A whole lot of jurisprudence in America (and Canada too, as far as I can tell) justifies itself by appealing to “reasonableness,” or something like it. And what’s “reasonable,” the law will tell you if you press it, has to do with what a sensible expectation for human behavior should be. However, when the rubber hits the road—that is, when the sensibility of these expectations gets litigated—the folks who get to determine what’s reasonable are usually from the cream of the elite of the select of the chosen, who have spent every single one of their living moments far removed from the common American experience.

Shouldn’t we have a required law school course called “Reality”? The first class meeting could start everyone off at the shallow end, with Census and other government statistics like these:

• Only 50% of adults in America went to college. Less than a third got a degree of any kind.

• In fact, nearly 1 in 5 adults didn’t graduate from high school or get a GED.

• And that’s the same percentage, about, that don’t speak English at home. Over 21 million people in the US don’t speak English “very well.” That’s over 8% of us, and more than six times the number of people who have got a law degree.

• But even more than that—14% of adults—read English at a “below basic” level. About 3% of us can’t even respond to the most basic literacy test questions.

• And lastly, you know that $18,500 personal cashflow level that almost all law students are certain to have, since that’s how much the government will loan you to pay for law school? Over 15% of American households live on much less than that every year. This is an especially huge problem in the NYC area, where you apparently can’t raise a family for less than $165,000 a year, according to US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.