But it is getting harder to find the legal nuts and bolts courses for the profusion of courses that are about various groups, feelings, how to manipulate the law, and so on. So argues lawyer J. Christian Adams in this piece, “Does Harvard Teach Law Anymore?”

The move away from teaching key material about how our legal system and towards activist stuff is nothing new. More than five years ago, Suffolk Law School professor Charles Rounds wrote a piece for the Pope Center making that point: “Bad Sociology, Not Law.”

One of the reasons why I would like to see law school put to the test of the market is that the mandatory three year arrangement that we have thanks to the special pleading of the ABA mostly protects the teaching jobs of hangers-on who get paid nicely to teach the courses Adams and Rounds called out. I can imagine future lawyers paying for good courses on contracts, property, civil procedure and so on, but not many willing to stick around and pay for ideologically slanted, theoretical stuff. If students could just learn what they think they need, many of the profs who teach ideological courses would find themselves looking for other work.