Law School Teaching Going Off on Ideological Tangents

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | July 24, 2019 | Charles Rounds Jr.

[reaganaut1]

Back in 2010, I wrote a piece for the Martin Center entitled Bad Sociology, Not Law bemoaning the marginalization of common law doctrine in the American law school curriculum. My point then was that, increasingly, law students were just learning about legal doctrine in their classes rather than being called upon to master the prevailing legal doctrine itself in all its complexities.

Put differently, law teachers are devoting more classroom time to policy (what should be) and less to the prevailing law’s basic anatomy (what is). At Harvard Law School, for example, Agency, Trusts, Evidence, Business Associations, and Family Law are no longer required classes and have not been for some time.

Competently addressing the nuts-and-bolts needs of the middle class when it comes to the rendering of legal services has not been a serious pedagogical goal for quite some time now in most of the prestige law schools.

On the other hand, students in the first year at Harvard are required to participate in “ungraded reading groups” that “allow students to explore an intellectual interest outside the scope of the foundational first-year curriculum.” The course catalog informs us that “topics” are as “diverse” as “legal responses to terrorism, regulation of climate change, Biblical law, detective fiction, conservative jurisprudence, artificial intelligence, and bioethics.”

Over the last nine years, as one can see, the problem I lamented has gotten worse.

This drift from “the law” to “about the law” has an unfortunate political component to it that Northwestern University law professor John O. McGinnis exposed in his article The Embedded Left-Liberal Assumptions of the Legal Academy. His concerns are big picture and fully justified: “Universities should have as their objective the production of knowledge, not activism…And activism interferes with the university’s production of knowledge

[Lurkinanloomin]

Have you found a candidate for 2020 since Trump is so unacceptable to you?

[Nifster]

meh

So glad you decided to post a rant by a law professor who teaches wills and trusts

[Steely Tom]

The Left doesn’t do well under the evidence-based rules of justice that have taken thousands of years to develop.

The Left needs a new set of rules that will be more convenient to their agenda.

[Bookshelf]

Harvard Law; The entering first-year class of about 560 students is divided into seven sections of approximately eighty students to facilitate academic and career advising and to provide regular opportunities beyond the classroom for discussions about law and the legal profession. A senior faculty member leads each section and coordinates numerous activities for students in the section. The first-year required courses in criminal law, contracts, civil procedure, torts, legislation and regulation, and property are taught in the sections.