Jonathan Herzog is a JD student and is currently running for Congress as a Democrat in New York’s 10th District
The Record: Why did you decide to take a leave from HLS, and how did you end up running for Congress?
Herzog: Andrew Yang announced his candidacy for President last year. At that point he was an unknown entrepreneur who founded Venture for America. His thesis is that we are going through the fourth industrial revolution, the greatest economic and technological shift in our history. It is why Donald Trump is our President. We have automated away millions of manufacturing jobs in the swing states that you have to win. And we are now doing the same to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs, and on and on. His flagship proposal was the freedom dividend, a universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every American adult to help us transition through this economic shift.
This felt deeply urgent to me. I looked around and he was the only voice in our political process calling out what I saw to be the central high variance challenge of our time.
That is why I took a leave: to help him qualify for the National Debate Stage. I am happy to say that he is a top four, five, or six presidential candidate, depending on where you look. And one of only two candidates to get more than 10% of Trump voters. If he gets the nomination, he will win.
The reason I’m running for Congress is that Yang’s platform is a legislative platform. We have conflated the executive with the legislative in our national consciousness in many ways. But fundamentally you need the votes in the House to pass the freedom dividend law. My goal was to run in the only district I could, my home district of New York, to try to advance so that we have the House united in 2021 to pass his agenda.
The Record: Was there an experience you had at HLS that led you down this path?
Herzog: It is interesting because in many ways, this is not a “them” issue. This is not a working-class issue. This is an “us” issue. I have HLS friends who founded Evisort, an automated contract review company that is getting a fair bit of investment. We know that much of entry-level white-collar work, from corporate law to investment banking — a lot of the work that most of our classmates will be doing — is subject to automation. From the second I set foot on campus, the changing role — the accelerating role — of technology affecting our education, our workforce, and our labor markets, was omnipresent in my mind.
The Record: We do not spend a lot of time here thinking about the potential automation of legal work. How should we be thinking about it? Should we be furthering it? Protecting our profession? Learning to code?
Herzog: I should not shortchange my experience here because I did take a class about these topics, Law 2.0 taught by Ron Dolin, which featured really incredible guest speakers. But there are not that many law and technology classes, and I think that we should integrate the subject into our curriculum, just like any other core subject is integrated into our curriculum.
In terms of what to do about it, one of the proposals that came up in my class was the reform of unauthorized practice of law regulations. This is related to Eddie Hartman’s work, the founder of Legal Zoom who was a guest speaker in Professor Dolin’s class. Eddie pointed out that we are a self-regulating profession and that there are good principled reasons for why you need to have barriers to entry, certifications, and safeguards for the quality of legal practice to avoid exploiting people. At the same time, the current access to justice crisis and the lack of access to basic legal services suggests that we are defending the current status quo of regulatory structures rather than reforming them.
The Record: Would commoditizing and automating legal work and delivering legal services cheaply solve the access to justice issue or would it primarily put lawyers out of work?
Herzog: This is why the foundation of a freedom dividend, a universal basic income to every American adult, is so vital.
We can try to plug the holes in the ship, wherever we find them. Today, 30% of American stores in malls are closing. If you walk into a CVS or McDonald’s, you have an automated kiosk and a self-checkout. Tomorrow, it might be accounting, corporate legal work, or any other entry-level, white collar work.
The reality is some professions have strong professional lobbies and others do not. I do not think we should be protecting the job. We should be protecting the people. We are at a point where our GDP has gone up to 20 trillion, but our life expectancy as a country has gone down for three years, for the first time in a century. That is unheard of in an advanced industrialized economy. We have hit the breaking point. We already crossed the threshold. Our focus has to be on building a more human-centered economy that works for everyone because the sky-high rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and unhappiness are not unique to a particular job or a sector, they pervade across the board.
The Record: Many suggest that lawyers are unhappy. The access to justice crisis shows that we fail to deliver legal services to most. Would automating lawyers be a net benefit? Should the goal of HLS graduates be to automate themselves?
Herzog: My goal, my hope, is help transition us. To restore entrepreneurship, creativity, vitality, dynamism in the economy where the brightest, most talented, enterprising, agentic people are going to build enterprises and generate value in society. There are going to be lawyers for decades, centuries to come. There are going to be humans in every sector.
I think there are strong parallels between the law and other professions. There are 3.5 million people who drive a truck for a living. They spend 14 hours a day in their truck. They provide fifty to eighty thousand dollars to their family. In many ways, we should be celebrating the fact that autonomous vehicles could be mainstream in the next decade or so. It is not good for your body to sit in a vehicle for 14 hours a day, and there is a high incidence of chronic markers of disease and illness in the industry.
According to the New York Federal Reserve, 44% of work is either repetitive manual or repetitive cognitive work. Even though lawyers and truck drivers serve very different functions, I think we are actually more alike than disparate. Again, it is not a “them” issue; it is all of us.
The Record: What advice would you give to law students? To someone who cannot code, who does not want to run for Congress, and who is thinking about going into big law?
Herzog: In many ways, this is the challenge. In many cases on the margin, our innate desire is to do something socially productive and valuable. We have set up a system where all the incentives push you the other way. At first you are loaded up with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. All the social rewards, structures, and systems in place pave a certain path. This is partly why I think the incentive system, which is set at a federal level, is an area for change: An area which allows us to incentivize our people, our talented young people, to go do those productive things.
What would you do? What would anyone here do, if they knew that they were guaranteed an unconditional income? What if your basic means of survival were not contingent upon your work at a firm or earning subsistence wages? Or sitting for a nine to five a nine to nine, or a nine to midnight? Often, we do not even ask this. We do not even ponder the possibility. What I would say is contemplate it.
As Yuval Harari says, the challenge of our time is getting to know ourselves better than those who seek to exploit us or manipulate our perception can. The hardest and most important thing is to get to know yourself better. What do you want to do? What is your competitive advantage? What are the ways in which you can contribute? You should constantly be questioning and testing, ‘Do these align with the choices I am making?’ Note that these are conscious choices, deliberate actions you are taking about how you spend your time and what you do in the world. Hopefully, we can set paths that incentivize and make it easier for us to do the kind of work we want to do.
The Record: If members of our faculty or administration are reading this, what would you want to say to them?
Herzog: First, I want to celebrate and call out some of the excellent examples of what I view as progress in the right direction. Glenn Cohen, for example, has integrated digital course materials and multimedia into his courses. He has tried to be more topical in his coursework. He also led 0L, which I was lucky to play a tiny role in, which provides a digital baseline for pre-law-school knowledge. That’s a really good direction to head in.
Ron Dolin’s course and Jonathan Zittrain’s course should not be anomalies that only few people can take, but integrated and mainstream, an unquestionable a part of the fabric of people’s academic journey here. I think that would be a great direction to move in.
It is really challenging because according to the data we are actually really bad at teaching entrepreneurship. We have seen a really marked increase in entrepreneurship programs and institutes at universities, but our generation’s rate of entrepreneurship is at multi-decade lows, in part because of pervasive financial insecurity and being loaded up with student debt, but also in part because the best way to learn something is by doing it. Right now, in the United States, 6% of high school graduates go into vocational, technical, and apprenticeship training, where you are actually doing the work and not just theorizing about it, while in a country like Germany, it’s about 60%. Clinical programs where you are out there and actually doing the work are a great way of moving the ball in the right direction.
The Record: Do you have any other thoughts you would like to share?
Herzog: We are in one of the most influential, high agency, and high-potential environments, institutions, and cohorts of people. There is nothing stopping you or anyone from setting out and actively making the change you think is necessary. If not now, then when? If not here, then where? There is really nothing stopping you.