Listen to the Codgers: Tushnet and Seidman on 50 Years in the Legal Academy

Better than late than never, let me urge on readers this fine dialogue between Mark Tushnet and Louis Michael Seidman, On Being Old Codgers: A Conversation About a Half Century in Legal Academia. It is dated 2019; I'm not sure why I didn't see it earlier. It is charming, useful, and insightful. Perhaps because I worry over these issues plenty and because I tend to agree with Mark on a number of issues, I don't think the insights are shocking. But they are useful, and I suspect some people who are less historical or institutional in orientation think about them less and might find that they are new to them. There are some statements here--for instance, "Our role is not to change students’ minds, but it is to get them to hold the ideas they have in the most sophisticated form that they can be held."--that many or most of us would take to be self-evident but for which I suspect that there would be some genuine divisions (political, generational, institutional and so on) and that some might even take to be clearly wrong. (It is actually clearly right.) The discussion about the reality or perception of a decline in general agreement about and faith in the seriousness of the enterprise is interesting, and so is Tushnet's suggestion that the brief establishment of a commune in the yard at Yale Law School in the early 70s, and the cultural challenge it represented, was ultimately "more significant than the directly political stuff that I was interested in." So is the discussion of scholarship. The whole thing is well worth your time.