Ill Legal

Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…

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There were some things I really loved about working for Columbia Law School. I had a fantastic team of colleagues in the Office of Public Affairs who taught me much of what I know about journalism and PR alike. It was a great honor to get to work with scholarly heavyweights such as Professors Philip Hamburger and Jagdish Bhagwati. And, I got paid to be endlessly wined and dined at countless dinners and galas in exchange for glossy write-ups portraying the exclusive evenings as glamorously as possible.

But then there was all the bad stuff, which could be actively nauseating. Many lawyers live down to their reputations, and some law professors are on another level still. Much of my work was more or less laundering wild-eyed woke dogmatism into some modicum of plausibility. The majority of the events I was assigned to glowingly chronicle were affiliated with the Law School’s many-tentacled Office of Social Justice Initiatives, which was more strident and totalitarian than I could have imagined. If you had any compunctions about taxpayer-funded gender confirmation surgeries for illegal immigrants, then you were a monster.

Toward the very bottom of that barrel was a spittle-flecked firebrand, Professor Katherine Franke, one of the most toxic bigots I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to work with. Her fierce aversion to Caucasians, heterosexuals, and especially Caucasian heterosexuals was rivaled only by her seething hatred for Israel. I can’t say I was very disappointed to see the news last week that Franke, at last, has been compelled to take early retirement on account of shameless vilification of Jewish students — she’d always reminded me of the pixelated Rottweilers in the old shareware Wolfenstein 3D. Less blatantly odious, but equally dubious, was our marketing Kimberlé Crenshaw, inventor of “intersectionality,” and having to cover up for her appalling scholarly sloppiness.

By early 2016, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was becoming professionally jealous of my cousin in Texas who worked as a prison guard. So I bailed on daily employment at Columbia Law, though I remained on-call for various sporadic assignments — only to witness the crusadingly messianic legal education discourse careen even further off the rails with the dual upsets of Brexit and President Donald Trump. And yet ever since, no matter how determinedly I’ve tried to explain why I had to get out, a lot of good people, including Columbia Law alumni from before my time, simply can’t bear to contemplate that there might be anything amiss in the nation’s leading law schools. It’s as if being an aspirational elite requires unlimited fealty to prestigious institutions and that allowing for the possibility of cracks in the foundation is inherently to be banished from the ranks of the Great and the Good.

So I was intrigued to hear about the new book from Manhattan Institute legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, tackling the crisis in high-end legal education. In 2022, Shapiro was famously subjected to a struggle session-style tribunal from his new employers at the Georgetown University Law Center following an inartfully worded couple of tweets suggesting that now-Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was a less qualified pick than Judge Sri Srinivasan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would have been and, by extension, that Supreme Court nominations ought to be decided on the basis of legal acumen rather than gender and ethnic background. While he narrowly avoided being fired, Shapiro very publicly resigned from Georgetown shortly thereafter with a scathing open letter that immediately went viral.

Spritely but substantive, Shapiro’s exceptional new volume rises to the challenge of imparting awful truths about the legal academy that many people don’t want to know. Instead of beginning with dry statistics and citations, he viscerally plunges readers into the tense, claustrophobic, Kafkaesque experience of having packs of university jackals besiege his livelihood and willfully misconstrue his words. Hour by hour, day by day, and bureaucratic communique by communique, Shapiro immersively relates the entire miserable nightmare, from the initial late-night tweets dashed off after a celebratory dinner with friends, to waking up to a social media firestorm the next morning of cancel culture minions divining racist sentiments in his tweets that no good-faith reading could support, to the excruciating four months of enduring a sham “investigation” as Georgetown Law preened, virtue-signaled, and strove as much as possible to make the process the punishment. Having spent more than my fair share of time with academic administrators, apparatchiks, and flunkies, Shapiro’s details — the hypocrisy, the intellectual sloppiness, the stilted institutional lingo — all ring totally true.

It happened at Georgetown, but it could just as easily have happened at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, or any of the other top private law schools. But given that Washington-based Georgetown is a major feeder for lawyers entering the Justice Department, it’s perhaps especially concerning that it happened there. Precious few people at Georgetown Law come out looking very good, and in particular, Dean William Treanor comes off as an unprincipled, mealymouthed coward with no business in higher education, let alone leading a supposedly august institution.

Along with detailing his ordeal, which ended happily with a new job at the Manhattan Institute, Shapiro intersperses a whirlwind tour of the embarrassing extremism to which many prestigious law schools have sunk in recent years due in large part, he argues, to the explosion of critical theory and to metastasizing administrative bloat as evangelizing bureaucrats seek to expand their empires. Also damaging, he adds, is the ideological corruption of the American Bar Association, even as it clings to a coercive monopoly on law school accreditation.

Forget the high-minded rhetoric about knowledge production and the life of the mind. The higher education industry basically runs on two things: hunger for money and hunger for status. And that’s even truer of legal education than of many other fields. So the pasting that the ivory tower has taken over the past few years has been a salutary development, and hopefully only just the beginning. Despite his trials, Shapiro still expresses hope that legal education can yet be salvaged. I’m not so sure, but here’s hoping that all the Georgetown alumni with any standards stop cutting checks until the university slashes its bureaucracies, embraces academic freedom, and sends Dean Treanor on a one-way trip down the Potomac.

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Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine.

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Next: The New Coke Revisited

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