Makes sense. My first temptation was to say that with José being where he is on the gov't pay scale, the only way that the benefit of law school would outweigh the cost, at least in terms of money, would be if he took the biglaw route upon graduation. But really, I'm sort of in the same boat. Web developer salaries tend to be at the low end of the tech-sector scale, and mine is on the low end of that because I gave up the big-agency path to work for an educational institution. But still, the salary I'm getting now is more than I'd get in a clerkship or government position, or if I decided to do public-interest work. Given that Baltimore doesn't have the volume of firms that NY and DC do, that may be where I find myself if I don't do terribly well in law school. And while there will always be that part of me that would love to do public-interest work, the poor-white-trash-done-good part of me wins out. It won't take me more than a semester, I imagine, to find out if it just wasn't meant to be. And if that's the case (although I really don't think it will be), at least I tried.