Practicing lawyer Bill Callison takes on Paul "ScamProf" Campos, concluding that:
Fundamentally, Campos calls law professors (perhaps on the median, perhaps on the mean, perhaps somewhere else) lazy and stupid. My initial reaction, having spent considerable time in his institution over the last year and in others over the last decades, is that the man must be confusing himself with others. Narcissus looking into the pond and all that. My second reaction is something along the lines of “I’ve been watching law schools for years, and I know bullshit when I see it.” My third reaction is something like “The guy’s lucky that I’m not his dean.” Confessions of ineptitude and nonchalance don’t ring very well.
My perspective – by and large (with some exceptions) the law professors I have known through the years are decent, smart, hard-working, and thoughtful people who genuinely care about and respect their students and their colleagues. One really cannot ask for much more than this. I have watched them teach; I have watched them prepare themselves to teach; I have watched them impart a sense of the ethics of dispassion, open-mindedness and hard work to their students; I have watched them struggle with difficult intellectual assignments; I have heard them talk coherently about difficult and important subjects; I have read a considerable amount of their writings; I have written with them; I have served on legislative drafting and other committees with them; I have watched them participate in, work with and teach to the organized bar; I have watched them apply expertise and real knowledge in myriad ways; I have seen lazy and dumb ones; and I have seen extremely hard-working and smart ones (will the real Bruce Ackerman please stand up?). But about the last thing I would do is pigeon-hole very many of the many law profs I know into the stylized caricature that Campos constructs. I wager that extends well beyond the subset that I know. Period. End of story.
It's an interestng analysis from a guy with a uniquely well rounded background. Go read the whole thing.
