Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'

At Minding the Campus (via Glenn Reynolds):

Old Law School culture revolves around a traditional curriculum—those torts and contracts courses—and the Socratic method of instruction, with its pointed and rigorous give-and-take between professors and students. Old Law School assumes that the process of training lawyers is training them to a centuries-old Anglo-American tradition of lawyerly thought, which rests on the careful crafting of legal arguments and the relentless challenging of those arguments, often by the professor in the classroom. Old precedent-setting cases may be supplanted by newer cases, and legal principles may shift, but the underlying methodology of close analysis of written court opinions and the arguments on which they rest, along with certain assumptions underlying the American legal systems—that human beings are generally capable of exercising reason and free will and thus should be held responsible for their actions—are Old Law School constants.

New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling": personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.

Continue reading. Especially good is Allen's discussion of Linda Ammons. I wrote briefly along the same lines here, "Widener's Dean Linda Ammons Goes After Law School Professor Lawrence Connell."

And from Allen's conclusion, she notes that Professor Lawrence Connell was exonerated of the allegations against him, yet Ammons still prevailed on her preposterous charge that Connell "retaliated":

What is appalling is that, despite both exonerations, Ammons appears to have gotten her way in the end after all, exacting sanctions against a tenured professor that are not only costly but humiliating (he is supposed to apologize to the complaining students. The charge of retaliation, based on a vague prohibition in the faculty handbook, seem especially flimsy. Connell’s e-mail to his students in December neither named his accusers nor referred to them in any way. As for the lawsuit, Connell never waived his right to seek redress in court against individuals whose false accusations have already cost him quite a bit of money and promise to cost much more. But that is the way of New Law School. It is perhaps only Old Law School, with its emphasis on fairness, reasonableness, and color-and gender-blind justice, that would find something totalitarian in Widener’s treatment of Connell and accordingly demand Linda Ammons’ resignation. In New Law School thinking, where power is everything, and the claims of grievance-bearing identity groups will always prevail over fairness, it is perfectly fine to strip your perceived opponent of his livelihood and to consign him to the ministrations of your own Nurse Ratched—and there is no such thing as abuse of power.