Attorney Ray Hartwell of Hunton & Williams reviews a certain “excellent,” “wide-ranging” and “richly informative” volume. It’s one of my favorite reviews so far; among its other virtues, it gets into the conflicting institutional pressures on law schools that underlie some of the ideological drift. For other reviews, see our posts here, here, and here. Why not order your copy — or a gift copy for a graduate or favored relative — today?

More: Today’s Yale Daily News is out with a story by reporter Nikita Lalwani on the cycle of inbreeding in high-end legal academia: top law schools draw heavily on a few elite undergraduate colleges for their student body, and in turn supply most of the future law faculty for law schools around the country. I’m quoted:

“Harvard and Yale graduates like complicated law more than the general public,” [Olson] said. “Legal academics like these complications because they are intellectually stimulating, but most lawyers just want to be able to advise their clients to either do or avoid doing something.”

And Chicago’s Brian Leiter is quoted saying something with which I’d fully agree:

In an email to the News Apr. 13, Leiter said he finds it troubling that just six schools control so much of the legal academic world.

“It is not a healthy situation, and no doubt accounts for a lot of what ails legal scholarship and explains the legal academy’s susceptibility to intellectual fads,” he said. “As long as the fad takes hold at a couple of feeder schools to legal academia, it’s guaranteed to spread.”

Filed under: law schools, Schools for Misrule, Yale