Paul Campos on the evolution of law schools and their professors

Knightly studies the law

This excerpt is from a larger blog post by Paul Campos.  Campos, of Inside the Law School Scam fame, first takes aim at a typical law school professor.  I don’t know this particular prof or his work, but from what I know about the academy, Campos’s target is indeed the prototypical, modern law prof.  Campos writes:

[His] career path is this: he was an undergrad, then he was a law student, then he was a law professor. That’s it. That’s all he’s ever done. He’s never had a job as a lawyer, or indeed as anything but a professor, at least not as an adult anyway.

But it wasn’t always that way at American law schools.  There was a time, before I went to law school, where law profs had actually practiced law before joining the academy to teach.  And law schools embraced their role as professional schools or trade schools — much the way medical schools do. 

In the 1960s, American law schools were on the whole intellectually moribund places, although they did have the advantage of employing a lot of faculty members who . . . had actually been lawyers at some point in their lives.  Law schools at the time conceived of themselves as professional training schools, with not much in the way of academic pretensions.

But then the Harvard-Yale-Stanford crew got involved, took over the academy, and started hiring their own straight out of law school.  As Campos wrote in a separate article, of those recent law prof hires who have any practice experience at all, the average length is 1.4 years — and that is mostly in highly sheltered settings rather than in the courthouse or other “trenches” of the practice of law.  (The 1.4 number is overstated, of course, if you include those profs who, like Campos’s targert, went from law school right into the professoriate with at most a clerkship in between.)  Here’s Campos’s take:

For complicated reasons . . . the elite and semi-elite slice of legal academia started to think it needed to tart itself up and integrate itself more into the rest of the university. The fastest and easiest way to do with was to become more “interdisciplinary,” and the discipline that lent itself most readily to this project was economics, or more precisely microeconomics, or more precisely still Microeconomics 101.

And the interdisciplinary trend, also known as “law and” studies, is here to stay — particularly at the “elite” law schools.  And law profs at these schools often teach a 2+1 course load, i.e., two courses in the fall semester and one in the spring, or vice versa.  (This is shocking to some college lecturers, who have to teach a 4+4 or even a 5+5 course load.)  With only three courses to teach per year, this leaves plenty of time for the profs to produce one “piece of scholarship” each year: 

[T]here’s basically an infinite market for glib pseudo-academic bullshit, if it protects and enhances the political and economic power of the already wealthy and powerful.  That, more than anything else, is the base on which the intellectual Potemkin village that [these law profs] have built continues to rest so securely.

Great stuff!  Hopefully Campos will follow up with a post describing the “complicated reasons” that led to the Harvard-Yale-Stanford set taking over the legal academy and turning it into a factory for the production of “glib pseudo-academic bullshit.”  I’m very curious about why and how that happened. 

I know the law profs love the current state of the legal academy, as they get paid a ton of money (relative to academics in college and even to most practicing lawyers) to produce one law review article and teach three courses.  And I know that some of them do have very high opinions of themselves — though many are kind, even modest people.  But I’ve often thought that some law profs must feel a little insecure as they occupy that shaky, artificial construct between real academic research and the practice of law, while never having engaged in either one. 

(Hat tip to Mo Hernandez for alerting me to Campos’s blog post.)