Latter Day Law Studies

Some three decades ago, Dr.Robert Hutchins remarked that there are no true schools of law in these United States—only trade schools for people who wish to become attorneys. Have we made progress since then? Not much. In several respects, we have retrogressed. Law schools are desperately crowded and swamped with applications nowadays, more so than medical schools. We are becoming a litigious people, and the proliferation of governmental controls compels even the smallest entrepreneur to consult a lawyer.

The latest afflictions of the law schools are zealotry for using the law to effect radical “social reform” and a humanitarian passion for opening enrollment to “minority” applicants—in part as a form of poor relief. One student at a law school in the state of New York tells me that the semester opened with a series of radical harangues by administrators and professors. The most moderate potentate argued that a knowledge of the law would be valuable to members of the rising generation who wish to make a revolution. Another law student friend of mine, in California, doubts whether he will practice law when he graduates; he is deeply disheartened. All his professors are under 30 years of age, he says, and so he has come to think that you can’t trust anybody under 30. (He thought of himself as a liberal until he got into law school.) If his professors know any law, they don’t reveal it; classroom hours are devoted to exhortations, the gist of which is that a radicalized bar and bench can establish some new “justice”—muddily defined, if defined at all.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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Some three decades ago, Dr.Robert Hutchins remarked that there are no true schools of law in these United States—only trade schools for people who wish to become attorneys. Have we made progress since then? Not much. In several respects, we have retrogressed. Law schools are desperately crowded and swamped with applications nowadays, more so than medical schools. We are becoming a litigious people, and the proliferation of governmental controls compels even the smallest entrepreneur to consult a lawyer.

The latest afflictions of the law schools are zealotry for using the law to effect radical “social reform” and a humanitarian passion for opening enrollment to “minority” applicants—in part as a form of poor relief. One student at a law school in the state of New York tells me that the semester opened with a series of radical harangues by administrators and professors. The most moderate potentate argued that a knowledge of the law would be valuable to members of the rising generation who wish to make a revolution. Another law student friend of mine, in California, doubts whether he will practice law when he graduates; he is deeply disheartened. All his professors are under 30 years of age, he says, and so he has come to think that you can’t trust anybody under 30. (He thought of himself as a liberal until he got into law school.) If his professors know any law, they don’t reveal it; classroom hours are devoted to exhortations, the gist of which is that a radicalized bar and bench can establish some new “justice”—muddily defined, if defined at all.