January 26, 2012

""[I]t’s no surprise that a visiting professor is teaching Admin; professors at Yale love to dump..."

"... the black-letter teaching duties on visitors, so the YLS tenured professors can teach 'Law and Literary Theory' or 'Law and Robots' or 'Law and __' (yes, blank in the original; this meta-course was all about the interdisciplinary study of law)."

David Lat, discussing a current student problem at Yale Law School
, in the larger context of the differences among law schools. He continues:
In the grand scheme of things — global poverty, domestic unemployment, the war in Afghanistan, climate change (presumably you believe in it) — the inability of third-year students at Yale Law School to take Administrative Law is not a huge problem. But it is an interesting illustration of the very real differences between law schools. At how many other law schools would students take to the streets — Occupy 127 Wall Street, if you will — over being denied the right to wallow in the nuances of Chevron deference?

7 comments:

Matt Sablan said...

David Lat is presumptuous! By which, I mean, he presumes.

Mark O said...

Maybe, but it has the advantage of being expensive.

Face it. If you have a law degree from Yale, your life will be substantally better than almost any other lawyer.

In the 1% you will be in the 1%.

Jose_K said...

I teach Administrative Law and Constitutional Law. Here, we are the royalty. But our University is not among the top 10 in the world.

Triangle Man said...

Isn't this a tacit acknowledgement by Yale that 1) the third year of law school doesn't matter at all and 2) Yale law students are not likely to practice law anyway, so why bother?

Skyler said...

Oh, come one. It's Yale. They don't have grades or attendance requirements. Why should they bother to pretend to have content in their courses?

Why this school continues to have a good reputation, I can't say.

Chip S. said...

How about a course called "Law and More Law"?

Richard Dolan said...

This is a non-story if ever there was one I(and Yale has now made it more so by offering a second section of the admin law course to deal with those 3Ls heart-broken at being rejected on th first go-around). Other than providing an opportunity for Lat to give his alma mater a poke, what is the point?

If the objective were to learn the basics of a 'black-letter' subject as the article suggests, it would be easy enough for any enterprising 3L to read the hornbook or casebook. Admin law is very, very far from rocket science.