Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Scott Greenfield on Schools for Misrule

The deservedly popular criminal-defense and general law blogger weighs in on my new book. It’s a great review and these are some of my favorite passages:

…In Schools For Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, Walter aims both barrels and pulls the trigger. The book is classic Olson, witty, caustic and facially challenging to the Academy. The poke in the ribs is unmistakable, and early signs are that it’s going to get a rise out of some of the more intellectually honest lawprofs….

While the use of law schools as an incubator of liberal politics may not cause you to break out in hives, you may find Walter to be awfully persuasive in challenging simplistic notions of right and wrong, good and evil, that characterize political correctness. If your interest extends beyond people applauding you for agreeing with them, and actually comes anywhere near achieving a better understanding of issues and interests at stake, then Walter’s challenge may give you pause to rethink your knee-jerk reactions. He may not turn you into a full-time libertarian, but he will add enormously to your understanding of what’s at stake and why the solutions aren’t nearly as clear and easy as you thought. …

…What Walter Olson offers in Schools for Misrule is a challenge to the Academy to clean up its act, stop teaching liberalism as the only good policy and keep their mitts off the minds of our future leaders. … it’s left to the rest of us, lawyers, pundits and those few lawprofs who have the guts to challenge their brethren, even in the typical tepid tones that characterize communications between intellectuals, to hold their feet to the fire.

I could raise a quibble here or there — “environment of overwhelming leftism” is a reviewer’s wording, not mine, and I don’t remember characterizing any recent American presidents as “extremist,” least of all Bill Clinton — but that would be churlish in the face of such a nice review. I’m going to send Scott the signed copy, too.

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Do NYT editorialists even read their paper’s own CPSIA coverage?

The New York Times editorial page continues to dismiss criticism of the testing burdens of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 on small manufacturers and retailers as “part of a standard antiregulation litany.” But on October 30, 2009 the paper itself ran a sadly belated but otherwise decently executed article PieManEthelEveretta by reporter Leslie Wayne from which a fair-minded reader would conclude that the small makers’ complaints about the law are only too well-grounded (“Burden of Safety Law Imperils Small Toymakers.”)

If one were to take a charitable view, one might commend the Times editorialists for at last deigning to concede that the law might usefully be “tweaked,” at least within a very narrow latitude. They finally acknowledge that there “might be a way to exempt products from testing if they very clearly do not pose a lead-related hazard,” without acknowledging that the great majority of products swept under the law’s coverage fall into exactly such a category. But they continue to insist that even older kids be denied access to products that could not pass BikeItalianPosterCPSIA’s lead testing, including whole categories of products like kids’ bicycles and ballpoint pens whose designs still cannot dispense with the (entirely harmless) use of brass and suchlike alloys. Only the repeated staying or postponed enforcement of many of the law’s requirements has spared the country a long list of similar absurdities — while the legal absurdities that the CPSC has not stayed or postponed have already wiped out makers and vendors of harmless products from coast to coast.

Even under the best of circumstances, the Times’s editorialists would find it hard to live down their cruel, ideologically blinkered track record on the CPSIA issue. But couldn’t they at least pretend to be following the coverage in their own paper? More: Handmade Toy Alliance. And Rick Woldenberg offers a critique of the the Times’s new, and anything but improved, news-side reporting.

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Law schools roundup

  • Looks as if ROTC will return to Yale and Harvard despite some misgivings at the latter institution over the military’s treatment of transgendered persons [Atlantic Wire, Weekly Standard; also see my Daily Caller interview]
  • California state bar urges U.S. News to factor racial diversity into law school rankings [Althouse]
  • Right-of-center commentators clash on Ninth Circuit nomination of Berkeley lawprof Goodwin Liu [Damon Root, Reason]
  • Odds of this resulting purely from chance distribution would seem pretty low: of 32 members of Congress who have Harvard degrees, 29 are Democrats [Stoll, Future of Capitalism]
  • Rather disrespectful review of new Ronald Dworkin book [Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Ed]
  • There’ll always be a legal academia dept.: “Multidimensional Masculinities and Law: A Colloquium” [UNLV/Suffolk via LaborProf]

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Supplying a missing footnote

A reader of Schools for Misrule points out that the book’s endnotes (at p. 240) do not include a source for one of its statements (at p. 14 of the text) about law faculty political disparities. (“Democrats at last count outnumbered Republicans 28 to 1 on the Stanford faculty, 23 to 1 at Columbia….”) The omission was inadvertent; the numbers come from a study by David Horowitz and Joseph Light entitled “Representation of Political Perspectives in Law and Journalism Faculties” whose findings are summarized, among other places, in this Oct. 13, 2005 post at Paul Caron’s TaxProf. Sorry!

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Update: French court tosses “book review defamation” case

According to Prof. Joseph Weiler’s website, a tribunal in France has not only dismissed the criminal libel complaint that Prof. Karin Calvo-Goller filed against him, but has imposed a monetary penalty on the complainant for abuse of process. The dispute arose over a negative book review in an academic journal Weiler edits (earlier here, here, etc.).

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Schools for Misrule review roundup

Professor Bainbridge has just opened his copy, and in the mean time has assembled some of the favorable reviews and summaries of Schools for Misrule that other leading bloggers have already printed. You can buy your copy of the book there or here (usual Amazon commission applies).

Robert VerBruggen has written a favorable review of the book at National Review, under the title “The Gilded Guild” (paywall). A few highlights:

…An important theme here is that in law, careerism is a powerful force. As a result, the worst left-wing impulses of the legal academy tend to stumble when they come into conflict with lawyers’ self-interest, and to succeed when they advance it.

In particular, as the book relates, law students themselves have served as an effective check on some kinds of ideological adventurism by law faculties when such adventurism threatens to deprive them of a serviceable legal education. On the other hand, there’s often less of a check on bad ideas when they advance the welfare of lawyers present and future:

… And that’s where we see the true genius of legal academia, and the legal profession in general: It manages to argue, on moral grounds, that it deserves more work, more money, and more power.

Yesterday I spoke to an enthusiastic crowd at the Cato Institute auditorium in Washington, D.C. Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the D.C. circuit was generous in his comments, and there was a lively Q-and-A with the audience. Cato will post the event as a podcast at its media site.

The radio campaign for the book also proceeds apace. I was on the Mike Rosen show out of Denver on Tuesday, and in the next few days will appear on Kevin Whalen’s WRKO show in Boston (Sunday), Cam Edwards’ national show, and Steve Malzburg’s show on NYC’s WABC (both Monday).

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