After learning about its existence, I read every post at this blog as it appeared. Legal education is imperfect and could use improvement, no question. And more transparency about law school data and procedures would be very useful; no one I respect has ever argued otherwise. To the extent the blog facilitates substantive discussions about ways to improve law schools, it is a useful exercise.
But was it really necessary for Paul Campos to write:
When it comes to what has happened in legal academia over the past couple of decades, the vast majority of faculty have been, as it were, Mafia wives: we’ve managed to maintain a marked lack of curiosity about what Tony was doing down at the waste management company, as long as he kept bringing us nice presents and let us redecorate the living room every other year.
Or to close the same post (somewhat incoherently) stating:
… Also, I’m a bit bemused by the claims of a couple of other legal academic bloggers that I’m just a publicity whore, given that, by comparison to their own hunger for public attention, Kim Kardashian look like J.D. Salinger.
Sexist slurs are not helpful to moving the purported project forward. All they do is remind me that in the legal academy, feminizing somebody you disagree with is a great way to insult them.
–Ann Bartow
Okay, he is talking about rich people which, I guess for some people gives license to say anything. But still, here is Law Prof on why some women– maybe some of his own students– go to law school:
3) Some law students are just engaging in conspicuous consumption. These are people who come from money and want an advanced degree that confers an air of both (absurdly) intellectual accomplishment and (more realistically) social status and respectability. These students go to law school for the same reason that young men of good family went to Ivy League schools a couple of generations ago, to collect their Gentleman’s Cs and polish their social connections. Luckily for law schools, the vast wealth that has been shoved up to the top of the social pyramid over the past 30 years means there are a lot of Tom Buchanans out there, and a good number are going to law school (better yet, now Daisy is going to law finishing school as well, so as to add a certain gloss to her wedding announcement in the New York Times).
I can’t figure out whether he thinks he’s being mischievously provocative or what. But, in any event, it’s a pretty retrograde stuff.