OTHERWISE: The Million Dollar Law Degree by Michael Simkovic, Frank McIntyre :: SSRN.

Is law school “worth it?? We all wonder. I spent less for law school at Rutgers-Newark (a state school) than I did for a 1-year masters degree in `polisci ‘ at Boston University. That wasn’t “worth it” – if we count lost income and subtract earnings from a couple of years teaching as an adjunct at Rutgers night school. But I Learned a lot of American history, and social science methods, which informed my work later – especially in editorial writing, political work, and in handling social science evidence in a few appellate cases.
But here two economists compare getting a law degree to stopping at the B.A. [There is a power point and link to the full article at the site above.] Simkovic and McIntyre show that by that measure a law degree IS “worth it”:

The mean annual earnings premium of a law degree is approximately $53,300 in 2012 dollars. The law degree earnings premium is cyclical and recent years are within historic norms.
We estimate the mean pre-tax lifetime value of a law degree as approximately $1,000,000.