Richard Posner pines for the good old days: "Law professors used to identify primarily with the legal profession and secondarily with the university. The sequence has been reversed."
In this short tribute to Bernie Meltzer, Posner praises the careful doctrinalist:
The messy work product of the judges and legislators requires a good deal of tidying up, of synthesis, analysis, restatement, and critique. These are intellectually demanding tasks, requiring vast knowledge and the ability (not only brains and knowledge and judgment, but also Sitzfleisch) to organize dispersed, fragmentary, prolix, and rebarbative materials. These are tasks that lack the theoretical breadth or ambition of scholarship in more typically academic fields. Yet they are of inestimable importance to the legal system and of greater social value than much esoteric interdisciplinary legal scholarship.
If you hadn't noticed, Posner is a contrarian.
Via Orin.
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1. Posted by Scott Moss on September 19, 2007 @ 11:28 | Permalink
Maybe Posner just succeeded too much in convincing the legal academy to do a lot of interdisciplinary thinking. Maybe back in the 1970s, when more scholarship was doctrinal, the marginal utility of more interdisciplinary scholarship was high -- but now, with so much interdisciplinary stuff (especially from the most prolific/respected scholars), there's actually a shortage of good doctrinal work.
If this explanation is an accurate elaboration of what Posner is saying, then I agree with it. If it isn't what Posner is saying... well, then I agree with just myself, not Posner.
I actually try to do a mix of interdisciplinary and doctrinal scholarship. I think the former contributes more ideas, but the latter contributes more to the legal profession. And I think the alleged problem of doctrinal scholarship not placing well is overblown, but that's another story.
2. Posted by Gordon Smith on September 19, 2007 @ 12:38 | Permalink
Scott,
That is my reading of Posner. He was playing the contrarian in the 1960s because he advocated more interdisciplinary work, and he is a contrarian now because he advocated more doctrinal scholarship.
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