Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Schools for Misrule’

Tom Smith reviews Schools for Misrule in Yale Alumni Magazine

I think the “bat virus reservoir” analogy may be an instant classic:

Walter Olson thinks that American law schools are the origin of some very bad ideas, in something like the way bats are said to be the reservoir of certain nasty viruses in Africa: the germs of pernicious concepts incubate there in relative obscurity between epidemics, erupting occasionally to spread destruction and misery. …

His histories of liability expansion, the role of wealthy private foundations, and international human rights law activism, as well as the ever potentially corrupting influence of money, amount to a sobering crash course in how bad things can happen to good schools and countries.

Reviewer Tom Smith is a law professor at the University of San Diego as well as a well known blogger. Since much of my critique in the book is aimed at Yale Law School itself, it will be interesting to see what sort of reaction he gets. (& Right Coast, Instapundit, Prof. Bainbridge).

Filed under: ,

Federalist Society podcast on Schools for Misrule

Just out: one of the most serious and wide-ranging podcasts yet on my new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America. I’m interviewed by James Haynes of the Society’s Professional Responsibility & Legal Education Practice Group Executive Committee and Baltimore Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter. It’s 53:25 minutes in length and you can listen here. Thanks also to the 100+ Facebook users so far who’ve “liked” the podcast.

Filed under: , , , ,

Schools for Misrule roundup: Chronicle of Higher Ed, NBN podcast

At his Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars takes a look at ideologically adventurous law school clinics and has this to say along the way (another version):

The hard-left politicization of law schools is surely the larger matter. Walter Olson’s new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, covers the matter so well that I don’t see much to add.

Hudson Institute scholar Tevi Troy interviewed me NBNLogofor the New Books in Public Policy podcast series and you can listen to the results here. Also online now is my appearance on Ronn Owens’ San Francisco-based radio show last month. And this recent Nielsen roundup of Hardcover Law bestsellers had Schools for Misrule at #9, down from #8 the week before.

Filed under: , ,

“Served: How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers”

If law schools were viewed in the same light as for-profit vocational training schools, there’d probably be a big movement to shut them down:

Many law schools all but explicitly promise that, within a few months of graduation, practically all their graduates will obtain jobs as lawyers, by trumpeting employment figures of 95 percent, 97 percent, and even 99.8 percent. The truth is that less than half will.

Schools use a variety of shabby dodges to undercount jobless graduates while straining to count others as employed, all of which serves little public purpose beyond “the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else.” [law professor Paul Campos at the University of Colorado, in the new issue of New Republic] When I spoke recently at Colorado on Schools for Misrule, Prof. Campos was kind enough to be the commenter, and I agreed with pretty much everything he had to say then and afterward.

P.S.: More generally from Alex Eichler, Atlantic Wire. And law school “merit scholarships” aren’t always quite as attractive as they seem.

Filed under: ,

Schools for Misrule radio and podcast, cont’d

Last week I was a guest on one of talk radio’s enduring institutions, the Jim Bohannon show on Westwood One, to discuss my new book Schools for Misrule. I always have a great time on Jim’s show and this was no exception; you can listen here. Also last week, I joined the African American Conservatives show on BlogTalkRadio, and you can hear the results here. And Bernard Chapin (Chapin’s Inferno), who is among other things a contributor to Pajamas Media, liked the book and gave it a video review on his YouTube channel.

I’ll be in Dallas over the next day or two to speak with leaders of conservative/libertarian legal groups at the Heritage Foundation’s annual get-together (invitation event).

Filed under: ,

Law schools roundup

  • ABA proposes retreat from use of accreditation as leverage for faculty tenure, AALS practically passes out on floor [Caron/TaxProf, Dave Hoffman/ConcurOp and more]
  • “Law professor calls for ban on Koran burning” [Volokh; Liaquat Ali Khan]
  • “Are Law Profs ‘Selfless’ Teachers and Scholars Engaged in ‘Public Service’?” [Tamanaha, Balkinization]
  • Behavioral law-and-econ has vanquished neoclassical economics? Not so fast, buster [Josh Wright, TotM]
  • Left-tilting legal academy? Perish the thought: conference simply aims to combat “spread of laissez-faire ideology” [ClassCrits]
  • Concurring Opinions symposium examines forthcoming Yale Law Journal study questioning whether clinic representation makes a difference in client outcomes [LEF, earlier] Hey, watch out, you’re giving ammunition to critics of legal services [Udell]
  • Schools for Misrule has spent a lot of time in recent weeks as #1 in the Amazon category of “One-L – Legal Profession.” Thanks for your support!

Filed under: , , ,

Washington Times review; Yale Daily News

Attorney Ray Hartwell of Hunton & Williams reviews a certain “excellent,” “wide-ranging” and “richly informative” volume. It’s one of my CoverSchoolsforMisrulefavorite 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: , ,

Heritage, Heartland talks on Schools for Misrule

The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the Heartland Institute in Chicago have posted videos of my talk on Schools for Misrule. (Although I adapt the talk to fit audiences and time constraints, if you’ve seen one version, much will be familiar about the others.) The Heritage talk is the same one that C-SPAN2’s “Book TV” broadcast over the weekend; it can be watched at Heritage here.

The Heartland version is broken into two parts on YouTube (parts one, two). Here is part one:

Volokh Conspiracy blogger David Bernstein, who teaches law at George Mason, generously recommended the book the other day. And liability reformer Bob Dorigo Jones (“Let’s Be Fair”) devoted his radio commentary to it.

Filed under: ,