Law Schools Are Bad for Democracy - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Law Schools Are Bad for Democracy - The Chronicle of Higher Education: They whitewash the grubby scramble for power.
by Samuel Moryn

Yale Law School, where I teach, was roiled by the confirmation process of Brett Kavanaugh. The usual disagreements about the politics of the day that are healthy in any community were exacerbated by a sense that this was not just one more confirmation fight but an epic battle over the future of the country. Students, in particular, denounced the school for its complicity with elite power and the nonchalance of its commitment to institutional and national justice. And when the accelerant of personal-misconduct charges was thrown into the blaze, the school began a period of self-examination.

This dispute raised a lurking question: What is law school for? How does it serve the individual aspirations of some of our most gifted young people, and the high ideals for social justice that many of them care about? "Elite institutions get so satisfied," my colleague Harold Hongju Koh observed in The New York Times, in the midst of the controversy. "Who are we? What do we stand for? Are we being true to our values? It’s a constant struggle for defining the identity of the institution as times change."

Get the Chronicle Review Newsletter

Sign up to receive highlights from our magazine of ideas and the arts, delivered once a week.

Sign Up Here

Some might be forgiven for thinking that there is an obvious answer to the question of what law schools, even elite ones, are for. Their purpose is to make lawyers, especially practicing lawyers. And for faculty members lucky enough to teach at such schools, they are not just for schooling but also for scholarship.

Such easy answers do get at the core of what law schools are supposed to be about and therefore how they ought to be organized. But they also miss a lot. Many students believe that they are doing something more than enrolling in a trade school to solve other people’s legal problems for (often tremendous) pay. Students are also hoping to advance or even incarnate certain ideals of political and social justice — ideals that professors, too, often talk about. The Kavanaugh crisis exposed a longstanding worry that law schools, and especially elite law schools, are failing to advance those ideals. Law schools allow you to do well. But it is harder to establish that they allow for doing good.