Legal Commentary

Before I ask my surly question, I should apologize for my own laziness, having not posted anything for the last two months despite my status as a permanent blogger. (I confess that I do not know how Leiter, Volokh, etc, keep up with blogging while maintaining an active writing schedule. I now have tentatively adopted the assumption that all active bloggers who also publish prolifically have identical twins with identical names).

My excuse for being AWOL is that I've been busy doing my job -- that is, preparing seminar readings for my course on "Federalism: Law, Policy, History." The point of the course is to examine federal regimes through the lens of U.S. and foreign history, economics, political science, etc.

But here is the difficulty: I am told by multiple reliable sources that students rebel at seminar readings longer than 50 pages per week. To reduce historical readings to such a size requires me to write boiled-down versions of the historiography --say, a ten-page summary of Fehrenbacher's The Dred Scott Case. Hence, my absence from the blogosphere.

And hence, my question: Are my sources correct in assuming that a law student typically will tolerate only 50 pages per each weekly two-hour class session? My wife, a history faculty member at NYU, tells me that this is astonishing -- that history grad students normally read a 200-page book per week. My poli sci colleagues make a similar report. They are bemused by the fact that law students read so little -- especially if the material is essentially narrative history or fairly accessible political theory (e.g., Calhoun's Disquisition on Government).

Of course, my law sources might be incorrect that law students will not tolerate more than 50 pages. So here are my three questions: (1) Is this 50-page assessment of law students' reading tolerance correct? (2) Assuming that law students really have such limits, does this fact indicate a level of philistinism unique in post-graduate education? (3) To what should one attribute such sloth, given that these same students will soon be confronted with weekly reading loads (in the discovery mills of various law firms, for instance) that dwarf in size the 50 weekly pages that they now tolerate?