Following up Anonymous Law Prof: ‘Law Professors Are Scamming Their Students’:

Constitutional Daily has a lengthy interview. Among the incendiary observations:

[W]hen you’re teaching the same material for the fifth or seventh or tenth time, there simply isn’t that much useful extra preparation you can do, even if you’re particularly diligent (which again in my experience many if not most tenured law professors aren’t.) The bottom line is that people go into law teaching because they don’t want to work as hard as they would at the typical alternative career track for them, which is practicing law at a big firm. This isn’t true 100% of the time, but it is a huge motivation for the vast majority of people who go into law teaching, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or a fool. …

There is absolutely no justification for students paying large amounts of money to subsidize the writing of traditional legal scholarship. As I argue on ITLSS, most legal scholarship has neither academic nor practical value, since most legal academics are neither lawyers nor scholars. Of course the present generation of legal academics would not be willing to take a big pay cut to just teach, because many of them do that already (a large proportion of tenured faculty do little or no writing).

Anonymous Law Prof’s latest posts:

• Would You Pay $100,000 for a Law Review Article?
• Law and?
• What Does It Mean to Call Law School a Scam?
• Another Perspective

Brian Leiter (Chicago), Isn’t It Obvious Who the “LawProf” Writing the “Law School Scam” Blog Is?:

It was obvious to me after reading the blog, with its reckless and inaccurate generalizations (cf. Paul Horwitz’s commentary), since the author has written in this vein under his own name in the past. …  I am somewhat amazed he would do this, since the blog is tantamount to an admission that he is not really doing his job and doesn’t deserve his salary (given what I know about him, I’m inclined to believe that).  More seriously, when his identity becomes public, as seems inevitable given how poorly he has disguised it, he will have humiliated his colleagues and his school, neither of which deserve his latest exercise in seeking the limelight. … Out of respect for his school and his colleagues, who deserve much better, I will not be posting his identity.

For a tax perspective, see the comment to my original post by Tax Prof Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.):

Sorry, but I don’t scam my students. I spend my time creating value for them. I think about how to create value for them in the shower, when I go to sleep, and when I wake up in the morning. When I’m done with them, they’re damned good tax lawyers, and most of them get good jobs. The author should stop accusing others of malfeasance and start focusing on how to provide value for the folks who pay him. Whether what he does is useless or useful is his choice — not his school’s, not his profession’s. His choice.

Tax Prof Linda Beale (Wayne State) offers her views in Law School (and Profs) a Scam?:

Maybe the description of a typical law professors’ workload/work methods is true for someone who teaches a couple of sections of the same first-year course year-in and year-out or even others who teach mostly case-based disciplines of the law where they basically hold easy-going conversations with students around a couple of cases during each class section.  … As a tax professor, I have to say that this description of typical preparation and typical classes, even if true for most law professors, is something quite different from the norm I believe exists for most tax professors.  Most tax professors will have practiced tax law at least a few years (in my case, more than six).  There are few people who could get away with teaching anything but the most limited tax course without more practical knowledge than can be acquired from reading the text and the teacher’s manual.  Most will keep up with key cases, legislation (and there’s lots of tax legislation to keep up with) and commentary, meaning that there are many hours each week that must be devoted just to keeping up with what is going on in the field.  Many will also research further various topics as part of their preparation for teaching particular classes, because a change in the law may have impacted something that is planned to be covered, and there may be new administrative guidance, relevant cases, or relevant commentary that throws some light on the full impact of the change. That research will be done, even if the class ends up being mostly about the same as the last time it was taught–either because the changes were too nuanced to be covered in an introductory level course, or because there was nothing very helpful out there.  Even if not directly taught in the course, the research and reading will give the tax prof more depth in the discussion–something to bring in, if the opportunity presents itself, from the ‘real world’ of transactions and deal-making.  Most manuals (with notable exceptions) barely touch the surface of the issues, and are far too limited to be considered an adequate foundation for a class.

Additional coverage:

• ABA Journal, A Law Prof Scamblogger?
• Daily Beast (The Dish), Inside the Law School Scam, by Andrew Sullivan
• PrawfsBlawg, Last Thoughts on LawProf, by Paul Horwitz (Alabama)
• Wall Street Journal, Law School a Scam? Professor Concurs