Newly minted and unemployed lawyer Ethan Haines has gone on a hunger strike in the name of all unemployed former law students, to protest misleading law school employment statistics, commercial school rankings, and antiquated career counseling programs. “I designated myself class representative since these students are not able to come forward themselves, for fear that vocalizing their concerns will negatively affect their careers,” he writes on his website. He is alerting various law schools about his Dick Gregory-style protest, intending “to bring awareness to the concerns of law students and recent law graduates by having them addressed by law school administrators. Their primary concerns are inaccurate employment statistics, ineffective career counseling, and rising tuition costs.” The strike, he says, “was motivated by a recent American Bar Association (ABA) investigate Report, which concluded that educational leaders are unable to timely combat the adverse affects of U.S. News’ rankings on legal education.”

In some respects this is an admirable cause; certainly law schools could use more openness about the earning power of a law degree, and tuition costs are indefensible. On the other hand, Haines’s attempt to play the victim is unseemly and shows a regrettable lack of accountability. Unlike some fields, law provides an instant opportunity for employment as soon as a graduate passes a bar exam. It’s called hanging out one’s shingle, solo practice, and self-employment, and lawyers from Clarence Darrow to my father have done it, sometimes for the rest of their lives. A lawyer can take court-appointed criminal cases, do wills…there’s a lot of legal work out there, and no bottom price limits preventing a lawyer from competing with expensive firms. Then there is the undeniable fact that a law degree is a versatile credential for many fields, law-related and not. I know from being on both sides of the interview desk that it enhances one’s desirability in management, business, government, education, public policy, writing and consulting, to name just a few options.

If you can’t eventually earn a living with a law degree, you either aren’t trying very hard, have a serious creativity deficit or you’re just not much of a lawyer. Haines doesn’t seem to lack creativity—the hunger strike idea is unusual in this context—but he seems to have been going to law school while deluded. If he believed that he was guaranteed a plum law firm job, he wasn’t doing his own due diligence. If he thinks that career counseling was going to make a critical difference, he has either encountered wiser and more dedicated career counselors than I ever have, or he has an inexplicably inflated expectation of what career counselors can do. If he was taking U.S. News and World Report rankings more seriously than ESPN’s weekly Power Rankings of baseball teams, he was naive. And if he attended law school just to make money, well, he may have entered the wrong profession.

There are too many lawyers seeking the same jobs, no doubt. That fact has hardly been hidden by the law schools. Law degrees still are valuable credentials, as is a good legal education, and if Haines got a good legal education, he received everything a law school is obligated to provide. Turning the degree into a career is his responsibility, and it is wrong for him to claim that anyone but himself is accountable for his present unemployed state.