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Exchange on Interdisciplinary Approaches in Law Schools

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.
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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?