Post-JD "Residency" Programs, and One Place to Start

We are all familiar with the claim that law schools don't prepare their students adequately for the practice of law.  This criticism is somewhat overblown, in my view; law is hardly unique as a profession in requiring a period of post-graduate, on-the-job training and experience before a person is deemed by her peers to be a solid, competent professional.  As many people have pointed out, medicine obviously does too-- it's just that in medicine, that period is formalized and funded by the government, and the trainees spend their training years providing needed services to vulnerable populations.  I don't think it's completely crazy to imagine a similar system for law students, especially given that the "oversupply" of lawyers we're currently hearing so much about is a function of effective demand (that is, ability to pay), not actual need for services.  My exciting proposal, below the fold.

There's a huge need for legal services among people who can't afford to pay out of pocket, just as there is a huge need for medical services among people who can't afford to pay out of pocket.  If all medical procedures were funded out of pocket there'd be a huge "oversupply" of doctors too, coupled with a huge unmet need for medical services.  (Indeed we're already seeing this somewhat in medicine, with primary care and general practice underrepresented, and lucrative specialities arguably overrepresented.)  To take maybe the most glaring example, we deport upwards of 300,000 people a year out of an estimated population on the order of ten million people who could potentially face deportation.  Our immigration laws are very complex, with numerous potential avenues for relief, and removals hearings are conducted like trials.  But while the government gets a lawyer, the alien, in 99 out of 100 cases, does not.  So we have a potential personal catastrophe--deportation-- which for many people is up there close to death on their list of fears; the statistics show that having a lawyer matters enormously to the outcome; almost all aliens in these proceedings have no lawyer; and yet we have no provision whatsoever for publicly-funded attorneys for aliens in deportation proceedings.  The substance of our immigration is fairly contested politically at the margins, but there's a core that's neither seriously contested nor constitutionally contestable.  That is, neither party is advocating eliminating all immigration; and due process requires that so long as there is substantive immigration law, there be a adjudicative system in place.  It's sort of like public teaching hospitals: you *could* just decide to let poor people die on the streets, but no one is seriously advocating that. True, Ron Paul said it at a debate, and Justice Scalia posed it as a question in the ACA arguments, but I think (I hope!) I'm safe in claiming that there's no chance that that will become official policy.   Likewise, I think I'm safe in claiming that the immigration-litigation machine is here to stay.  Thing is, unlike with teaching hospitals, we don't take advantage of that machine to train young professionals.  So why not?  As far as I'm aware, no one seriously defends, on its merits, a system of adversarial trials in which only the government gets a lawyer.  The Court has said that the Constitution doesn't require provision of publicly-funded lawyers in deportation proceedings, but as a policy question, I've certainly never seen any argument that that's a good thing-- rather, it'd be too expensive to provide them, etc. etc.  So why not turn the immigration courts into a pilot "residency" program, thereby providing training for new lawyers, representation for aliens, and relief for the private sector from some of the training burden that they now shoulder almost entirely.  I've had on the back burner for a while an attempt to set out as best I can an estimate of the actual dollar costs and benefits of such a program (the benefits, by the way, are potentially quite significant given that a lot of work in criminal cases now involves hypothetical relitigation of the underlying removal proceedings), but I thought I'd get the idea out there in case anyone else has been thinking along similar lines.  And of course there are other areas where there are really important interests at stake, publicly-funded lawyers are not currently provided, and young lawyers could get useful training-- one thinks of, e.g., landlord-tenant, or family law.  I'd love to hear more ideas.