I don't know that lawyers do hate law professors, but if I had to guess, I'd say that most practicing lawyers don't think too highly of legal academics as a group.
But why? She speculates "that economic constriction [might] lead to anti-faculty sentiment."
Look. The disconnect between the practicing bar and the legal academy is hardly a new problem. And the reasons are well known:
- Law schools produce too many students who can't write a coherent letter, let alone a detailed contract or brief. Inside Higher Ed reports: "The 2008 annual results of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, released today, show nearly half of all law school students reporting that their education does not “contribute substantially” to their ability to “apply legal writing skills” in the real world."
- It's bad enough that courses like "Law and the Visual Arts" or "Law and the Evils of Republican White Male Hegemony" don't prepare students for practice, but neither do most "core" courses. The ABA reports: "Now a recent report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, reports that while some improvements have been made, legal education still pays little attention to training students in how to actually practice."
- Legal scholarship is increasingly irrelevant to judges and lawyers. Judge Harry Edwards once described what I think is the right goal of legal scholarship: "a good 'practical' scholar gives due weight to cases, statutes and other authoritative texts, but also employs theory to criticize doctrine, to resolve problems that doctrine leaves open, and to propose changes in the law or in systems of justice. Ideally, the 'practical' scholar always integrates theory with doctrine." Today, however, too many professors focus solely on theory. They write articles about how the study of Icelandic blood feud sagas open new ways for wise neo-Marxist Latinas to use critical feminist theory to expose the hegemony of fat white guys in law school cafeteria lines. And it gets worse as law schools hire more and more PhDs. We increasingly see people with mediocre law school records who lack experience as a law clerk or practicing lawyer getting hired because they're ABD on some project involving multiple regressions and best buddies with the ABD rookie we hired last year. For these folks, if they can't count it, it doesn't exist. And then there's the GIGO problem. A while back I mentioned having read a paper "on executive compensation, whose author should remain nameless. The author found a statistically significant result that he didn't like. So he threw it under the bus by claiming that his regressions were flawed. Accordingly, he turned to panel data analyses that gave him a result he liked. All the while, another paper on the same topic had found the same results as our author's regressions. Who was it that said statistics don't lie?" And don't get me started on their inability to actually analyze traditional legal sources. It's no wonder the NY Times was able to report that “I haven’t opened up a law review in years,” said Chief Judge Dennis G. Jacobs of the federal appeals court in New York. “No one speaks of them. No one relies on them.”
It's almost enough to tempt me to try my hand at being a dean at a law school that wants to try a different approach. Almost. But then I remember one of my favorite Reaganisms -- "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?" -- and come to my senses.
A very dear colleague of mine back when I was at Illinois described being a law professor as a "loophole on life" and compared it to the job of a dean which is "being a fire hydrant in a room full of dogs with urinary incontinence." I think I stick to the former.
