Legal academia has been long overdue for a book-length critique, and Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites delivers—released just as Trump’s election victory appears to signal a turning of the tide on wokeness.
A good deal of scholarly ink has been spilled exposing the absurd degree of wokeness and suppression of debate in higher education generally, but not so much regarding law schools in particular. With the exception of a few—now dated—volumes such as Walter Olson’s Schools for Misrule (2011) and Brian Tamanaha’s Failing Law Schools (2012), the rapidly deteriorating state of legal education has been chronicled primarily in newspapers, blogs, and online publications. Northwestern law professor John McGinnis has made important contributions to this nascent literature in essays for Law & Liberty, the Wall Street Journal, and City Journal, as well as scholarly articles (including, ironically, for reasons that will be apparent shortly, one published in 2005 by the Georgetown Law Journal).
While many commentators focus on and monitor campus trends at our colleges and universities, few train their attention on the esoteric arcana of the nation’s law schools. After all, other than lawyers themselves (a self-interested guild leaning strongly to the left), who in the general public cares about the curriculum and pedagogy used in law school classes? The Federalist Society is the only national organization that provides any center-right ballast in the legal industry—a mandarin class (or clerisy) for whom law schools are the incubators (as well as social justice academies).
The left-wing capture of the legal academy matters far more than the shenanigans of, say, the Modern Language Association or the field of grievance studies. As Shapiro reminds us, law schools produce our future judges, lawyers, prosecutors, law professors, legislators, and political leaders. Moreover, large law firms already embrace the leftist orthodoxy of the legal culture, and devote their enormous “pro bono” resources accordingly. Unless corrected, the baleful trends in our law schools will only accelerate. Hence, Lawless addresses a neglected topic of enormous significance, and one hopes that it will provoke greater public attention to the dysfunction in legal academia.
The nation’s capital is the epicenter of the administrative state, and many students aspire to become part of that swamp. It is appropriate, therefore, that Lawless was inspired by the shabby treatment Cato Institute veteran and acclaimed author Shapiro received by Georgetown University’s administration concerning an admittedly “inartful” tweet he sent in early 2022 on the eve of commencing employment as executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.
Shapiro’s sensible tweet bemoaned President Biden’s campaign promise to appoint only a black woman to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, instead of selecting the most qualified candidate aligned with a Democratic administration, whom Shapiro believed was DC Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan. The viral tweet, prompted by Breyer’s abrupt retirement announcement, ignited a firestorm of overwrought—and, one suspects, mainly performative—outrage by the administration, faculty, and students at Georgetown. Shapiro was falsely denounced as a racist and a sexist. (Biden ultimately nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson, who had barely served a year on the DC Circuit.)
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer.
