Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America [Hardcover]

Walter Olson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2011

From Barack Obama (Harvard and Chicago) to Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale), many of our current national leaders emerged from the rarefied air of the nation's top law schools. The ideas taught there in one generation often shape national policy in the next.

The trouble is, Walter Olson reveals in Schools for Misrule, our elite law schools keep churning out ideas that are catastrophically bad for America. From class action lawsuits that promote the right to sue anyone over anything, to court orders mandating the mass release of prison inmates; from the movement for slavery reparations, to court takeovers of school funding—all of these appalling ideas were hatched in legal academia. And the worst is yet to come. A fast-rising movement in law schools demands that sovereignty over U.S. legal disputes be handed over to international law and transnational courts.

It is not by coincidence, Olson argues, that these bad ideas all tend to confer more power on the law schools' own graduates. In the overlawyered society that results, they are the ones who become the real rulers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest book from Olson (The Excuse Factory) is part historical overview and part cutting-edge commentary examining corporate case studies and public and tort law with a sharp analysis of the academic system and the internal and external forces shaping its agenda. Law schools mould the future leaders of America, shaping the nation and influencing consensus. Recent legal scholars have infiltrated politics, journalism, and broadcasting, claiming greater authority and creating potentially serious social repercussions. The author explores perceived political bias at Harvard and Yale, their dependence on "left-tilting philanthropy," and the tendency of professors to permeate the curriculum with their own values. Additionally, Olson argues, the commercialization of American universities creates markets of intellectual property and a culture of one-upmanship. Often with tongue firmly in-cheek, Olson addresses the "American disease" of dubious injury claims and product liability lawsuits, the ever-spurious "recovered memory" litigation, and other legal precedents. This hard-hitting, witty account reveals the effect of law on the individual and the collective and astutely forecasts the future of law reform, in the academy, in politics, and across the globe.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (March 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594032335
• ISBN-13: 978-1594032332
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #698,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Problems With Law Schools March 1, 2011

By Ira E. Stoll VINE™ VOICE

Format: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. Read more ›

33 of 45 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great topic poorly handled March 3, 2011

By D. C. Carrad

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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).

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Every law student should read this! February 29, 2012

By KH

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I don't normally write reviews, but after being exposed to law profs who preach the wonders of class actions and debase the "horrific" case of Citizens United (and that's just this particular term), I run home to find solace in Olson's book. Law school can be alienating for a Libertarian, but it is heartening to know that people like Olson exist. Every law student should read this book--I hope it will open their eyes to the Left's monopoly on academic law.

6 of 16 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

By Bernard Chapin VINE™ VOICE

Format: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.

1 of 8 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars First Kill all the Lawyers! August 5, 2011

By Dr. Wilson Trivino

Format:Hardcover

Maybe Shakespeare was right, "first kill all the lawyers" but unfortunately that is not an option.

In Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and An Overlawyered America by Walter Olson, the author makes the case how our society has systematically gotten more litigious for the wrong reasons. Stemming from the future lawyers, law students, learn in the institutionalized law schools. This has led to a systematic system of mistrust.

Multi track, this book examines a broad view of the law on our society. Starting off that many of our leaders, like President Obama are lawyers.
Olson goes into examples of legends of frivolous law suits that have placed a strain on our system.

He also ventures into universal jurisdiction that blurs national boundaries and cause havoc to sovereignty.
This book also examines the united consequences of policies that attempt to fix one program but end up creating others.
Over all Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and An Overlawyered America by Walter Olson is an insightful analysis into our modern legal system for anyone wondering out loud "How the heck did we get here?"