Legal Research

The Postradical Legal Generation

By David Cheifetz

The title of this posting is the title of an article that just appeared on the Chronicle Review website of the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Call it a more temperate look (more temperate than that of  a now retired Canadian law professor – already noted on this forum)  at law school education, albeit in the United States rather than Canada.

The focus of the article is the education of the graduates from “elite” law schools in the U.S.  “at a time when most of the more-radical members of the faculty had either already disappeared or were losing their last battles.”

The author of the article (a current professor of law at a US law school) states:

The law and the law schools that teach it are temperamentally more conservative than the rest of the university. Anthropologists or sociologists do not teach their classes wearing suits, but law professors often do. While students in the humanities might be considered to have dressed up if they attend class in jeans, law students are often caught wearing nothing more casual than khaki pants. The professionalism of the American law school is evident.

The purpose point of the article is to explain why President Obama and his last SCOTUS appointment (Justice Sotomayor) and the current nominee (Elena Kagan) are (seemingly) less partisan figures.

The article’s concluding paragraph is:

Law schools have changed a lot since Sotomayor, Kagan, and Obama sat in their first classes decades ago. Understanding those changes can help us better understand today’s courts?and the legal thinkers presidents may appoint to sit on them.

Worth reading.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 21, 2010 (boomark / email).