Academic

More on the Future of the Legal Academy

By Lawrence Solum

My post of Friday entitled Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity, and the Future of the Legal Academy was prompted by Brian Tamanaha's Why the Interdisciplinary Movement in Legal Academia Might be a Bad Idea (For Most Law Schools).  For a collection of links see Belle Lettre's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know/Read on Interdisciplinary Legal Scholarship and Craig MacFarlane's Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. Here are some of the comments:

Larry Ribstein, Law schools, scholarship, and lawyer licensing:

[T]he current system of forcing everybody who wants to practice any kind of law into three-year, high-priced law schools will never produce that competition. Instead, the cartel forces practical/doctrinal training to coexist uneasily with lawyer-scholars, and results in training that compromises the needs of all kinds of lawyers.

Brian Tamanaha, Is There an Impending Crisis in Non-Elite Law Schools?:

It's time we start thinking more seriously about whether non-elite law schools would be better served, and would better serve their students, if they develop a different model for training people who want to be lawyers. Otherwise the crisis might be one that non-elite law schools bring upon themselves, as more and more prospective law students decide that the cost of law school is not worth the return.

Jeffrey Lipshaw, Encore - I Couldn't Resist Saying Something About the Interdisciplinarity Debate:

There's something to be said for the Luhmann-Teubner theory of social systems in law - that is that law is a closed system that has points of interconnection with the rest of society, but is "autopoietic" in that it self-generates its own principles, standards, processes, results, etc. I would posit that legal academia is autopoietic even within law. To put it more bluntly, practicing lawyers don't care what the law professors are thinking or writing about, as long as the professors are churning out law grads with the basic doctrinal training (that training that Larry Solum aptly says fits like a glove). Or to put it another way, Larry Solum and I are almost the same age, so his essay describing what it was like to be a legal academic from the late 70s until now is fascinating; I was a hard-nosed practitioner over the same period, had no concept or even awareness whatsoever of anything Larry described, and, trust me, was absolutely no worse for the wear as a lawyer!

Mark Graber, Aesop's Bat and Interdisciplinary Legal Scholarship

There is a great deal to say about whether legal education helps the average practitioner, but almost none of this, I think, is all that relevant to interdisciplinary legal scholarship. To begin with, if the University of Maryland School of Law is any example (and it is the only one I know well), most of the professors who might be accused of interdisciplinary legal scholarship teach the basic courses (property, torts, criminal law, conlaw), and teach them from reasonably traditional perspectives. Indeed, a certain cowardice probably explains why I do not do more political science in my law school constitutional law classes. After all, legal practitioners probably will benefit more by reading what Gerry Rosenberg and others have said about the (in)significance of winning constitutional victories in court than by trying to figure out the precise position of the median justice on any issue (given likely changes in the median justice by the time they practice).

Jim Chen, Interdisciplinary legal education: the overt costs:

Here's the bottom line. Not every law school is this constrained, and my hypothetical is admittedly extreme. But every faculty position committed to a professor whose primarily intellectual allegiance lies far afield from the core law school curriculum, who is unwilling or unable to absorb large numbers of mostly frightened, uninterested, and/or unprepared students ? that faculty salary represents precious financial resources that all but fifteen law schools in the United States must consider very, very carefully before committing.

Jim Milles, On the Impact of Blogging and Legal Scholarship:

To me, just as important as the debate itself is the fact that it is taking place online, in real time.  As Jeff Lipshaw notes, Larry Solum's "'post' on the subject ten, and maybe even two, years ago would have been an unread essay in the Journal of Legal Education; today it is read by thousands of people within hours of his writing it."

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on January 21, 2008 (boomark / email).