Or is it already too late?
Each year the rankings arms race seems to produce a new low in law school conduct. Although all the law schools are run by lawyers, our reliance on moral suasion has failed….
This day is upon us because nobody in the legal academy was willing to step up and lead.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Northwestern law professor John McGinnis favorably reviews my new book:
American law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university. In ‘Schools for Misrule,’ Walter Olson offers a fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions. One of his themes is that law professors serve the interests of the legal profession above all else; they seek to enlarge the scope of the law, creating more work for lawyers even as the changes themselves impose more costs on society.
Prof. McGinnis deftly conveys my theme about how embracing the cause of reformist legal critique helped serve law schools’ quest for academic respectability within the university, and he is particularly complimentary about the book’s discussion of law school clinics (“superbly describe[d]”). He is perfectly fair in observing that the book makes no attempt to evaluate some important recent developments such as the burgeoning of interest in empirical legal studies, even as I do devote considerable attention to other academic enthusiasms (like the ill-fated movement for race reparations) that he and I agree led to practical dead ends.
Most of Schools for Misrule is by intention backward-looking, an assessment of wrong turns and misguided enthusiasms that have led legal academia astray up to now. As Prof. McGinnis and I agree, things have been changing of late, sometimes in favorable ways. And that I hope provides much fodder for discussion as more observers join the debate.
P.S. Prof. Bainbridge has some kind things to say today as well. And I’ve got a general reaction roundup at Cato at Liberty, including those obsessively watched Amazon sales rankings, which are almost as bad a distraction for the author world as the U.S. News rankings are for the legal-academic. Yet more: Paul Caron/TaxProf, Instapundit, Above the Law, Kent Scheidegger/Crime and Consequences, Smallest Minority, Estate of Denial, Jeff Hadden/Detroit News, Memeorandum.
Just out in the DC-based Daily Caller: Jamie Weinstein interviews me about my work and in particular my new book Schools for Misrule. I greatly enjoyed the interview, which I think turned out as one of the best I’ve done in quite a while. Some points that come up:
The interview seems to be a hit with readers; as of a few hours ago it was listed as the most-emailed item on the site. Read the whole thing here (& FrumForum).
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!
Several interesting reactions to my book already from around the blogosphere:
I’m interviewed by Cato’s Caleb Brown (appx. 11 minutes). I discuss the roots in legal academia of developments ranging from modern tort law (thank you, William Prosser) to sexual harassment law (thank you, Catharine MacKinnon) and quite a few others besides.
The Manhattan Institute publication Minding the Campus, which monitors higher education and its reform, is out with an excerpt from my forthcoming book Schools for Misrule. You can check it out here.