Walter Olson, creator of the blog Overlawyered.com, recites concisely the purported evils of the progressive vision of law. In alarmist rhetoric the Cato Institute Senior Fellow sees not UN commandos in black helicopters but shameless check writers at philanthropies. Today's target: The Ford Foundation. Aided by a stock photo of Bernadine Dohrn with her FBI wanted poster, he accuses Ford of "shaping America by re-making her law schools".
For over half a century, the Ford Foundation has quietly worked to turn the nation’s law schools into agents of Sixties-style “social change.” Other donors like Carnegie, Soros, and MacArthur have followed Ford’s path, and the result can be seen in landmark Supreme Court decisions, the plethora of politicized “legal clinics” on campus, and the courts’ growing willingness to defer to “international law.I recently celebrated what Olson deplores in my recent article `People's Electric: Engaged Legal Education at Rutgers-Newark Law School in the 1960's and 1970's'. To Cato and Olson it is just an example of what he has labeled in a book-length tract "Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia". I'm disappointed that he gives so much credit to the Ford Foundation, and so little credit to the energy and insights of the faculty at Rutgers-Newark, where it all really began.
'via Blog this'
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