...because the alternatives, Yale and Harvard, have come out with this nonsense op-ed. Stanford has not....at least not yet.
The Yale and Harvard piece, penned by the deans of each school, is so fatuous it's hard to know where to start.
It begins with this:
In the wake of the recent grand jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island, outrage and despair are reverberating across the nation, including at the law schools where we teach. Many of our students are struggling to reconcile their ideals of justice with what they perceive as manifest injustices in the criminal law system.
What is the documentation for the claim that "outrage and despair are reverberating across the nation?" That Mother Jones is beside itself? And are Yale and Harvard students so out of it that they discovered just this week that there are "manifest injustices in the criminal law system?" Did they miss the OJ acquittal? Were they underground when a jury let Casey Anthony get away with offing her daughter? Were they studying abroad when one state or another abandoned the death penalty for even the most grotesque crimes, and against the wishes of the voters?
The next paragraph tells us:
Law establishes its legitimacy through procedures that are open and fair. Legal procedures create accountability for those who wield power. We ought to determine the law's legitimacy at least in part from the perspective of those who suffer its coercion. When the law's blows fall persistently on the lives and bodies of identifiable groups, and when the procedures we have designed to create legal accountability are short-circuited or fail, our aspiration for a legitimate social order is put at risk.
Yikes.
First, someone should tell these deans that grand juries have never been open, in large part to protect those who are investigated but ultimately not charged. Liberals used to think this was a good idea.
As for the notion that "[w]e ought to determine the law's legitimacy at least in part from the perspective of those who suffer its coercion," I'm a little unclear about what that means. The most prominent class of people who "suffer the law's coercion" are, ummm, criminals, and, no, criminals do not get to determine the law's legitimacy.
And what do the deans believe actually undermines "a legitimate social order?" I have to think it's society's once-blase' failure to control rampant crime -- such as, for example, the crime wave that was building in the Sixties and Seventies while Harvard and Yale, etc., looked the other way and, instead, devoted themselves to long-winded discussions about why criminals were -- ready now? -- the victim class. (Actual victims never got much of a hearing in the Ivy League, and still don't).
Oh, and someone might also want to tell the deans that the depredations of a frayed social order were and are borne most heavily by African-Americans.
I could go on and, and perhaps I will later. For now, I'll just refer to this critique by Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, and send Stanford a bigger contribution.
These deans have to placate their students. It's a financial decision. Tuition is $56G/year. And you wouldn't want your emotionally devastated student body to hop a plane to the Left Coast and fork their money over to, say, Stanford -- where the administration (under pressure, and not wanting to be seen as bigoted) might be more in tune with the injustice that is, in a word, "Ferguson."
What a joke!
One would think that a country this size would have more than three law schools.
You would indeed. Yale, Harvard and Stanford, however, are consistently rated the top three, and so get the most ink.
I don't doubt that they all have top-notch teachers and students, but the little secret behind it all is that the rankings consist of little more than professors and alumni from hot-shot schools patting professors and alumni from other hot-shot schools on the back.
It's a club -- or, as I referred to it a couple of days ago, a bubble. In one way, it's just baloney, because many, many other schools put out first rate graduates. This was never more true than now, when the Big Deal Law Schools are getting unearthly expensive, and it's starting to dawn on potential students that they can get just about the same quality education -- and sometimes without the ideological blanket -- at many other schools that are considerable less expensive.
Still, when you have an op-ed co-signed by two of the Big Three, and it simply blunders its way through the topics it takes on, that is likely to prove an irresistible target for a skeptic like me.
I've always said that Civ Pro is the same whether you learn it at Harvard or some fourth tier outfit. I highly doubt the professor's at the big three provide some super special analysis of Erie, that I didn't get at good old, University of San Diego.