Draft Excerpt From "In the Company of Thieves: The Character of Law Professors (most of them anyway).

 

For most law professors I have known, life is an extended negotiation to advance one’s self interest. They are their own clients. Their constant obsession about where they rank means a complete lack of humility and the use of certain devices. The most common device is to show no weakness. This leads to a number of things. One is to never seen to care very much about something, at least publicly. To show you really want something is to reveal a weakness. For example, when I was chair of the appointments committee, I asked members of the committee who wanted to go to the meat market. This duty is something that is usually coveted by mid or early career professors. No one said he or she wanted to go in the meeting. In a few hours after that, every member of the committee called me privately to say they were “willing to go.”

This leads to the volunteer scam. Law professors never want to demand to do something -- -- they volunteer. When you volunteer it is not like you wanted something but you were willing to help out. Helping out, in this life long negotiation, means you are owed. For example, one of the plums of my teaching career was to be appointed to summer abroad teaching program. One year the person who was set to go could not go at the last minute. I called the person running the program to see if I could go instead. I was informed it would not be necessary because the head of the program had “volunteered” to take on the assignment himself.

Another part of not showing weakness is to try to get others to do work that might expose your own weakness. This means office to office visits and indirection. Let’s say you think someone who has been appointed to chair a committee is an awful choice. You would go office to offices saying something like “what did you think of those committee assignments.” In other words, you throw out the bait and see if anyone bites. Eventually, you might find some people saying they were disappointed and then you roam the halls saying to others “I heard that several people are upset with that committee assignment.” You say "several" even if it is one. Note, you do not say you are upset but that others are. You, of course, just want to be fair.

There are also ways of disagreeing. Suppose Jack at a faculty meeting proposes that teachers have more office hours than currently required. You hate the idea but you do not raise your hand and say so. Instead you say something like “It’s wonderful to be available to students but I have “concerns” about Jack’s proposal or “if gives me pause.” These are ways of saying “that is the dumbest thing I have every heard”

No matter what, you are too busy. You have students, exams to write, phone calls to return, and papers to grade. In reality you may be on Amazon looking for a new toaster or frying pan. You may take a nap. But you never admit to anything other than being overwhelmed with how much work you have.

Being sneaky is important. You do not write down what you could say. If it is written down you have accountability. If you say it, then if it  is passed along you can claim you were misunderstood or taken out of context.

Working the students for high teaching evaluations. You can do this by being funny or radiating your deep concern for their well-being. It does not hurt to bring cookies when their evaluations of you are distributed. One neat ploy a colleague freely admitted was designed to help is evaluations was passing out his own evaluation form before the official. This communicate that you value the opinion of the students and more or less lets them vent if they are inclined to as a way of lowering the chance they will unload on you on the official evaluations.

Information among law faculty is power. If you have it, you can dispense it in the way that best serves your ends. It may be rumor, it maybe something that has very little foundation. Important things are generally bad news about someone else – their article got rejected, they failed an interview at another school, the Provost is angry with the Dean. You can use the information as currency and you spend it to get what you want – usually that is a reaction that advances whatever is in your self interest.

Law professors call what they do “scholarship.” It almost never is. You could count on one had the number of times a law professor actually tries to find the answer to an important question. Instead, consistent with their training they are advocates for their own notions of what should be. Their research skills are limited and the idea of putting anything to an empirical test is frightening to them. You might compare this with seeing a doctor. Usually you tell the doctor the symptoms and he or she tries to match with with a cause, Suppose instead you walked into the doctor and he or she said "you have typhoid fever" and then ignored every thing you said except those things that were consistent with typhoid fever. That's legal scholarship.