Writing tip from the Legal Watchdog (or, don’t write like a law professor)

This is my second law professor-bashing post today.  This one will be especially valuable to soon-to-be One-Ls, but hopefully will be useful to lawyers as well. 

For those of you starting law school this fall, you’ll soon learn that, if you play the game correctly and educate yourselves before walking into class, the law profs don’t really add anything to your education.  Many of them will have no experience practicing that particular area of law (or any area of law), some won’t be admitted to a bar, and some won’t even have a law degree.  In other words, after properly preparing for class, you will know nearly as much about the law as they do. 

The good news, though, is that while profs don’t add much, they are also largely harmless – some might even be funny, thus making the class time pass more quickly.  But there is one area where professors can cause you true harm, and that area is legal writing. 

Law profs just virtue-signaled their way toward irrelevance

This is the first of two law prof-bashing posts today.

I have previously explained how several law schools copied Yale and “boycotted” the US News law school rankings.  I use quotes around that word because the schools weren’t really boycotting – or even withdrawing from – the rankings.  Rather, they were just succumbing to the irresistible urge to copy Yale and signal their virtue in the process, often to the point of sheer absurdity.  They just can’t help themselves.  And US News responded to all of this professorial griping by changing its ranking methodology.  The new rankings are available here.

Copying Yale and virtue signaling are two things that the wormy legal academy loves doing, so it was pretty easy to spot these events as they unfolded.  However, what I didn’t see happening was that the legal academy was, rather hilariously, screwing itself in the process.