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Ethics

: Legal Ethics Forum

Practitioners one month, academic observers the next?

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In today's NYT David Brooks has an article on the shift in the US Army's approach to fighting counter insurgency. He argues that the capacity of the army to do so arose from the fact that its leadership was both academic and actually engaged on the field, with the result that it was both able to write critically about what was happening and knew what it was writing about. Brooks suggests that this approach would be beneficial across many endeavors, but that it was not institutionally possible most of the time (he lists business schools as an exception).

As I read that I felt that it articulated what I think should be the ideal that law - in practice, in legal education, in legal writing - should aspire to. Not that every academic needs to practice, nor that every practitioner needs to write, but that for the law to function well people who write about it should care and be engaged with how it operates in practice and those who work in its operation should be actively engaged in thinking critically about whether it functions well or badly.

This is not, however, I think an ideal that is always as well realized as it should be. At a conference a couple of months ago an academic colleague of mine (who practiced for many years) was dismissed as "ivory tower" by the lawyer who (in my view) just didn't want to engage with his criticisms of the confidentiality rules. Yet I often read academic articles and think... really? How is that helpful precisely?

If my observations are correct - that Brooks is right, that this applies to law and that it is not always well realized - I wonder how that could be changed? Law schools seem an obvious place to start, but also face some challenges given how we value success in law schools, especially from a university perspective.

Full post as published by Legal Ethics Forum on May 07, 2010 (boomark / email).