LSU: Practitioner Versus Professoriate

A partner at Gibson Dunn is in the running to be the head of the LSU Law School. But shockingly, Jack Weiss, a media and entertainment lawyer in Gibson Dunn’s New York office, does not have the support of the faculty.

The LSU search committee met in closed session for an hour Thursday before publicly approving Eric Chiappinelli, associate dean at Seattle University School of Law, and Michael Krauss, law professor at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Va.
The third finalist named, who does not have approval from a majority of the faculty, is Jack Weiss, a New York partner for Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, a law firm with more than 800 lawyers.

It’s not immediately obvious to us why someone with Weiss’s credentials should be unacceptable to the LSU faculty. He clerked for Warren Burger and John Minor Wisdom, and he has ties to the area, having previously been a partner at a firm in New Orleans. He certainly looks like a law school dean!
More important, isn’t practice at a large firm decent preparation for running a law school, perhaps more so than churning out seldom-read articles in solitude? We suspect that this has something to do with the hostility some law professors harbor toward people who actually practice what they teach (particularly the ones who make good money doing it).

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