The Journal of Legal Education recently hosted an interesting exchange on the merits of interdisciplinary approaches in law. The exchange began with an article by Wyoming lawprof Stephen Feldman, who argued that law professors presently have “a profound crisis of identity” resulting from the large gap between legal academia and legal practice. Stephen M. Feldman, The Transformation of an Academic Discipline: Law Professors in the Past and Future (or Toy Story Too), 54 J. Legal Educ. 471 (2004). According to Feldman, law professors feel an identity crisis because we have discovered that we no longer believe in “law” and the legal profession doesn’t care what we think. Feldman suggests that lawprofs can recover their identity by focusing on interdisciplinary scholarship:
If law professors no longer base their writing predominantly on lawyers’ and judges’ methods, what will ground legal scholarship? One possible answer is interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinary work is in vogue with scholars in many university departments who recognize that disciplinary boundaries are historically contingent and often developed for reasons more related to professionalization than to the discovery of truth or production of knowledge. Steve Fuller puts it starkly: disciplinary “boundaries are necessary evils that become more evil the more they are perceived as necessary.” Therefore, Fuller explains, interdisciplinary scholars maintain “that certain sorts of problems–increasingly those of general public interest–are not adequately addressed by the resources of particular disciplines, but rather require that practitioners of several such disciplines organize themselves in novel settings and adopt new ways of regarding their work and co-workers.” Interdisciplinary scholarship, done well, can generate creative methods and original insights in previously stale areas of thought.
While interdisciplinarity is popular in many university departments, it is especially robust in law schools. To a degree, law faculty merely are following the contemporary trend. Just as the Langdellians sought to secure their professional positions in the universities by conceptualizing legal science in accordance with the then-dominant general views of scientific research, interdisciplinary legal scholars of today can be understood as seeking to establish and reinforce their professional worthiness among their university colleagues. But law schools are interdisciplinary leaders more than followers. Law schools include faculty trained in other disciplines–economics, sociology, philosophy, history, or whatever–far more often than those other departments include faculty trained in law.
* * *Law schools committed to interdisciplinary scholarship need to do more than hire faculty with doctorates in fields other than law. Law faculty with degrees in other disciplines, even those who also have J.D. degrees, are likely to have strong commitments to maintaining the professional integrity of their particular doctoral field and might, instead of encouraging interdisciplinary creativity, be inclined to insist upon strict adherence to the discrete methodology of that discipline. Even if not blatant protectors of professional turf, many might be quick to condemn interdisciplinary efforts by any scholars lacking the credentials of a Ph.D. Therefore, in addition to hiring faculty with professional credentials from outside the law, a law school committed to interdisciplinarity should encourage anyone interested, including those faculty with only a J.D., to experiment with scholarly approaches that combine and alter disciplinary methods, including traditional legal methods.
In the latest issue, Idaho lawprof Richard Seamon wrote a letter to the editor in response to Feldman. Here his Seamon’s letter in full, reprinted with his permission, which appeared in the Jounal under the title “Law and Law”:
Your supposed life partner has just told you that s/he wants to call it quits. You ask why, and s/he says, “We’ve grown apart; we have so little in common.” The lines are timeworn, but s/he says them sincerely, and now s/he is gone. In your hectic response to being newly unconnected, you revamp. You join a gym; you get dental work. You take night courses for singles to learn a foreign language and pottery making. You begin a new stage of awkward dating.
This is where I would locate legal education since its divorce from the legal profession. Professor Feldman locates it in a similar place, if I correctly understand his recent article in this journal. Where we differ is in our advice to the lovelorn legal academy. Feldman urges liaisons with other academic disciplines. I urge that we attend to the children of the divorce: our law students. This is partly for their own sake; partly for the sake of society that they will serve; and partly for the sake of the legal academy itself.
It is hard to resist the attraction of interdisciplinary relationships. University presidents push them as a way for the legal academy to plug into funding sources that are not available for purely legal research and teaching. Individual academic units have their own reasons to connect with law schools. The connections may give entry into legislative chambers and courtrooms, with attendant prospects for exerting influence and earning notoriety and expert fees. In addition, law-and-something-else disciplinarity opens up law faculty positions to PhDs from other fields. Interdisciplinarity creates new publication opportunities–largely by breeding new Journals of Law & Fill-in-the-Blank-with-Some-Other-Field. Along with those opportunities come new symposia on exciting topics and new conferences in exotic places.
The problem with promiscuous interdisciplinarity is that it does little to improve our graduates’ ability to practice law or to improve the quality of justice. Furthermore, it distracts us from pursuits that would bring such improvement. I am speaking, specifically, of curricular and instructional development and legal reform. More specifically still, I mean efforts such as improving law school graduates’ ability to write and increasing the availability of basic, competently rendered legal services such as the preparation of living wills. There seems to be a strong consensus that law schools do not adequately prepare their graduates to practice law and that basic, competently rendered legal services are not widely available to the poor and the working class. Under those conditions, it is selfish and irresponsible for the legal academy to pursue interdisciplinarity on a broad scale so that law professors can feel good about themselves despite their abandonment by the legal profession.
Beyond that, there is not much of a future in rebound relationships between the legal academy and other academic disciplines. Its future cannot be as bright as that of a strong relationship between the legal academy and its students. Ultimately, legal education will be judged by–and rewarded or esteemed (or not) because of–its graduates and the legal system that they create. Our focus should be on law and law, not law and something else.
Your thoughts?
I think Seamon is right.
And I think that it is a shame that so many profs feel that they cannot be bothered to do actual legal analysis, of the variety that persuades courts to do things. Sticking to the original mission of legal scholarship would increase the academy’s relevance to both students and practicioners. Otherwise, it’s harder and harder to justify the expense of so many tenured folks doing whatever they feel like, just to get them to teach a class for a few hours a week.
I think Seamon probably has the better argument, but doesn’t it matter what sort of interdisciplinarity we’re talking about?
I would love to take a law and economics course taught by an Econ PhD.
It seems to me that a quantitative analysis course taught by a PhD. statistician would also be very valuable for students concentrating in areas of law where data analysis plays a significant role.
If those profs also happen to produce scintillating interdisciplinary research, all the better.
But I do agree that interdisciplinarity for its own sake is pretty worthless.
I’m not sure Seamon’s being entirely fair to Feldman here. Teaching and scholarship are two (sometimes distinct) parts of a law professor’s job; Feldman is focusing on the latter and (as far as I can tell) saying nothing about the former. That is, I don’t think Feldman’s suggesting that law professors can enhance their stature by focusing *entirely* on interdisciplinary research. Rather, he seems simply to be saying that the best solution to the problem of legal scholarship’s perceived irrelevance is to focus on interdisciplinarity; I don’t think he’s suggesting that professors abandon (or even reduce) their emphasis on teaching.
Seamon is probably right that students would benefit if professors were to focus less on scholarship and more on teaching. But I don’t think this really addresses Feldman’s topic: how to make the scholarship that professors do produce more relevant to practitioners. Or is Seamon suggesting that professors should accept their irrelevance as scholars and focus entirely on teaching?
Why not devote a little more time to teaching and at the same time ground your scholarship in economics, history, philosophy, etc.? The two professors’ positions don’t seem mutually exclusive.
The key is balance. Law school should focus on preparing law students to practice in the profession of law, but a smattering of interdisciplinary courses can help law students from becoming oblivious to other ways of thinking.
To use a food metaphor instead of a marriage one, the main course at law school should be law and legal reasoning, but a few different side dishes, appetizers and desserts make for a more well-rounded meal.
Feldman strikes me as being precisely right. Moreover, I don’t see why we can’t have it both ways–both encourage good scholarship and improve teaching.
Perhaps the key problem with integrating the two visions is the legal academy’s obsession with ranking systems, and particularly ranking scholars. Ceteris paribus, a professor who spends little time on prepping teaching is going to write more (and perhaps better) than someone who researches all day and night.
On the other hand, the legal theory blog just had a good post on how teaching can feed into scholarship. But I worry that the type of teaching Seamon is (rightly) calling for is going to lead to few original contributions to legal scholarship.
So we must find ways as a profession of rewarding and recognizing teaching innovation. Paul Caron’s experience with “clickers” has been well-documented and lauded, and Matt Bodie has some very interesting thoughts on improving legal teachign materials via an open-access paradigm. Let’s hope initiatives like that help us square the circle.
Rich Seamon used to be a colleague of mine at South Carolina, and I can attest to his incredible committment to teaching and to a law student centered approach to legal education generally. He was also pretty helpful and caring toward junior colleagues, which was pretty lucky for me. I can’t disagree with most of what he says, and yet I do think law profs serve an equally important function when we analyze and critique the law in a way that lawyers-with-clients are unable to do. Rich Seamon is an outstanding scholar as well as teacher, but I saw the kind of hours he had to put in to pull this off, and they were very long ones.