Moonlighting in Law School: A Multischool Study of Part-Time Employment of Full-Time Students

The part-time employment of full-time law students is a significant aspect of contemporary legal education. Successful socialization and training in law are presumed to require the undivided time, effort, and commitment of students. Part-time employment, therefore, is commonly believed to siphon those scarce personal resources away from the central task of legal education. This multi-school study of a sample of 1,370 law students attempted to determine the significant ways in which employed students were differentiated from nonemployed classmates in finances, attitudes, and uses of time, and whether type of law school and student's year in school had effects on patterns of student employment.
The incidence of part-time employment, while strongly related to personal financial resources, was found to be equally influenced by the type of school attended and year in school. While those settings varied substantially in the degree of permissiveness toward student part-time employment, students employed part time could not be distinguished statistically from their nonemployed classmates in terms of levels of involvement in law school or their levels of morale. Both temporal and attitudinal disengagement from law school were found to be commonplace among upper-class students in all school settings, but part-time employment did not appear to contribute to it uniquely.