Academic

Leiter on Historical Materialism & Legal Interdisciplinarity

By Lawrence Solum

Lot's of interesting material in Brian Leiter's post on interdiciplinarity.  Let me focus on just one point:

Solum's version of the evolution of interdisciplinary scholarship also attends entirely to intellectual forces, but as all Marxists and Posnerians know, it's a mistake not to consider the material forces at work as well.  Here are two that surely bear on an explanation of the growth of interdisciplinary work in law schools over the last thirty years:

1.  In the 1970s, when the academic market crashed, many folks with PhDs in the humanities and social sciences went to law school, and then ended up in law teaching.  Not surprisingly, many of them retained an interest in their original PhD fields, and so integrated that into their new teaching and scholarship.

2.  The terms of academic employment in law schools--from salaries to teaching loads to research support--tend to be much more favorable than elsewhere in the university.  This was an obvious incentive for young scholars to earn both the JD in addition to a PhD, and to pursue academic positions in law schools.  I have written about this phenomenon previously.

These two facts essentially guarantee a continued growth of interdisciplinary scholarship, barring some countervailing pressure from outside the law schools, such as a dramatic change in the accreditation process for law schools and new lawyers, or an economic meltdown which will bring the kinds of pressures on non-elite law schools that Professor Tamanaha identifies to a head, and force dramatic curricular and pedagogical experimentation in a struggle for those schools to survive.

Of course, Leiter is right to emphasize the notion that interdisciplinarity could never have gotten off the ground if the "material conditions" were not present.  I am not sure that Brian literally means that the surplus of PhDs and the favorable conditions of employment in law schools "essentially guarantee a continued growth of interdisciplinary scholarship," if his claim is construed as stating the sufficient conditions.  It seems rather obvious that the growth of interdisciplinarity involves complex interactions between intellectual and material forces.  Had law school not been an option would PhD philosophers have gone into business schools instead?  (I am tempted but will refrain from imagining in detail the "what is business" debate as it might have been conducted in this possible world--although I confess that the temptation to pursue this amusing reductio is quite strong.  Oh dear, I can't quite resist a few tidbits: "The Concept of Business" "The Authority of Management" "Business's Empire")

Just one more tiny point.  Leiter correctly observes that not all forms of legal realism lead naturally to interdisciplinarity--he emphasizes Oliphant.  But it seems to me incorrect to move from this premise to the conclusion that other strands of realism did not play an important role.  It is no accident that both law and economics and the law and society movement (core instances of interdisciplinarity) claim to be the heirs of legal realism.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on January 23, 2008 (boomark / email).