The University Law School

In my previous two posts on the ‘2 v. 3' debate (see here and here), I have tried to suggest that participants in this debate need to give more consideration to how law schools—along with undergraduate institutions or, perhaps, despite undergraduate institutions—contribute to a liberal arts education.  In this post, I’d like to continue to explore the pedagogical inter-relationships between undergraduate (liberal artsy) education and legal education, but from a somewhat different perspective.  This perspective is one that relies less on an image of impoverished undergraduate institutions ‘dumping’ their ill-prepared graduates on law schools and, instead, on empowered undergraduate institutions able to dictate what law schools teach and how they teach it.

Indeed, in an era of widespread plummets in law school enrollments and sudden reversals in how law schools and universities fiscally relate—with some universities (both high- and low-profile) finding themselves in the surprising role of subsidizing their law schools—questions of fiscal reciprocity will likely become intertwined with questions of pedagogical and mission reciprocity.  Consider the perspective of a hypothetical university administrator—or a hypothetical Arts & Sciences faculty—that now sees the university’s law school as no longer a money-maker whose many quirks can be tolerated, but instead as an institutional deadbeat which must be reformed from top to bottom.  If a university can be analogized to the contemporary European Union, its law school might be (former boom/now unemployed) Spain.  (NB:  I’m sure the comments to this post will correct me on this analogy!)

Perhaps unwilling to close the law school, the urge nonetheless might be to leverage its resources (e.g. its tuition dollars, its buildings, its faculty) towards bolstering the undergraduate liberal arts programs—where, perhaps, all the money is now being made.  (This, of course, depends on the research grant and endowment profile of the university.)  Indeed, contrary to how the ‘2 v. 3’ debate is often structured—namely, as one concerning how law schools, responsive to legal employment markets, should choose to structure themselves—the driving force in this debate may soon very likely come from universities themselves.  In such a brave new world, ‘strictly doctrinal’ law faculty teaching ‘real law’—I don’t know what these terms mean, but people seem to believe they exist—may be the ones who suffer under the new university-driven, liberal arts regime.

This, admittedly, is all a bit speculative and surely contingent on universities’ diverse histories and politics, but I make these observations nonetheless because I think they intersect with some of the blind-spots in the current debate over legal education.  One such blind spot is the location of most law schools in larger university contexts.  Indeed, while law schools must be concerned with making sure that their current and recent graduates find remunerative jobs after graduation, the collapse of the traditional legal employment markets has, ironically, made many law schools far less dependent on those legal economies and much more dependent on their own local political economies.  In these local (i.e. university) political economies, the priorities of administrators and faculties other than law school administrators and law school faculties loom large.

Comments

[E]

Can you talk a bit more about what you think this would look like, i.e., how a law school might bolster the undergraduate liberal arts programs in practice? I am not sure I know what you mean, when you say doctrinal faculty might suffer in this setting. And, also, why you think the larger university might ask this, as a quid pro quo, for supporting the law school? What does the undergraduate program *get* ?

[Jeff Redding]

E, thanks for your question. What I was immediately thinking of was the possibility of harnessing law faculty to teach undergraduates. Perhaps this couldn't be done directly, by assigning law faculty courses in the undergraduate curriculum, but it could be done through cross-listing and heavily promoting certain courses taught by law faculty. It's also relatively easy to imagine a university colonizing the facilities of a law school (e.g. using its lecture halls, its event spaces, transforming its empty offices into university-oriented offices), and there is often the incentive to do so, I would think, given that law schools tend to have the nicer buildings on university campuses.

With respect to harnessing law faculty to teach undergraduates, it would be the law faculty who can teach in an interdisciplinary way who would be most valued by the university in that situation (most likely). That would put doctrinal faculty in somewhat of a position of vulnerability. Again, this is all hypothetical, but the larger point is that there are local political economies driving law school reform which the '2 v. 3' debate largely ignores.

[Anon]

This has already occurred in some universities. Up until relatively recently, I know a school that had a quota of undergrad/grad courses that law faculty had to teach. It's actually not hard to come up with how law faculty could staff those courses, especially at elite law schools where a large percentage of law faculty have advanced degrees outside of law. Even without PhDs in the other department, I know law professors who have taught courses in the History, Philosophy, Sociology, Public Policy, Education, and Economics departments, plus a myriad of ethnic studies and identity group programs, as well as university cross-departmental programs for things like international, human rights, and the environment. The genesis is not so much financial as other things like undergrad teacher-student ratio (and the desire to have more freshman seminars and the like) and the focus of many University Presidents on interdisciplinarity and breaking down the boundaries among departments. Of course, professors from other departments, such as Business/Finance, Psychology, Criminology etc, often teach a course in law schools as well.

There is no question that this is the area in which a lot of the "Law &" professors have an advantage. Law Schools end of subsidizing the rest of the university by either loaning out their professors for a course at no cost or at a cost far below tenure-track replacement value. Part of the rationale for using law faculty is that it is harder and less sensible to hire an adjunct in some of the other departments, but in Law, an adjunct may be more valuable than a regular law professor's third or fourth course. So, it is somewhat of a win-win for the university. Resources are deployed more efficiently and teaching elsewhere for a course or a semester can enrich the professor's research and encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas.

[Jeff Redding]

Anon, thanks for the information and detailed explanation—quite useful to know all of this.