A couple of years ago a reporter from The Australian Financial Review spoke to a number of law deans about the growing oversupply of law students. All the deans sang from the same hymn sheet. They defended the growth by pointing to the portability of a law degree. They said that the problem-solving skills drummed into the heads of law students were not only of benefit to future commercial lawyers, but also transferable to other career paths.

But their claim that the legal problems undertaken in law tutorials are a platform for a generalist degree – that will see students who miss out on a job as a lawyer well placed to enter other high-paid spheres of the economy – is a self-serving myth.

'Narrows the mind'

Jonathan Sumption, an Oxford history don, later a barrister and then a UK Supreme Court judge, caustically noted that studying law at university "narrows the mind and blunts curiosity". In brief, the rule-based fetishism of law eliminates much of what constitutes intellectual life. Exactly in order to flee the lack of scope for expansive and lateral thinking in law, artists and thinkers such as Flaubert, Galsworthy, Harper Lee, Marx and Maupassant ditched law before graduating – or hung on to the bitter end and never practised. Mastering legal rules is not called "mechanical jurisprudence" for nothing.

Law is a subject far removed from expanding the mind towards non-legal areas in the new knowledge economy and digital age employment. Time in the legal classroom is overwhelmingly spent on tracking through problems that deal with locating the correct legal rule to apply to a set of facts. It is mind-numbing work: desiccated, insular, narrow.

Certainly essays are not a top priority in law schools. Solving arcane legal puzzles is the order of the day. Students who have to endure law tutorials might fairly say, with T. S. Eliot, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons".

Law deans are running a bait and switch operation. They hold out the promise of a legal career, while adding to the unemployment queue.

Thousands of students are undertaking a degree that will result in broken dreams. They believe the neoliberal lie that the magic of the market will (somehow) deliver job opportunities if only they get their foot in the door of the legal academy.

Any warnings to tyro lawyers about the state of the legal market are delivered in whispering tones, reminiscent of those pioneered by the tobacco and pokie machine industry. It is time for this to change.

Only a strong interventionist state willing to expose market imperfections and aid the planning of the jobs of the new economy will save thousands of prospective law students from being sold down the river by a clique of rent seekers.

Frank Carrigan is a senior lecturer in the Law School at Macquarie University.