Legal Commentary

Over at the excellent business law blog, Conglomerate, Gordon Smith, who just finished his first year as a professor at BYU and has taught at five other law schools, is good enough to share some thoughts on mine and Paul Horwitz's posts from yesterday on BYU and other religiously affiliated law schools.

On religious affiliation, he says in part:

"Finally, the most distinctive aspect of BYU Law School is the religious affiliation. Jason makes the obligatory disclaimer: "And no, it's not for everybody with its religious affiliation and fairly conservative faculty, administration and student body ..." Can't we say "And no, it's not for everybody ..." about every law school? Wisconsin is not for people who hate snow. Lewis & Clark is not a great place for people who hate hanging around environmentalists. Chicago is pretty uncomfortable for stupid people. So, yes, BYU is distinctive on religious grounds, but as Jason observes, most people figure that out long before they set foot in the building."

I'm glad Gordon made this point because I was confused not to hear a defense of BYU from our Yale friends yesterday, who had been defending their school in part on "different strokes for different folks" grounds. If you want moral relativism, go to Yale; if you want a little more moral certainty, go to BYU.

And in defense of religious homogeneity, he says:

"[T]he notion of "religious homogeneity" is a placeholder for a much broader accusation of lack of viewpoint diversity. While I am not going to pretend that BYU has no challenges with regard to diversity, I was impressed with the passion of my first-year law students last fall in Contracts on all sides of the issues we covered in the course. (By the way, I was using the Wisconsin materials, so we weren't ducking tough values issues!) The empirical point is hard to verify, but my impression was that religious homogeneity actually enabled or encouraged many of those discussions. Why? Because the students were required to examine the implications of their (assumed) shared beliefs. They could not pass off their disagreements on the simplistic ground that they held different values than their classmates. This was real learning, not indoctrination."

Read the whole post here.

Note also BYU 3L's comment on my prior post, making the case that being one of ten non-Mormons at BYU has its downsides.