Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Law School Snark of the Day: The Utility of Interdisciplinary Scholarship

Over at Brian Leiter’s blog, they’re debating what criteria are necessary for a law school to be deemed strong in “social scientific study of law” and whether Stanford meets them.

Five of our faculty members have Ph.Ds in Political Science (Hensler, Victor, Rabin, Ho, and Cuellar).  In fact, five out of seven of our entry-level academic hires since 2001 have Ph.Ds in fields other than economics.  Of the remaining two, one has a Ph.D in economics but does both historical as well as econometric work quite different from the quotidian applications of microeconomic theory that seem to be at the core of what some observers take to be “law and economics.” Maybe this is more of an investment in interdisciplinarity than “social science,” but it’s not at all obvious where one begins and the other ends.

Yeah, but can any of them brief a case? More seriously, are any of them doing work that is routinely cited by the bench and bar? In his well-known critique of modern legal scholarship, Judge Harry Edwards remarked: “Theory wholly divorced from cases has been of no use to me in practice.” My practice experience confirms that criticism, at least as long as we put strong emphasis on the phrase “wholly divorced.” Theory brought to bear on specific legal issues often can be quite illuminating, but the great tradition of legal scholarship is the deployment of theory in the service of helping the bench and bar better understand doctrine. Unfortunately, the rush to hire newly minted PhDs with little or no legal experience has helped contribute to a law school culture that has been aptly described as follows:

Law professors write solely for other academics, but since their underlying religious/ideological/political positions are relatively conventional, they can also reassure their co–ideologues outside of the academy that someone really smart who speaks the language of modern moral/legal theory is on their side. People outside the academy still give enough credence to academics and academic discourse that they want someone in that world to hold and defend their views, even if they themselves would never be able to decipher the academic writings in which they do so.

No wonder most judges and lawyers with whom I’ve discussed these questions tell me they ignore the law reviews. No wonder blogging may be the future for communication between bench and bad and the academy.