Like Health Care Law Schools are Rotting
How woke is infiltrating law schools? Read on.
Here’s a sample: (from the National Review)
George Leef is 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. Another topic you won’t find in any American courtroom but will see taught at the law school at NYU is the course called Economic and Social Rights. This course isn’t about torts, the rules of evidence, civil procedure, preparing witnesses, writing a brief, or anything lawyers out here in the real world do. Instead, the course catalog:
Rapidly growing inequality around the world, and a growing awareness of the fundamental importance of the structural underpinnings of racism, sexism, and many other systemic violations of human rights, are all starting to focus long-overdue attention on the importance of economic and social human rights. These include the rights to food, health, housing, and education, and also labor rights and cultural rights. All of these rights are part of the International Bill of Rights, many have been explicitly recognized in national constitutions, and they are increasingly subject to judicial implementation in a range of countries. By the same token, they have been systematically ignored by many human rights advocates and have been a major casualty of the triumph of neoliberalism in the economic sphere.
That has nothing to do with teaching prospective lawyers the nuts and bolts of their trade, but instead is reinforcement for the priors of social-justice-warrior types who want to use the law to demolish what is left of liberty and limited government.
Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams march through the top seven law schools. exposing the top-ranked law school, Yale, then Chicago, then exposed Harvard. Hans covered number two, Stanford, and also Columbia, and Penn.Stanford University’s School of Law.
Unfortunately, Stanford is no different. That should surprise no one, given the recent front-page coverage of, as Christian succinctly put it, “rude, belligerent proto-totalitarian students shouting down” Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan. Their noxious behavior came with the assistance and approval of Stanford’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach. And none of the other four Stanford administrators present intervened to stop the disruption, either.
Judge Duncan described how the students, ill-trained and ill-mannered future professionals in our legal system, “hurled abuse, including vile sexual innuendo; some filed past me spitting insults.” One of them expressed the hope that his “daughters get raped!” Clearly, the mindset of “tolerant” liberals was on full display. Are these the attorneys of tomorrow? Freedom of speech is one thing, but potential lawyers should know or be taught when to keep their mouths and emotions in check. They show that the radicalized course offerings at the previous six schools demonstrate that these elite law schools have become training academies not so much for effective and competent lawyers, but instead for militant and transformational radicals with a law degree. It affects the nation as well as your lives. These graduates from elite law schools have outsized influence in government, on the courts, and in academia and corporate America. They have enjoyed an elevated brand, free from scrutiny from mainstream Americans.
Chicago has a reputation for being a “conservative” law school. Maybe in relative terms compared to Stanford or Yale, but don’t be tricked. Maybe two decades ago. While Chicago is relatively better than Yale, crazy still reigns there, as you will see below.
Chicago suffers from the same obsession with DEI and even has a dedicated DEI portal for reporting to authorities. Chicago even still pesters students to wear masks. Naturally, race is the single most important topic for the deconstructed law school curriculum. Instead of contracts and torts, at elite law schools these days, it is more important to teach deconstructive philosophy disguised as law. It is better to stoke racial grievances than focus on lawyer fundamentals. The University of Chicago law school is no different in providing a smorgasbord of grievance courses like “Critical Race Studies”.
There are more courses at Chicago that might disgust the average member of American society. Consider the highly marketable course “Public Law in the Time of Trump.” The course is so full of rank bias that law professors from all over the country were invited to pile on via Zoom: We get it: academic credit for exhibiting Trump Derangement Syndrome at the nation’s third-ranked law school.
In fairness, Chicago is bad, but not off the rails to the same degree as Yale and Stanford law schools. Chicago is teaching useless leftist courses of the sort that Harvard taught almost a decade ago.
Regardless, Chicago is another top-ten law school where students saturated in ideology are graduating ill-prepared to appear in court and represent paying clients. It is part of the extremist drift of our nation’s elite law schools and is an important part of the story of how America has crept toward bigger government, diminished liberty, growing authoritarianism, and hostility toward American values that built civilization and rescued the world from dictatorship on at least one occasion.
According to the law school’s own calculation, tuition, living, and all other costs for this sort of education will total $105,000 a year. So, either someone’s parents will be paying or a law student will be going into horrendous debt in the staggering amount of $315,000 to attend a school that will teach those students to be the best Marxist agitators that money can buy. As for whether Stanford Law School grads will actually be able to conduct unbiased, objective legal research, draft a complaint or the many other pleadings involved in litigation, comply with the rules of civil and criminal procedure, and act professionally, ethically, and civilly… that’s another matter entirely.
Given the very public misconduct of its students, it’s a very doubtful one. Potential clients may be better off hiring lawyers from a Southeastern Conference law school like the University of Tennessee or Alabama. Those students will certainly be paying a lot less and are far more likely to have learned how to be competent lawyers instead of emerging as the brainwashed graduates of a California reeducation camp that would make Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao proud.