Law Schools

Pssst: Don’t Read This

The secret to legal academia is that the game is rigged.

By LawProfBlawg on February 26, 2019 4:16 pm

This blog post summarizes an article I wrote with my coauthor, titled LAW REVIEWS, CITATION COUNTS, and TWITTER (Oh my!): Behind the Curtains of the Law Professor’s Search for Meaning. OR as I posted it on SSRN, “The Most Important Law Review Article You’ll Never Read: A Hilarious (in the Footnotes) yet Serious (in the Text) Discussion of Law Reviews and Law Professors.”

The article stems from a Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Symposium on the future of legal scholarship.  You see, I’m a bit disillusioned about the future of legal scholarship.  As the abstract suggests, my coauthor and I think it is a bit of a fixed game.  “The game,” as we describe it, is the quest for measuring scholarship success using metrics such as law review ranking, citation counts, downloads, and other indicia of scholarship “quality.”

My coauthor and I argue that this game is rigged.  It is inherently biased against authors from lower ranked schools, women, minorities, and faculty who teach legal writing, clinical, and library courses. As such, playing “the game” in a Sisyphean effort to achieve external validation is a losing one for all but a few.

Instead, we argue that faculty members should reject this entrenched and virulent hierarchy, and focus on the primary purposes of writing, which we believe should be to foster innovation in a fashion that is both pleasing to the author and that improves society. We discuss this rigged game, and seek to reframe our academic life to focus on enhancing innovation and discourse.

We have no illusions.  We aren’t going to change a damned thing.  And most likely, we are going to make some people very angry.

Nonetheless, to paraphrase our President, we quote and discuss only the best and most excellent articles to help advance our argument, even where the authors don’t agree with us or where we don’t agree with them.  Of course, that’s what the game should be about isn’t it?  Shouldn’t the game be about the fruitful exchange of great ideas on their merits without resorting to logical fallacies or ad hominems?  I hope so.

If you walk around the outer circles of academia as I have, you quickly discover I’m not the only one disillusioned with the game.  Even people who play the game well leave it entirely.  Then there are those who are still in the game, fighting to be heard despite the fact they started out with strikes against their ideas because of who they are, where they graduated, what they teach, or some other distinction not on the merits of their ideas.  Sometimes they are bullied for speaking out.  It’s the anti-intellectual part of academia that perhaps makes me the saddest.

And even those who play the game well are frustrated by it.  Often times there are great debates.  But sometimes our craft is something akin to side-by-side play in children.  The problem with side-by-side play is the less diverse the group of people judging intellectual ideas, the less likely they will choose the best ones.  They may just choose the ones that look like their own.  And this is why academic diversity and hierarchies should be of concern to everyone, not just those disadvantaged by the system.

I feel comfort in the number of people who have shared their experiences with me in their quest to achieve a faculty position.  Some are deeply personal and painful.  And perhaps some are incredibly painful for me because, while being someone from a lower socioeconomic status, I recognize deeply my own privileges.

Sorry you read this.  I did warn you.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at [email protected].