The Corner

Politics & Policy

Harvard’s Activist Law-School Curriculum

American law schools used to focus on teaching students the nuts and bolts of our legal system — through courses such as property, contracts, torts, civil procedure, and so on. Stuff they’d need to know in legal practice. Then the lefties began taking over and adding ideological junk to the curriculum.

Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams have been running a series of articles on the top law schools and this one looks at Harvard. With regard to a course entitled “The Art of Social Change,” Adams writes, “This is one of many cases dedicated not to teaching what the law is, but rather what the professors wish the law would be. Call it the utopian pedagogy that infests the elite law schools. It is built on arrogance and selfishness. Their model is not to graduate lawyers who can help clients with real problems, but rather graduate lawyers with the theoretical grounding to upend the law.”

The goal, it seems, isn’t so much to prepare students for the practice of the law as it is to push them to be leftist activists.

George Leef is the the director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He is the author of The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable for Our Time.
Exit mobile version