Academic

Skepticism about "Law and ...."

By Calvin Massey

It's practically part of the legal acadamy's catechism now to hire only PhDs with a law degree.  I remain unconvinced of the wisdom of this new orthodoxy.  Some disciplines are directly relevant (e.g., economics, history, engineering for patent types, hard sciences for IP, philosophy for the jurisprudes) but others are quite marginal (e.g., the modern version of literature).  Oh, I can hear it already -- the post-modern analysis that characterizes literature and its related disciplines is intensely relevant to law.  Or not.  Check out this jaundiced view.  The fundamental problem is that law schools are (let's be honest) trade schools that are also academic departments within a university.  Balance between these two conflicting objectives is needed.  I fear that law faculties composed overwhelmingly of PhDs will skew the balance so far to the law-as-abstract-social-institution pole that we will disserve the vast majority of our students, who wish to become lawyers.  In the linked article (admittedly with its own bias), note the resistance of contemporary undergraduates to some of the more faddish aspects of po-mo academic culture. 

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).