> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Carl Remick
>
> >At a personal level, I've been incredibly disappointed in the
> conservative
> >teachers here at Yale Law; their "law and economics" is of the mindless
> >defense of the present corporate law with little engagement of
> any radical
> >economic critiques.
>
> Why the disappointment? The fatter and lazier conservatives get, the
> better, IMHO.
In general, yes, but as someone who wants to study the rightwing arguments to attack them, having stupid teachers means that the arguments you develop to attack them won't necessarily hold up against a smarter, more engaged version of the same perspective. The smartest conservatives I have known have acknowleged that their best teachers were smart leftwing folks who forced them to refine their arguments to lazor sharpness in response. (And, conversely, the dumbest leftists are those who either don't read conservative writers or only read the stupidest ones, then feel self-satisfied with simple left bromides as a response.)
Yale Law School is frankly very overrated (or maybe the other law schools are more horrificly bad than I can imagine). The liberals are all mostly Warren Court nostalgics, while the law and economics conservatives tell just-so stories to explain why decisions of the Delaware chancery court are the results of transaction cost efficiency maximization. It's all relatively dull - a tomb of intellectual homogeneity that leaves a pretty intellectually dead and apathetic student body.
Last night the student body had its annual "Law Revue" - skits and songs that mostly satirize the faculty. The theme of almost every skit was how egotistical each faculty member is and their competition for prestige, with the political or social content of their thought being so irrelevant that it was not itself worth satirizing.
The funniest bit of the night was a version of the TV dating show "Change of Heart" where a student dates a girl called "public interest" his first summer, then dumps her for a new fling "law firm" because the latter wines and dines him so well. It's unfortunately funny because it is such an accurate portrayal of the trajectory of so many law students here, who whatever idealism they come in with rapidly decide its all sort of irrelevant and make a run for the bucks and prestige of New York law firms. The reason for this trajectory has less to do, I think, with any conservative content of courses, since that would inspire more righteous indignation if it was intellectually engaging. Rather, even students who obstensibly keep their liberal values seem to react to the general intellectual bankruptcy of the school by losing the energy to care. It goes with my general view of education that I would rather have rightwing hysterics teaching children than apathetic centrists, since conservatives breed its own opposition, but apathy breeds only itself.
-- Nathan Newman