Prof. Dorothy Brown of Emory has this op-ed in the WaPo, headlined "Law schools are in a death spiral. Maybe now they'll finally change." The article includes this passage:
While law firms can fire lawyers, law schools cannot cut their largest expense: faculty. Most faculty have tenure, which equals lifetime job protection -- as long as the school remains open. While faculty could be part of the solution to legal education's woes, we are actually the problem.As additional, huge problem that is neither mentioned by Brown nor considered in the notorious USN&WR rankings is a lack of diversity of viewpoint. When students hear nothing but one side of controversial issues for their entire time in school, what you have is not true education but Maoist indoctrination in the guise of education. When the academic consensus on any issue with political overtones can be predicted with 100% certainty merely by identifying the Politically Correct position, the consensus no longer means anything.
Legal scholarship is in a terrible state, with counter-intuitive incentives for faculty. Status comes with publishing, but more publishing means less teaching and interacting with fewer students. In the legal academy, second- and third-year law students select which law professors' articles to publish; while my second and third years are brilliant, they cannot select for quality the same way experts would. But even if you think the student-run system is fine, the value of legal scholarship, which is rarely read, has its skeptics, among them Chief Justice John Roberts. Scholars at the University of Florida argue in a recent study that very few articles are cited for their ideas. This broken system is also subsidized disproportionately by the tuition dollars of poorer law students.
I am thus grateful to Georgetown University Law Center and its Dean, Bill Treanor, for having some first-rank conservatives on its faculty, Professors Nick Rosenkranz and Randy Barnett, and Professor Emeritus Don Wallace. As adjuncts, Georgetown has the brilliant Lee Liberman Otis (former Scalia clerk and co-founder of the Federalist society) and, bringing up the rear, her husband.
I remember hearing that the University of San Diego had a pretty conservative faculty. Off the top of my head, I'd say my contracts, torts, and con law profs were pretty conservative. Maybe that explains my awesomeness.
But seriously, I felt my legal education at least ideologically wasn't Maoist at all and pretty balanced all things considered.
Mine was also. My comment was intended to refer to those schools that have no balance, which unfortunately seems to be an ever-growing portion of them. It is not unusual at all to meet students who say they never got anything but the leftist slant their entire time in law school.
The extent of your awesomeness requires more cosmic explanations.
Curious to hear from you which law school you think are the most biased AND whether you think US News rankings might reward such bias. While at Harvard, I always got the impression that Yale and Stanford had even more liberal faculties and HLS --- which I think is by far superior simply based on its size and breadth --- is behind or ties with these two schools in the rankings. In addition, UC-Irvine headed by a noted liberal scholar, jumped to 30 in it first official rankings. And Berkeley moved up, while Georgetown moved down a spot.
Though folks here may not believe it, I have long tried at Ohio State to make sure we have a number of diverse and dynamic voices represented on the faculty and throughout the student body. I cannot help but wonder if such efforts get, at least indirectly, penalized in the rankings game.
Thoughts?
A good question ... wish I had a good answer.
The only information I have is anecdotal. I'm told that during her tenure at Harvard Elena Kagan actively sought to broaden the intellectual diversity, even consulting with a certain FedSoc co-founder. I have also heard through the grapevine that certain members of the Yale faculty made it their mission to block any candidates who might pollute their ideological purity. So your Harvard v. Yale comparison may be valid.
But I don't know. There is no systematic measurement of these things to date that I know of. I suggested to the editors of USN&WR that they add a viewpoint diversity index as a separate tally, even if they wouldn't consider it in their main ranking methodology. They didn't even bother to answer me.
This would be a good project for someone with the depth of pockets to do it.
I was thinking about this a bit more, and I don't see how ideology fits into a lot of the standard first year curriculum. I mean is there a conservative or liberal spin on Civ Pro? Or Torts? Or Contracts? Maybe on some stuff like class actions or joint and several liability but that at least in my opinion isn't overly ideological. I think preliminary injunctions and personal jurisdiction are pretty neutral topics.
Oh also, forgot to mention, my Criminal Procedure was pretty conservative too - I recall him mentioning a lot of the issues on the 4th amendment exclusionary rule that Kent has brought up in various posts and brief - i.e. it should really be limited to intentional actions and so forth.
I went to a very left-leaning law school that has only moved further to the left since I graduated. It was very obvious from my first day in class that both of my criminal procedure profs believed that cops and prosecutors were the oppressors of society. Recently, a group of students tried to get a legal clinic for prosecutors started. That effort was squelched by the faculty because they thought a prosecution clinic was "inconsistent with social justice." The next time I got a solicitation for a donation from the school, I wrote a long letter explaining exactly why they would never receive a dime of my money until and unless they figured out that protecting people from being victimized by criminals is the very definition of "social justice."
The law-abiding people of your county are most fortunate that you came through the brainwashing with your sense intact.