Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. aren't seeing a drop in the quality of applicants. I get the impression there's a very elite group that Musk would consider "smart" - and they have no issues getting into a T-14 law school.
Still don’t see your point. We need some lawyers. We don’t need millions. If the only law schools that existed were the T-14 where aggregate enrollment is like 4000 a year then that’s hardly “too many”
If all the lawyers in the world lost 10 IQ points, which were redistributed to the non-lawyers, who would lose out?
I argue that law is an adversarial profession - what matters is if you are smarter than the lawyer in the other side of the courtroom. If everyone was less good, outcomes would be much the same, and we as a society could redistribute those smart people to engineering problems where those IQ points will make the difference between inventing something useful or not.
As an attorney who has seen what actually happens in the courtroom, I can tell you that the smartest lawyer does not always win the case, and that judges will often go out of their way to help lawyers who look like they’re tangled up. Being on the right side of the law often helps more.
That doesn't quite answer his question though, the issue here is that quality of lawyer can be counterproductive towards finding the "correct" decision.
It's an effect on the outcome that's orthogonal to the actual facts of the case itself. Unless the guy with a public defender has as much of a chance as the guy with a legal team with a million dollar budget. I'm a little doubtful that that's the case right now.