This week, I was called to jury duty in Santa Ana, California, which meant that I spent the day sitting and waiting to be called and released at the end of the day. While waiting, I picked up a copy of Commentary Magazine, a conservative Jewish periodical, and read an interesting article by Walter Olson, called "Law Schools and Leftist Orhodoxy."
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/law-schools-and-leftist-orthodoxy/#
In this article, Olson made the case that most if not virtually all university law schools are completely dominated by liberals and Democrats. In addition, he also stated that law school faculty are dominated by those who spend their legal careers in the fields of research, writing, and teaching as opposed to actual courtroom experience. That seemed to make sense to me since most professors who teach in the humanities are people who have spent most if not all their careers in academia as opposed to working out in the Real World.
Naturally, I thought about the university where I teach part-time, UC-Irvine. UCI has a newly-created law school headed by noted liberal consitutional expert Erwin Chemerinsky. I decided to look up the law school web site, check out their faculty and see if I could determine their political leanings from their bios.
To be honest, it takes further digging into each professor to get an idea where they stand politically. A couple are obvious, but the overwhelming majority have such bland bios on the web site that it is impossible to tell. I'm not sure I have the inclination to really dig up each faculty member's career history. (If you want to, be my guest.)
http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/page1_e_chemerinsky.html
One thing that did jump out of me was the lack of any mention of these folks having any real courtroom experience trying cases, either as a prosecutor, defense attorney, or civil litigator. That doesn't mean it isn't there, but it just isn't highlighted.
In thinking back to my own law enforcement career spanning almost 30 years, I recall the hundreds of times I testified in court as a witness, testified before grand juries, and sat at the prosecution table as the lead investigator during trial (in total, literally hundreds of times).
It brought up an interesting question to my mind-since I do not possess a law degree. Is it possible that I may have more courtroom experience than all the UCI law school faculty combined?
Of course, I could be completely wrong, and someone will list some names who have years of courtroom experience on their resumes. All I am saying is that in going over the faculty bios on the UCI Law School website, I don't see much if any mention of courtroom experience.
If this is true, where are all the experienced trial attorneys? The apparent answer is that they are in court.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Good points, all. I once read a critique of the Scalia-Thomas school of "original intent." The author lost me when he proposed that instead of "is it original" we should ask "is it legitimate." That renders the constitution a totally elastic document, and therefore, no constitution at all.
(My own method starts with Justice Scalia's reminder that the constitution does not mean what we think it ought to mean, it means what it says. But, the fundamental principles of the constitution have to be applied to new developments and new technology... otherwise it ALSO ceases to be an enduring document, because we have to amend the constitution every time something new happens in the world. It is primarily a jurisdictional document, not a policy document).
I also think it would be a good idea to ONLY allow people to teach in law schools who have practiced law for at least ten years -- prosecutor, defense attorney, civil law, judge... However, no prosecutor should be a judge without spending at least ten years as a defense attorney, or vice versa, and in practice, nobody should be an appellate judge before the age of 50 (by which time they have a good deal of experience).
As to this "liberal" and "conservative" bias, few people meet a sane definition of either one in the world anymore. Rand Paul was doing a great job on the extension of the so-called "USA Patriot" act today.
As a student it would be nice to know that your teacher has actually done what he or she is teaching.
Gary, Commentary is the best magazine in the country. I read it practically cover to cover every month. Even when you don't agree with the authors, you have to acknowledge that not only are they are well researched and well written, but they have valid points.
.
This is an interesting blog. I had the opportunity to pick up my daughter's college History text. What a surprise when I reviewed what was supposed to be American history. This text sounded like history according to Howard Zinn. There were concepts such as "Social Justice", "Progressive era", "Redistribution of wealth", American "Imperialism" and "Colonialism". When I finished reading the text, I looked up the authors and found that the senior author got his masters and doctorate at the University of Illinois (Bill Ayers University) and the rest of the authors were associated with Socialist enterprises.
When my daughter wanted to sell the book back to the college, she could not get here money because they had cancelled it.
Squid
Post a Comment