A few weeks back I blogged about Brent Newton's ninety-five theses on the reform of legal education. Now I want to call your attention another article that critiques legal education -- Kenneth Lasson's piece on law school marketing and its effect on the academy, "Compelling Orthodoxy: Myth and Mystique in the Marketing of Legal Education." Lasson's been writing for years about the politics of the academy. (You may recall his article in the Harvard Law Review back in 1990 called "Scholarship Amok.")
"Compelling Orthodoxy" covers a lot of ground -- and I must say that I found this line to be one of the most amusing I have ever read in a law review: "Like business schools and some high-profile athletic programs, legal education is a common cash cow – here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo-moo – often used to subsidize other fields in universities that can’t pay their own way." Now that put a smile on my face -- in fact, it caused me to laugh, which is a reaction I have far too infrequently to law review articles. Lasson's brief abstract is "This article seeks to demonstrate the negative effects of law schools’ preoccupations with enhancing their image and marketing strategy, especially as they are reflected in both scholarship and academic freedom." Download it from ssrn here.
Update: I took down a comment that wasn't relevant to this post and I have now closed comments to this post.
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