I Am LawProf

Actually, I'm not.  But there are similarities.  LawProf, the anonymous author of a blog called Inside the Law School Scam, purports to be a mid-career, tenured professor at a top-tier law school.  According to this article, which says the reporter confirmed that LawProf is who he says he is, he teaches at a well-regarded but not top-10 law school, is active in publication and service, and has taught at four law schools.  Pretty similar so far.  But I've taught at five law schools, didn't graduate from an American high school, and seem to have graduated a few years after this person.  

Also, I don't write anonymously.  (With one exception: I've written one cracking good humor piece, which I published anonymously in a journal, primarily because I wrote it mostly as a diversion from more serious work and didn't want to yoke my identity to humor writing, and partly because I didn't want to feel as if I was feuding with the scholars I gently made fun of.)  LawProf says he writes anonymously because he feels he would face repercussions if he wrote under his own name, and also because he feels he can be more honest that way.  Unlike some of my online colleagues, I don't necessarily have a problem with anonymous writing (see this piece), and I will assume that LawProf really does feel that he can write more honestly this way.  But it seems to me that tenure is a reward for showing that you will write the truth as you see it despite possible repercussions (in theory, at least; obviously, we're all human, and I'm convinced that too many scholars truckle to others for various reasons), and LawProf doesn't measure up splendidly according to that standard.  Again, we're all human; but he doesn't.  More important, the kind of honesty that anonymity allows can sometimes lack a deeper level of integrity: that is, it can pride itself on its brutal frankness without exhibiting the kind of humility, care, self-doubt, and acknowledgment that one might be wrong that comprises full honesty, the kind of honesty we are often constrained to engage in when we attach our reputations to what we say.  Based on the name of the blog and what he's written so far, I'm not sure how LawProf measures up according to this standard either.

So, given our similar backgrounds, do I reach the same conclusions that LawProf does: that law school is a "scam" perpertrated by law professors, that they are "absurdly" overpaid for doing "almost no real work," that the academic rather than practice background of many professors "guarantees that most of your classes will be a complete waste of time," that professors don't prepare for classes but probably wouldn't benefit students any even if they did, that we should have fewer legal clinics, that full-time legal academics should have much smaller legal salaries, and much more?

No and yes, and probably more no than yes.  To state the obvious truth -- one so obvious that I know no law professors who don't acknowledge it, despite the usual official defenses -- there are plenty of good grounds for criticizing legal education.  (That there always have been good grounds, and that there are always good reasons to criticize any institution, educational or otherwise, is true but beside the point, except to the extent that it might take the edge off the hysteria and help us see ourselves as engaging in ongoing and useful reform instead of applauding ourselves for being "whistle-blowers" who are revealing some unseen conspiracy.)  The kind of writing LawProf is engaging in from behind the veil of anonymity has lots of foundation in fact, and just as much exaggeration.  That means it puts some genuine and important problems in high relief, but also distorts the overall picture.  

I have generally enjoyed Brian Tamanaha's useful posts on problems with legal education.  I've written -- under my own name, and without apparent repercussions -- about problems with the gatekeeping function of law schools and legal scholars, and about the pretensions of legal scholarship to more authority and expertise than it can rightly claim.  I've written both for student-run journals and peer-reviewed journals, and performed peer reviews for university presses and journals.  And I have, as LawProf seems to as well, argued that adjuncts with practice experience are a crucial but often undernoticed part of law school teaching, and that we ought to see their value more clearly and pay more attention to them.  Although I think the economic downturn continues to drive much of the current panic over the state of legal education in ways that can be both good (in that it spurs valuable reforms) and bad (in that it leads us to think nothing has ever been this bad and to overdo the apocalyptic rhetoric about how all this must change, especially because if the economy improves we may end up quiescent rather than dedicated to continuing self-monoriting and reform), I certainly see the value in long-term reform.  If LawProf has useful and constructive, as opposed to merely alarmist and bludgeoning, things to say about reforming legal education, then so much the better.

But will he?  I don't know yet.  As I said, the problem with the kind of rhetorical overkill and murder-by-anecdote that LawProf's anonymity encourages is that it ends up blaming everyone (e.g., virtually no professors prepare for class, a claim that seems quite untrue to me) and no one (e.g., LawProf goes on to say that no professors actually intend to "scam" their students, so that no one and everyone is culpable); proposing sweeping changes without really considering whether those changes will be truly useful or merely dramatic (reducing law professor salaries may be a cosmetically useful statement, but is it actually relevant to the general cause of structural reform?  Isn't the problem lock-step tenure and relatively lock-step salaries rather than high salaries themselves?); and so on.  The question, to me, is whether we can think about and effect real reforms and think carefully about what we do well and poorly(and I do think there are some things we do well, even now), and whether we can do so in a way that not only responds in a reactionary fashion to the current moment, but institutionalizes an ongoing process of experimentation and examination -- or whether we're going to limit ourselves to sound and fury.  For all the talk about how we are so badly off right now that the legal profession and the legal academy must either change or cease to exist, my suspicion is that even a slight economic uptick will lead us back to being comfortable with roughly where we are right now.  That's a downside of revolutionary rhetoric: it subsides easily, and is just as likely to lead to nothing in particular as to something concrete.

My own experience, at a variety of high- and low-ranked schools, is that most law teachers actually do work hard at teaching and many are quite good at it, despite the obvious existence of some bad teachers.  It also suggests to me that many legal scholars work hard at their scholarship, although whether that scholarship has value is a different question, and whether all legal scholarship needs to have the same value (I don't think it does) is yet another question.  I think lower teaching loads have helped those who are serious scholars a great deal, although those people would produce no matter what.  I do think there are some scholars (but not all!) who clearly produce so little and of so little worth that one must shudder, wonder at how their time is spent, and think more carefully about the tenure process.  (I should note that some of these people are excellent and dedicated teachers; but one shouldn't universalize there either, and even if these individuals fully deserve their tenure, it's not clear to me that they should have reduced teaching loads.)  And I think that we ought to fully recognize how integral adjuncts are to legal education -- while resisting the urge to think of them as "the" solution to the "problem" of full-time legal scholars, rather than thinking of both adjuncts and full-time scholars as part of a total mix.  (I think clinics are a part of that mix, too, so I don't agree with LawProf on the general view that we should kill off legal clinics as such.)  I'm struck by just how hard-hit today's law students are on the job market, and feel a strong sense of responsibility to them -- without thinking either that it means I ought to stop being a legal scholar, or that there are no costs to viewing law schools as providing trade education and treating law students only as "consumers."  

I like Tamanaha's posts because I think they are hard-hitting and concrete, even when I don't agree with some of his universalizing tendencies or with all of his specific suggestions for reform.  But I like them most when, and because, they tell it like it is, without concern for how bad it makes law schools look, and think hard about what to do about it, without dismissing scholarship altogether -- Tamahana himself is a prolific and presumably well-paid scholar, who writes on fairly non-practical topics -- or engaging in easy alarmism.  We absolutely need to have those discussions.  If LawProf adds to them, again, so much the better.  But, with all respect to his well-earned frustrations and his good intentions, I see his anonymity, and some of the heat of his writing and his self-description as a "whistle-blower," as more of a distraction than a concrete contribution that can be made a part of a long-term institutional process.