time. what did you hear there? deborah: law in real-time and law in primetime are very different. a lot of students go to law school for the wrong reasons, and it should not win by default. i only scans people if they think about law as a career that they should do something law-related first and to see if they are well-suited for it. brian: what did you do after you left law school? deborah: i clerked for a justice, justice thurgood marshall in the appellate court and in the federal circuit court of appeals in new york and then i went directly into teaching. brian: let me show you this video of thurgood marshall, who became a justice, i believe in 1957, and you clerked for him for one year.

deborah: 1978. brian: what was happening that year? deborah: we had an affirmative action case that was important and an abortion case that was important. we had a wonderful case where he wrote the denial about a librarian and a janitor who were fired because they were living together in a small town. brian: here he is in 1988. justice marshall: i have been watching those around here and those who came and i am so impressed with those who were around in the good old days. you know, you talk now about lawyers and lawyers' fees and these things, and you know, when i was running the job that the most we could give any lawyer was $25 a day.

now they need about $24,000. as a matter of fact, i don't know what fees they get. brian: you write about fees in your book, but what about thurgood marshall. what you are member about your experiences? deborah: he was wonderful to clerk for, just his stories of the civil rights movement alone made the experience wonderful. you know, he just had a real sense of justice and you know, that is kind of what took me to law in the first instance. so it is very great to be at the knees of a very great lawyer. brian: i looked up some statistics for clerks under thurgood marshall. he had about 53 clerks. 24 of them are from harvard, 13

from yale, and then there were others from all over the place, from georgetown, from georgia, from texas. you were from yale. what does this say about the kind of folks who end up clerking? deborah: well, the one question he had asked me in my interview is that i have read all of the opinions that i could put my hands on. he looked at my resume and looked down at me and said, "so, i see you were a phi beta kappa. do with your key?" and i said, "well, i gave it to my mother." and he laughed and he took chances and he had quite a smattering from schools that he thought would produce well.

the other thing that i should note though from a marshall is at a time when a number of the supreme court justices weren't taking any women, he had two. brian: so in the end -- and this is a question -- how do you show somebody like a supreme court justice that you are smart? deborah: you work really hard. brian: but he didn't know when he interviewed you. what do you say -- deborah: in the interview it is not about being smart but if you have some decent people skills and if you have a sense of humor and he had a screening committee that looked at all of the resumes and the letters of recommendation and screened for smart, so by the time you got an interview with him, it wasn't so much about that. brian: you clerked as you said for a number of judges and then for thurgood marshall.

when all of those experiences were over, what have you learned that you would not have learned had you not done the clerkship? deborah: oh, you know, an enormous amount. i think i was struck by one thing, and my husband at the time was working for the department of justice for something called the office of improvements and the administration of justice, and one of the tasks in that job was to write up a draft testimony for senators and representatives on various bills that the justice department was putting through. and of course, that testimony would get submitted to the record, and you know, legislative intent and i as a supreme court clerk would say that congress clearly intended

this, and it was kind of a never never land, i don't know how many congressmen had actually read that testimony and whether that was really their intent, and so it gave me a dose of realism about the process that i otherwise would not have had. brian: how political was the court? deborah: i don't think it was political at the time, but there were strong divisions of views. marshall and brennan and stevens were holding up the liberal end. brian: what evidence do you have that it is more political today? deborah: well, you know, i think there are just more polarized decisions in which you just know that it is going to be 5-4 and the only question is, which way

is the swing vote going? i think that has been true of some recent decisions. in cases like bush v. gore, probably being the greatest example of one where it is hard to think that that was decided in a political vacuum. brian: does that include both sides making the decision? deborah: oh sure. brian: did you see that very often when you were there, when thurgood marshall would predict how he was going to go on a case before you even asked him? deborah: on some cases you knew because he had his principles. you knew how he was going to come out on the race case or on a death penalty case. i mean, he didn't believe in the death penalty. you know, he got above his share of cases that he used to jokingly put or would have the

least impact on the fewest possible people, because the chief justice from then, war and berger, would punish you and we used to have a little betting pool as to which would be the worst case and he would go to congress and say, i am going to try and get that one for you. brian: your book, called "the trouble with lawyers," published by oxford, um, what's the point? "the trouble with lawyers." you are one! deborah: i think our profession is we have deep troubles. the trouble on the top of my list is the access to justice. you know, we have the world's highest concentration of lawyers in one of the least accessible and one of the most expensive systems in the world. 4/5 of the legal needs of poor people and middle income people are being met.

-- are not being met. when you look at world rankings, we are 67th, right there with uganda, in terms of access to justice. you know, we price law out of the pockets for ordinary americans. brian: here is the former attorney general eric holder back in 2010. eric holder: today, despite the decades that have gone by, many cases have yet to be fully translated into reality. that is a fact. but you already know this. all of you have read the reports and all of you know the data.

many of you have learned this truth in the hardest of ways i -- by experiencing it on the ground. you have seen how to many of our counties and into many of our communities, some people accuse us of crimes, including juveniles, they may never, may never have a lawyer. brian: how did the public defender system work? deborah: if you are indigent, and about 2/3 of the defendants in criminal cases are too poor to afford a lawyer, you get one assigned, and it can either be a public defender which is paid for by the state, or a can be someone who is contracted to provide a service for low income individuals, and you get a statutory fee, which is typically capped at ludicrous levels so that effective representation is a recipe for financial disaster for most practicing criminal attorneys.

so they have to cut corners. brian: who is or who will be a public defender? deborah: people who care about justice. i worked as an intern in the public defender service. i thought that was maybe what i would do with my life and i have the greatest respect for people who work under very difficult circumstances. huge caseloads, and they do as good a job as they do, but they -- we don't provide nearly anywhere near enough lawyers to cope with the rising number of individuals who are entitled to lawyers. brian: you say in your book that there should be more government funding for lawyers. deborah: yes. brian: who that would be entitled to it? if somebody committed a crime, would they get a free lawyer? deborah: no, we would still have

the same test for indigency, but there wouldn't be 5000 cases on the caseload docket. you could pay lawyers at a rate that would work out at the minimum wage per hour if he put a serious amount of time into the investigation of the case. brian: what are the chances that you will see more money coming from the taxpayers to lawyers? deborah: we are moving in the wrong directions on that. the appropriation vote for criminal defense has dropped and the only way i think to seriously change it is for the courts to step in and to demand more resources for effective representation in criminal cases and more context in which people can get appointed lawyers in civil cases. brian: the latest statistic that i have seen about washington, d.c., is that about one in 12 people here are lawyers. there are people here who make over $1000 per hour. what is the average public

defender paid for doing that kind of work? deborah: now, you know i haven't looked at that recently, but it is a small fraction of that amount. brian: are you talking $10 an hour? deborah: no, it is a living wage, but the disparity between people make in the corporate sector and the public sector has widened in the last decade. brian: you are here in washington, one in 12 people here in town are lawyers. deborah: i think it gives congress a deluded sense about how much law is readily available to americans, but there are plenty of counties in america where there are no lawyers. brian: plenty of counties? deborah: yeah, we are radically underrepresented in rural america. brian: what do you do in rural america? deborah: you go to the next county. brian: do you deserve a public defender? deborah: yes, you do.

brian: when you were here as a clerk, at some point he became a staff person up on capitol hill during the impeachment proceedings of bill clinton. when did you do that and why did you do that and where were you right before that? deborah: well, i was a law professor at stanford and my two areas of specialties were gender and law and apparently someone did a search and the thought that two things that they were going to need during the impeachment proceedings were people who were good at ethics and gender. nobody wanted a repeat of the anita hill situation in which liberal congressmen were thought to have allowed her to go on the

stand and people will worried about that with monica lewinsky. they wanted a better process. so they wanted somebody with some expertise in ethics and gender. i took a leave. i had to refuse an opportunity -- how could i refuse an opportunity like that? brian: who did you work for? deborah: i worked for the house judiciary committee. it was for the committee but i was on the democratic side. brian: who was the top democrat? deborah: uhhh -- brian: or who did you answer to when you were there? deborah: i answer to the chief counsel for the democrats more than the -- but conyers was the ranking democrat at the time. he was great. brian: what did you think of close when you saw this? where were you -- deborah: i was really shocked at how political it was all the way down. i had majored in political science as an undergraduate and what i saw and what played out were just so vastly different. i will give you one illustration. we spent a lot of time during

the first few weeks reading the tapes of the interviews, and the appropriations for the committee were controlled by the republicans. and so the republican staff had offices and secretaries and, you know, all of the comforts that you would expect to go with this investigation. and we had half as many people as they did and no office, and a secretary, no telephone and we were all outside of the little secure room where the tapes were being held, and it was some night when we are going through this. we were sitting on the floor and we were on our cell phones and one of the members of the committee came by and saw us there and said, what are you all doing on the floor? and the chief counsel looked at him and said, i wish you guys would win some elections so you could get us some chairs. and that was just how tough it

was and the hearings were just so politicized that hyde would call witnesses and we would hear about it on television from c-span, you know, rather than getting any kind of formal notice. brian: what was your feeling than about the issue itself and the monica lewinsky versus bill clinton? did there seem to be any reason to have the impeachment process? deborah: no, there was no reason for it. i mean, it was all political. totals all the way down, as they say. turtles all the way down, as they say. you know, there was a lot of his

conduct there was not to like, but it was not an impeachable offense. brian: i saw something today and i wanted to get your take on it because of your involvement in all of this. this is what is coming up now in this political season. you no doubt have heard about a writer who has been writing for "salon" over the years. camille paglia. this is an interview that i saw today for the first time. she said that "the horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the u.s., led by gloria steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to bill clinton's behavior, because he was a democrat. the democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn't matter what his personal behavior was." what are your thoughts on this? deborah: i don't think it mattered as to behavior, but what it did for women's issues is something that certainly rallied people to his defense when he was called upon to answer for conduct that a lot american presidents had carried on in private. so, you know, as i say, there was a lot not to like in his conduct, but it wasn't an impeachable offense.

brian: and you deal with this generational the time, and she suggest that things have changed dramatically from the attitude back then to the attitude now. what is your opinion on that? deborah: well, you know, 80% of americans were polled and they wanted to know whether the president had an affair or not, and my own view is, yeah, there are some context in which the conduct is so egregious, very hard to follow a womanizer in the media and one person said, there is nothing here and you won't find a thing. and of course, they did find a few things. so that is i think, disqualifying. there is poor judgment that you don't want in the leader of the free world, but there was absolutely no correlation

between fidelity in marriage and effective presidencies. i mean, richard nixon was by all accounts an ideal husband and he lied about watergate. fdr lied to his wife about his affairs and was one of the nation's greatest presidents. so i think we should just kind of get over the notion that all politicians' private lives should be fodder. unless it reaches a level of conduct and it calls into question a person's judgment, and ability to serve as a role model for the nation, i don't think it is relevant. brian: in your book, you have another suggestion that you talk about and you put it into the words of president obama. here is a little thing that he had to say about this back in 2013.

president obama: this is probably controversial to say, but what the heck. i am in my second term so i can say it. [laughter] president obama: i believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years. because by the third year, in the first two years, people are learning in the classroom, and by the third year, they would be better off clerking or practicing in a firm, even if they won't get paid that much. if you could maintain good professors and sustain themselves, my suspicion is that if they thought creatively about it, i think that they could. brian: what do you think? deborah: well, as you know, i quoted him in the book. i think it could be a wonderful program.

we could have to your programs for people who wanted to do something specialist in the third year and three or four years. but you know, it is crazy to train in the same way somebody who is doing routine divorces in a small town in the midwest compared to somebody who is doing mergers and acquisitions on a wall street. we have this one-size-fits-all model in the education system of law school, and it is not working. this assumes that people can afford this. brian: so if i wanted to go to stanford, what would it cost me for three years to get my law

degree? deborah: oh god. i should know that figure but i am going to take a wild guess and say somewhere around $400,000? brian: three years? and that is the average? deborah: yep. brian: what is the normal wage that a stanford graduate would get? deborah: it depends a what kind of practice that they are going into. if they are going to wall street is not atypical. $50,000.profit,

brian: are there scholarships to law school? deborah: it is kind of a reverse robin hood. it is not a cost-effective way to deal with our nation's access problems. brian: 500 students at stanford law school? about 180 in the first year? deborah: yes. brian: you teach what? deborah: i teach legal ethics and smaller courses in advanced comm law class and gender law and policy and leadership. brian: what do you tell your students on the first day?

deborah: i think what i tell them on the last day is more critical. i tell them not to settle. their diploma from one of the world's leading law schools opened a lot of doors and they may need to settle in the short term because of law school debts or geographic constraints, but in the long term, they should pursue their passion and find a job that is a true match for their interests and skills, and not to settle for something second-best just because it pays well or confers status. brian: when it comes to ethics, can you describe what is unethical in the law? deborah: we talk a lot about confidentiality, conflicts of interest, and failures of the regulatory process. the poor job the bar does around discipline and admissions and

regulation of competition. i talk a lot about the lawyer-client relationship and conditions of practice and what makes for a satisfying life in the law. diversity in the profession. access to pro bono service and the importance of lawyers doing public interest work, not just because it is good for the nation, but for many lawyers it is their most valued professional experience. brian: explain what pro bono law is. deborah: it is lawyers working for free to provide services to underserved populations. persons, but also social classes that are under represented.

brian: how much of it is done by these large law firms? deborah: not nearly as much as you would like. the american bar association has an aspirational norm of 50 hours per year, which is essentially 10 hours a week. most of the nation's largest law firms don't match that and when i crunched the numbers, it was around less than an hour a day. brian: should there be a requirement for more? deborah: i think there should be a requirement that lawyers either provide the service or have a financial buyout. if you're really not competent to provide services and you don't want to learn to be competent in areas that are underserved, then make a contribution to a legal aid organization. brian: who should require that be the case? deborah: it would probably come from the courts but you can also have bar organizations as a

condition of membership propose a rule that would be then adopted by the court. when the american bar association was last drafting its ethical code, it's considered a mandatory pro bono requirement. brian: i will show you another video. this is robin west at georgetown law center talking about the number of lawyers that there is in a society. >> it is clearly the case that law schools are graduating so -- too many lawyers. graduates. over the last few years, we have

graduated somewhere around double the number of law graduates as there are law jobs to be absorbed. this has created a serious crisis of underemployment and unemployment for our recent law graduates, many of which are now competing with lawyers who have been squeezed out of firms and have been unemployed. this is the biggest crisis facing law schools right now. deborah: she is right. we are overproducing, which is ironic because we are under producing the lawyers that we need for poor people and low to moderate income americans. in terms of those who can afford it, we have vastly more lawyers chasing the deep pockets than any one can absorb. law schools need to adjust to that new reality. brian: how much of a decline has there been in people applying or going to law school? deborah: it has been about 12% during this postrecession economy. brian: what is causing it? deborah: more jobs are being outsourced, more jobs are being done through technology, clients are less willing to pay for the

training of new lawyers so they expect nothing but experienced lawyers who already know the business to be working on their cases. brian: what is going to happen to these law schools around the country? i have heard talk about some law schools that are in serious financial trouble because of this. what are they going to do to survive? deborah: i think a few of them won't make it.

i think others are cutting the numbers in their class and shrinking their faculty. brian: in a place like stanford, how many law professors are there teaching the 500? deborah: we have a faculty of over 50 full-time faculty members and then we have a large number of adjuncts who just teach one class. schools like stanford aren't feeling it. stanford is either number 1 or 2 in the rankings -- 2 or 3 depending on the year that you look. if you move down the pecking order, you see schools struggling. brian: the chief justice of the united states, back in 2011, talked about legal scholarships. let's watch. chief justice roberts: pick up a

copy of any law review that you see and the first article is likely to be the influence of immanuel kant in 18th-century bulgaria, which are sure was of much interest to the academic who wrote it. if the academy wants to deal with the legal issues at a particularly abstract and philosophical level, that is great and that is their business. but they shouldn't expect that it would be of any help or interest to members of the practicing bar or judges. brian: you quote him in the book. why?

deborah: i think he has taken some poetic license there. i am not aware of an article on the topic he described or anything close to it. he is trying for a laugh. that said, there is an overproduction of legal scholarship as i suggest in the book. i think people's talents that are being wasted on articles that no one reads would be better spent in time teaching students -- a higher law professor-student ratio, or doing work that would affect the needs of poor and low income individuals. brian: how important is the stanford law review? deborah: in terms of world peace and world justice, not very. in terms of helping people get jobs on the academic market,

very. brian: you go into a law firm and you want the job. doesn't matter to them that you are law review? deborah: sure. they say that they care about practical training. when they look at the resumes, they don't hire the students who took a lot of clinical courses, it is the students who were on law review. brian: what is your approach to a classroom and your students? deborah: i expect them to be well prepared. i have them do weekly reflection papers on the readings. i teach, especially in the legal ethics class, it is easy to bullshit your way, so i want there to be an informed dialogue. that is my way of making sure that they are not just responding off the top of their heads. brian: what do have them read? deborah: reported cases, ethical rules, commentary by law professors. there is even some journalism articles. all of the cases are built on real, ethical problems that have happened. when something blows up in the american lawyer that might be the subject of a problem they

have to solve, and that there will be readings and rules that they have to resolve it. brian: "the trouble with lawyers" is your 20th? why so many books? deborah: i don't have a rich leisure life. i am hoping to write for the general public, not just academics. i think it is hard to get a lawyer to buy a book that is critical about them. they hear enough from cabdrivers. i think this will influence the debate, certainly among legal academics and in law schools, and i hope around public policy issues surrounding access to justice and so forth that i talk about in the book. brian: "the trouble with

lawyers," "gender and law," "managing pro bono." pretty."e towards "the beauty bias." of all the books you have written, with one sold the most? deborah: probably "the beauty bias." brian: why? deborah: it appeals to the largest number of people. it got a lot of play on the new york times book review, in "the washington post," "the boston globe," and other places. it affects people on a daily basis.

we are a society that is preoccupied with appearance, and that preoccupation really spills over in ways that are, i argue, extremely costly economically and psychologically. brian: walter olson of the cato institute has a point on this in march of 2011 -- >> i tell the story in "the excuse factory," my book about workplace law, about the novel idea that the law should combat looksism. looks-ism is the highest where employers are hiring better looking people and paying them more and send the rest of us who are homely. it is unfair.

yes, it is unfair, but not until around the time that the harvard law review ran an 80 or 90-page student note about the need for the law to combat looksism. brian: doesn't seem to agree with you i don't think. deborah: i think he trivializes the issue. even to take it on his terms, why should a lawyer -- and there are well-documented studies to indicate that lawyers who are more attractive are paid more, are more likely to be promoted. in our profession, look bears no relationship to competence. why should it matter? to many people, the notion that you consume because of it is ludicrous, but a number of other jurisdictions.

they are not awash in litigation. i don't think law is the major answer. i think the major answer is our cultural to try to combat the serious discrimination that people who aren't attractive, are seriously overweight, face our society. i think the law can help in raising consciousness about the issues and it can provide a low-cost dispute resolution mechanism in egregious cases. brian: what drew you to that thesis in that book that you wrote? deborah: oddly enough, women's shoes. i watched as women tottered in footwear that was clearly designed for anything other than appropriate travel. i was with a number of women who were hostage to their footwear, couldn't get to the next

meeting. -- a cabdn't get qa and couldn't manage to walk. i wrote an op-ed, which "the new york times" published. i got more responses to that op-ed then anything i have ever written. i thought, there is something more going on here. i got interested in the topic. it was partially a response to conservatives who are constantly ridiculing the notion that lawyers -- that employers generally should be held accountable for discrimination. it made me think, somebody needs to take the other side of this issue. brian: have you ever worn those big high spiked heels? deborah: some were given to a charitable organization after i began getting notes from a podiatrist saying, thank you for raising this issue. 80% of women's foot and back

problems are attributed to women's heels. brian: what kind of reactions did you get to the book and the article? deborah: i got some really vitriolic e-mails and i was surprised that so many people -- not just to the book but to the coverage in "the times" and "the post." my favorite one was, "why don't we take up a collection around stanford and buy the professor a burqa so no one has to experience her looks." there wasn't a picture on the book cover so where he got the notion that i needed a burqa wasn't clear. but i think it's these volumes about the fact that you can get hate mail for just suggesting that appearance bias is a problem. brian: this is not quite

connected but it is close. here is sandra day o'connor around 2010. >> how would you recommend that people deal with the old boys club? justice o'connor: the old boys what? >> i think that young women know what i'm talking about. how do you deal with that in government, private practice, academia. justice o'connor: i think you do the best you can. get out there and put on a good show, it will help. i think everyone will recognize good work when they see it. there may be some initial belief that she is a woman, she will do a good job.

if you do a good job, they can recognize it. i don't know what else to say. brian: what do you think? deborah: i am all for women trying to do a good job, but i do think there is a lot of unconscious bias out there in the world, and i am not the only what it thinks that. there has been a cottage industry of work done on the devaluation of women's confidence and the continued pervasiveness of the old boys network and the preference that people feel for individuals that are like them. we need structural remedies to deal with that. it is not enough to tell women to pull up their socks and soldier through. it worked really well for her but it doesn't work so well for a lot of other women.

brian: more than half the students in law school are women now. what impact does that have on the old boys network? deborah: it is changing. certainly in terms of differences between now and when i went to law school. i had a partner tell me that there was no women problem that his firm. they had one woman partner and she had just given birth to her first child. it happened on a friday in the following monday she was back at work. those stories aren't occurring anymore. we have made enormous progress. although they are half of recent law graduates, 17% of the partners in major firms. we do have a glass ceiling issue

in law as we do in other areas of the economy. brian: what do you say to young women in your class to teach that are going out to practice law? what is your advice? deborah: sometimes i quote madeleine albright, "there is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." go and do your bit to try and make the profession a level playing field for women. brian: where are women having the biggest impact in the law? deborah: they are well represented in the nonprofit sector. there certainly well represented in some, especially nonprofit leadership positions. we have a woman of color attorney general. that wouldn't have happened when i went to law school. we should celebrate the progress but it is partial. change this to happen before we are truly at a place where people justice under law applies to lawyers as well as everyone else.

brian: in your book, you have the statistic that in 1960, 1% of the lawyers in this country were black, hispanic. one third of the population today comes from that segment, but only 1/5 of the lawyers come from that segment. what is the reason? deborah: poor educational preparation. then we have standardized test's and a way of assessing interest for law school that doesn't really match up with all of the qualities that are important as a lawyer. we put too much emphasis on grade point average and lsat scores. brian: has stanford done anything to get around this? deborah: we are still pretty reliant on the numbers, in part because our rankings depend on. brian: you don't seem to like the "u.s. news" rankings.

last i checked, stanford was number 2. deborah: those who live by the board, die by the board. th\ey are very flawed systems of ranking. 40% of the ranking is based on reputation. no one has good information about the quality of an education that you get different law schools relative to each other, which is why in some experimental surveys, president and m.i.t. law schools have done very well even though they don't have law schools. brian: what do you see stanford doing that you don't like in order to stay number 2 or even become number 1? deborah: i think a lot of assiduity admission.

i think the curriculum -- i think a lot has to do with admission. the curriculum can be problematic. attention to practical skills, access to justice. i think we are probably producing more legal scholarship that is not read them needs to be used in more that comes out of our collective work could probably be used in better ways. the expense of the law school is shocking. if i had one chance to make, it would be to increase the level of financial aid and repayment programs for students who go in to public interest law. brian: you have been very active in the american bar association over the years. if my successes are accurate, there are about 1.2 million lawyers in the country.

why should, when over two thirds of the lawyers aren't represented by the aba, should they have that much power in our society? deborah: i don't think they should. on the whole, on many issues, they have not been out in front in terms of regulatory reform in ways that i would like to see them. i don't think they should have as much of a lock of the regulatory process as they do. brian: what have you done for them? deborah: i chaired their commission on women in the profession.

i cosponsored a national summit on access to justice in legal education. i have been chair of their litigation section, ethics committee. brian: why have you spent so much time with the aba? deborah: what did they say, why do you rob banks? that is where the money is. that is where the power to change things is. on many issues they are on the right side of the ledger. i'm very proud with the work i did in the commission on women in the profession and the reports that we produced on lingering discrimination, sex harassment in the profession. there is a lot that they do that is good. i got the pro bono award from them that i treasure. they have been very good around pro bono issues. brian: you write about pro se, translated to latin as "on behalf of themselves."

how often does that happen in this society? courts, moreome often than not. in divorce courts, more than half of the litigants don't have a lawyer. in landlord-tenant cases, almost none of the tenants have lawyers. bankruptcy court, a lot of individuals are unrepresented. in immigration matters, it is scandalous. deportation hearings, a lot of those people don't have counsel. brian: doesn't happen very often at the supreme court? deborah: they appoint lawyers for any case they get there. i am teaching a course on equal possession. brian: our guest has been deborah l rhode. she is the author of the book "the trouble with lawyers."

thank you very much for joining us. deborah: thank you so much. ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> for free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda.org. programs are also available as c-span podcast. c-spanou liked this program, here are some others you might like. by laws are interpreted

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