John O. McGinnis (Northwestern) reviews the new book by Walter Olson (Cato Institute), Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (2011) in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university. To what effect? …
One of his themes is that law professors serve the interests of the legal profession above all else; they seek to enlarge the scope of the law, creating more work for lawyers even as the changes themselves impose more costs on society. By keeping legal rules in a state of endless churning, lawyers undermine a stable rule of law and make legal outcomes less predictable; the result is more litigation and, not incidentally, more billable hours for lawyers, who must now be consulted about the most routine matters of business practice and social life. …
To be sure, intellectual life in the legal academy would be more vibrant if law schools were less lopsidedly left-liberal—if, that is, they encouraged more internal debate. Tenure also permits aging 1960s and 1970s ideologues to enjoy positions of academic power. … What is novel about law schools today is that, compared with their checkered past, so many more scholars are vigorously returning to the methods that made America.
- TaxProf Blog, Book: Elite Law School Ideas Are ‘Catastrophically Bad for America’ (Jan. 24, 2011)
