Law prof/blogger Tom Smith reviews Walter Olson's book Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America
Walter Olson thinks that American law schools are the origin of some very bad ideas, in something like the way bats are said to be the reservoir of certain nasty viruses in Africa: the germs of pernicious concepts incubate there in relative obscurity between epidemics, erupting occasionally to spread destruction and misery. Sadly, Olson is not entirely wrong.
Schools for Misrule is a broad complaint against American law schools, especially perhaps the Yale Law School, alleging that they promulgate terrible jurisprudence. ...
It is not clear, however, whether law schools are responsible for the abuses Olson identifies or merely reflect their professional and political environment. Law schools also should get credit for incubating intellectual movements that have proven powerful tonics for the very problems Olson complains about. The law and economics movement, for example, which evolved at the University of Chicago law school, has deeply undercut theories that everybody should be liable for everything and has increased respect for common-law rules and adjudication. Public choice theory, sprouting in part from the law school at George Mason University, and now widely influential, has made the idea of benevolent judge-reformers seem hopelessly naïve. Harvard Law School hired Jack Goldsmith ’89JD, outspoken critic of the grander claims of international human rights law. Even Berkeley has not seen fit to extradite torture memo author and law professor John Yoo ’92JD to the mercies of his many adamant critics. ...
In other words, the problem is liberal law professors not law schools. Smith concldues, however, that:
Olson’s book, if one-sided, is nevertheless well worth reading. His histories of liability expansion, the role of wealthy private foundations, and international human rights law activism, as well as the ever potentially corrupting influence of money, amount to a sobering crash course in how bad things can happen to good schools and countries. Olson writes with a humorous touch and wears his considerable erudition about the history of legal education lightly. Anyone interested in how law schools influence our broader political debates should read this book, even if it is not the only book on this topic one should read.
