Legal Commentary

Fans of Joe Queenan will recall a series of articles he wrote for Spy Magazine in the early 90s called "Admit it!  It Sucks!" in which he skewered various things--jazz, "San Francisco"--that all good serious cultured intellectuals are supposed to say they love but that, if they were honest with themselves, would admit actually suck.  So, for example, in his jazz column, he runs a hypothetical: your friend calls you up with two tickets to see Wynton Marsalis's 11:00 pm show at the Blue Note, and you beg off, citing various excuses about how your mother is coming to visit you that night and how cigarette smoke "isn't really good for your asthma."  But, he says, "after you put down the phone, you know that it's time to be honest with yourself.  You blew off your friend because deep down inside, gnawing away in your bosom, is an ugly, horrible secret that you dare not share with anyone else--even though everybody else in the country shares it.  Jazz sucks."  He continues:

OK, so I actually love jazz, but you know Queenan has a point here.  And the question that follows for this group of readers is what about the legal academy: What are the things that we as purportedly serious intellectual scholars are all supposed to say we love, love, love, but actually, deep down sort of think kind of actually suck?  Here are some nominations: (1) peer-reviewed journals (I mean, come on, we whine and whine about student edited law reviews, but for the 95% of us out there that don't write groundbreaking scholarship--and here I'm making the controversial assumption that there is a distinction between "good" legal scholarship and "not good" legal scholarship--isn't it better that we can blame the "ignorant" students when the Harvard Law Review once again rejects our article on the original understanding of the Weights and Measures Clause?); (2) interdisciplinary work (really--if I wanted to hear about philosophy all the time, I would have gone to philosophy grad school . . . and taught six classes a year for $46,000); (3) workshops and conferences (oh, great, here's another "comment followed by a two part question" to which the speaker "will take the second question first" (incidentally, do you ever wonder what would happen if the person giving the talk actually took the first question first?)); (4) pursuing "social justice" (OK, never mind, I guess that one's pretty solid).

What do people think?  Any of these fit the bill?  Other ideas?  Anonymous comments are welcomed and danced with, vigorously.