Law Schools

The Nobel Prize For Law... And Other Frivolities

No, we don't need an award for legal academics.

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Nobel_PrizeIt’s not that lawyers can’t win Nobel Prizes. Indeed, several lawyers have. But all of these attorneys managed to win their awards by contributing something useful to society (read: something outside of the law). Like ending wars and stuff. Besides, if we really wanted to reward people for pioneering a new way to look at contracts, we’d give a Nobel Prize to economists.

So when Brian Leiter posted a poll asking who would win a hypothetical Nobel Prize for Law, it was an interesting “Mt. Rushmore” exercise if you didn’t take it too seriously.

Specifically, Leiter asked:

If there were a Nobel Prize, which living legal scholar in the U.S. should get it? Rank order the candidates. Only those over the age of 60 who might make the top ten are listed as choices.

Here are the current results in the poll (which is still open despite a statement on the site saying that it closed October 12):

1. Richard Posner
2. Cass Sunstein
3. Guido Calabresi
4. Jeremy Waldron
5. Bruce Ackerman
6. Joseph Raz
7. Catharine MacKinnon
8. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
9. Richard Epstein
10. Akhil Amar

It’s hard to argue with those choices — all of them would belong on any list of the most influential living lawyers, but again, you can’t take this too seriously.

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Unfortunately, Stephen L. Carter at Bloomberg View took it too seriously:

But he has nevertheless performed a valuable service by encouraging us to evaluate our colleagues not according to the size of a corpus but according to the lasting influence of any part of that work. By this theory, an academic who wrote one great book and has since fallen silent for a decade or two, even if dismissed by colleagues as a has-been, ought to win if that one great book did enough to alter the course of legal thought.

No. Don’t even joke about that. “Valuable service”? Stop. This is exactly the smug self-importance that people hate about lawyers.

Of course, there are no other Nobel Prizes, and there are plenty of prizes now in other fields, some carrying significant stipends. But the exercise is useful nevertheless. There are scholars of titanic influence everywhere, and it would be good to see them more noticed.

More noticed? The Nobel Prize for Economics exists because there aren’t a lot of people reading math equations about contract theory. But we actually have plenty of avenues for recognizing the influence of legal theorists. Two of the top three finishers are federal appellate judges! The other man in the top three recently served in the Obama administration! Unlike economics or literature, there’s a very short path from theory to practice in law — if your work is influential, we see it in future decisions or implemented as policy. If it’s not influential, we see it in a Law and Mario Kart class. It’s a self-awarding industry.

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Now, one could say that medical breakthroughs are also self-awarding, but the point of that award is the hefty stipend to reward expensive research. With all due respect to the quantitative law and econ folks out there, there’s nothing in law that approaches the intensive resources needed for medical research.

So neither of the two primary reasons for giving out a Nobel Prize — recognition or remuneration — apply here. Legal academics aren’t cloistered in an ivory tower bereft of public contact who need to be “more noticed,” their work directly influences society every day.

Let’s just celebrate Leiter’s contest for what it is — an unscientific conversation-starter — and leave the self-congratulatory stuff to other fields. We have enough of that in this industry already.

Titans of Law Are Nobel-Worthy, Too [Bloomberg View]
A Nobel Prize in Law? [Leiter’s Law School Reports]
Results [CIVS]

Earlier: Lawyers Winning Nobel Peace Prizes

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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