Monday, August 22, 2011

An Academic Donnybrook: Professor Campos v. Professor Leiter

It has now been made public (by Professor Campos) that Professor Paul Campos is the author of the blog Inside the Law School Scam. Professor Campos has used that blog and other outlets to attack alleged scams and frauds by law schools. These attacks have apparently aroused the ire of Professor Brian Leiter (but I have no personal knowledge of this). Professor Campos replied thus to Professor Leiter's presumed positions:
It is thus with a certain sadness that I note one of the leading lights of contemporary legal academia, Professor Brian Leiter, the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director, Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Value, at the University of Chicago Law School, has, I have been told, chosen to point out to the world that, in comparison to himself, I am a poor scholar and have reprehensible work habits, rather than responding to any of my arguments about the state of the contemporary law school. This is unfortunate, as who could doubt that someone with Professor Leiter's extensive training in the analytic philosophical tradition would not have many valuable contributions to make regarding such questions as precisely why law school costs have increased exponentially, even as the job prospects of law school graduates have declined? (When I was doing background research for this piece I was reminded that the law faculty on which Professor Leiter currently serves includes several legal academics whose own professional work is in every sense admirable. I can only imagine how pleased they are to have acquired someone with Professor Leiter's unique set of talents). Nor can anyone doubt that Professor Leiter would add a valuable voice to the debate regarding how much contemporary legal academic scholarship is actually worth the remarkably high price students are required to pay for it. One must admit that it would be unrealistic to expect someone as busy as Professor Leiter to take time away from the rest of his many professional obligations to note the substance of this blog, let alone that he should be expected to put in the effort necessary to evaluate the academic talents and personal character of its author. Professor Leiter already makes a significant sacrifice of his time and talents by maintaining a blog that catalogs in exquisite detail the professional comings and goings of legal academics and professors of philosophy. He also devotes his remarkably wide-ranging abilities to constructing and maintaining a set of law school rankings (as well as another one for philosophy faculties), that does a far more rigorous job of determining the precise academic quality -- or at least prestige -- of the publications of law school faculty than the rightly-reviled set published by U.S. News & World Report. Without Professor Leiter's exemplary work on the subject, legal academics and the world at large would both find it much more difficult to determine whether, for example, the faculties of the NYU and Columbia law schools have had the fifth and sixth greatest scholarly impact on their fields over the past five years, or vice versa. (Professor Leiter's deans and faculty colleagues must find it especially gratifying that his rankings consistently discover that whatever school currently employs him deserves a a higher spot in the legal academic hierarchy than is assigned to it in the USNWR rankings). Nor can anyone blame Professor Leiter for refusing to bring his expertise and experience to bear on such matters as the extent to which law schools actually train students to engage in some aspect of the practice of law, given that he has never held any professional position for which a law degree (let alone bar admission) is a requirement. On this subject, his silence reflects a becoming and characteristic modesty. I am hardly in a position to dispute Professor Leiter's evaluation of the quality of my scholarship, both because I haven't seen it, and because, as I believe Freidrich Nietzsche observed (or perhaps it was Lord Coke), no man should be a judge in his own case. That Professor Leiter's scholarship, touching on such complex and important subjects as those explored in "Rorty and the Philosophical Tradition: Comment on Professor Szubka." 25 Diametros 159 (2010)," and in "Explaining Theoretical Disagreement." 76 University of Chicago Law Review 1215 (2009) (also published in Spanish in Analisis y Derecho), neither of which I have read, but which I plan to give my full attention as soon as time permits, is of both the highest quality and the deepest relevance to the mission of the contemporary law school is a proposition that surely no one qualified to evaluate the question would bother to dispute. As for a comparison of our work habits and moral character, I have never met, let alone worked with, Professor Leiter, so I must regretfully leave such comparisons to the tools employed by others. 
All of which is to say that I welcome substantive discussion and disagreement about the issues raised on this blog, but have no interest in pursuing evaluations of personal character and the like. No reasonable person can deny that, in the course of what to all outward appearances is a brilliant career, Professor Leiter has played the legal academic game superbly well, and I wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors (assuming, of course, that those endeavors do not involve any actionable statements regarding the targets of his ire). For the moment, it is enough to note that the kind of work he does has its rewards, and that which I do has others.
 

&&&


The dynamic evidence page

It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law_prof_blogging_on_law_school_scam_is_no_longer_anonymous

Unknown said...

In the grand scheme of things, it is not very important whether one "likes" Professor Campos more than Professor Leiter, or vice-versa. But the question of what ought to be taught in law schools is important. In my preferred scheme, there would be no single answer to this question: I would make scholarly & pedagogical diversity an important value: I would let different law schools pursue different pedagogical and scholarly objectives. But if law schools are to be given this latitude, it is critical that law schools be up front about what they do and do not do for their students. Then students who have no interest in Rorty and similar matters could avoid law schools where Rorty's philosophy or whatnot is emphasized. But it is fair to ask if law schools are capable of such transparency. And it is fair to wonder how prospective students are to judge the importance of Rorty and similar matters to the study of law before they know much of anything about Rorty, similar matters, or the law. I also put to one side the important and troublesome question of whether publicly-funded law schools fall into a special category -- whether, because (and if) they receive (large amounts of) public money, such law schools cannot go whichever way they please and must do whatever (someone thinks, but who?) best prepares their students for work as a legal professional (practicing lawyer, judge, legislator, etc.). -- Please note that the word "best" in the last sentence adds a inherently tricky issue to the stated hypothesis about the obligations of state-funded law schools: "best" in what sense(s)?