31 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Problems With Law Schools, March 1, 2011
This review is from: Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (Hardcover)
Of all the possible explanations for Barack Obama, one of the most intriguing is that, like Bill Clinton before him, he was both a law school graduate and a law school professor.
As such, Walter Olson explains in his new book, Mr. Obama was subjected to an environment of overwhelming leftism.
Democrats outnumber Republicans 28 to 1 on the Stanford law school faculty, 23 to 1 at Columbia, Mr. Olson reports.
Mr. Olson's book describes the various ways that law schools have shaped public policy. Clinics on the law school campuses get involved in political issues. He writes that Yale's Legislative Advocacy Clinic "attempts to move the state of Connecticut toward 'a more progressive agenda in taxing.'" CUNY law school, meanwhile, is "itself a unit of the same New York City government it regularly sues on welfare issues. The website of Fordham's Community Economic Development clinic says it works to "limit gentrification."
Law schools, including professors who profited personally from their work on anti-tobacco litigation, helped shape changes in product liability law. They also helped spawn "public law litigation" suits under which, Mr. Olson recounts, courts "in more than half the states took control of school financing systems" and "took over control of child welfare departments in thirty-five states, prisons in more than forty, and jails in all fifty..... The process thrust courts deeply into management, with reform orders often going on for hundreds of pages specifying such details as the required square footage of prison cells, the wattage of light bulbs, the temperature at which food had to be served, and so forth."
Mr. Olson quotes one law professor acknowledging that such litigation is meant to "further a decarceration strategy" by making incarceration "both difficult and expensive." The professor has since joined the Obama administration.
Mr. Olson notes drily that "Frequently, many members of the ostensible beneficiary class neither want nor welcome the changes ushered in by court order. Overcrowding suits often result in inmates' transfer from a camped and rundown in-town facility to a more modern but remote facility that is harder for friends and family to visit....In one consent decree, New York City agreed to elaborate new rules restricting its ability to evict disruptive families from its housing projects. But most residents in fact feared the crime spawned by such households, with the result that leaders of the projects' tenant councils wound up hiring lawyers to intervene in the proceedings against their 'own' side."
Mr. Olson, who is a fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Overlawyered.com, excels at outlining the problems. He's more reticent about possible solutions. He notes that the Ford Foundation had helped to reshape law school curricula and "from 1966 to 1969 contributed start-up funding for Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (which changed its name to EarthJustice) and the Natural Resources Defense Council."
So perhaps large-scale philanthropy could have some effect; the book might have mentioned the Olin Foundation's work in spreading Law and Economics to law school campuses. Any donor or foundation wanting to reshape legal education would find Mr. Olson's book a fine place to begin.
In the meantime, the schools are unlikely to reform on their own so long as they have more applicants than they can handle lined up for the chance to pay (or borrow) hefty tuition payments. Never mind that the students may be motivated less by the education provided than by the attendant chances at high-paying law firm jobs in which the students can labor for clients that include the very corporations their professors demonized.
And for all this, the picture may not be entirely as grim as that painted by Mr. Olson with all his usual lucidity and flashes of humor. Justices Alito and Thomas are both Yale Law graduates, after all, while Justice Scalia, a Harvard Law graduate, taught at Stanford and the University of Chicago.
In the meantime, if the law professors are too far to the left, the rest of Americans, while living with the public policy consequences, can at least know that while the law professors have their wins in court, they are often less successful in the court of public opinion. Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton both managed to get elected, but they were quickly hemmed in by Republican congresses elected after they overreached. In the end, in the American system, the politicians who write the laws, and the voters who put them there, have a way of outranking even the law professors.
Disclosure: The publisher sent a review copy of this book.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
27 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great topic poorly handled, March 3, 2011
This review is from: Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (Hardcover)
This is a great idea for a book but, alas, falls very short in the execution. First, it is much broader than an analysis of what is wrong with US law schools -- it meanders off into tort cases, "public interest" law, UN NGOs, etc. and loses focus too soon. Second, it is very poorly written and full of awkward sentences and simple grammatical errors which should have been caught had even the most rudimentary editorial attention been paid to the manuscript. There are lots of interesting - and depressing! - bits, but overall the souffle fails to rise. (I am a Harvard Law graduate, '72, so was caught in the middle of many of the evil developments addressed here and am painfully aware of the many shortcomings of American legal education).
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book Tells the Story of Both Law Schools and America, April 26, 2011
This review is from: Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (Hardcover)
Upon opening this excellent book, I soon found that I couldn't put it down. Overall, this is an outstanding document showcasing the ideological corruption of our law schools and how they have completely compromised and rendered dysfunctional the practice of law in America while also seriously debilitating the nation as a whole. What I, and conservative slash libertarians most often critique...is statism, and what do a legion of lawyers perpetually produce? Statism...ad infinitum and they breed increased regulations, edicts, taxes and guidelines that automatically restrict our liberty. The influence of the law schools over the past 70 years has turned my country into the United States of FUBAR. Olsen reveals the big picture here along with the specific issues behind this erosion of freedom. Now I'm not interested, myself, in the field of law but anyone who is concerned about the advance of socialism and a government whose spending is so outrageous that it will soon result in our bond rating being lowered will be enthralled by this book. Its simply superb. Schools for Misrule is really an education and a half. For example, I ran into in college debate, what was termed a Strict L case, as sophomore, now, two decades later, I finally understand--from reading this--what those jerks were actually pushing via Olson's discussion on the Prosser Tort revolution and how much Strict Liability has functioned as a plague on America's businesses. A brilliant read.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
