Legal Commentary

I haven't been reading Jason's series of posts about "super-elite" law schools, but it strikes me that this piece, which I was going to excerpt anyway, may be something of a response to his own comment on his latest post. The New York Times yesterday linked to an interesting piece in The American Scholar by William Deresiewicz, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. Here's a particularly relevant snippet:

The first disadvantage of an elite education . . . is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren?t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely?indeed increasingly?homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it . . . .

But it isn?t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn?t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren?t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were ?the best and the brightest,? as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic ?Oh,? when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I?d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say ?in Boston? when I was asked where I went to school?the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don?t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don?t go to college at all.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren?t ?smart.? The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one?s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The ?best? are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

Are these observations especially relevant with respect to law school? How worthwhile is it working towards Jason's "super-elite" law school, defined by the qualities that he says make it "super-elite?" Granted that one important aspect of law and legal practice is analytical excellence, and that it may be a sine qua non for much legal practice. But do people who have tested well for analytical intelligence, and attained some success as a result, tend to over-value it in the law as compared to other kinds of intelligence -- the ability to work with others, creativity, emotional intelligence, and so on? Is it any wonder that so many graduates of the top law schools end up climbing the standard rungs from law review to clerkship to the Peter Principle points of either unhappy non-equity partnership or unproductive tenure -- while many other law school graduates, who are neither the tops of their class nor graduates of elite law schools, become rainmakers, superb mediators, top trial lawyers, the developers of innovative legal arguments, and agents of social change? Is there a point at which the criteria we so often value in the constantly insecure world of legal, and legal academic, ranking are not meaningful criteria for the development of meaningful legal skills, but merely measures of how well "people like us" talk to people like us?

As a side note, a quick-and-dirty Westlaw search for "emotional intelligence" in the same paragraph as "law school" yields a little over 50 results. A similar search substituting the words "first in his [or her] class" within the same paragraph as "law school" turns up around 240 results. What do you think we value?