Interesting post by Gordon Smith at Conglomerate on Ideological Wars Among Business Law Professors:

The [AALS] Section on Business Associations and the Section on Securities Regulation are dominated by free marketeers, while the Section on Socio-Economics has a high(er) concentration of progressives. There is, among this latter group, a pervasive sense that the corporate governance system is corrupt and that legal intervention would make the world a better place. Their discourse is Naderesque, with hyperbolic caricatures of the status quo and urgent calls for reform. While the free marketeers tend to favor the descriptive, the progressives lean toward the normative.

I was surprised to find this same air of moral outrage the next morning in several presentations at the Section on Agency, Partnership, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations, which sponsored a panel entitled, "What’s Left of Fiduciary Duty?" Among some in this group, the word "contract" was articulated with venom, while Cardozo was exalted.

Unfortunately, I don’t sense much real engagement across ideological boundaries. Perhaps surprisingly, given the usual portrayals of the legal academy, free marketeers dominate at elite law schools, and they can afford to ignore progressive critiques (or assign those critiques to footnotes). Progressives talk amongst themselves, reinforcing each other and becoming increasingly exasperated with the free marketeers.