"Law school changes the way you think." Of the many clichéd predictions and bits of advice given to me before law school, I must grudgingly admit this one has turned out to be true.

One of the curiosities of law school is that it's like the Mall of America for intellectuals. Within its walls, it houses dozens of scholarly interests, some of which are what I'd call intrinsically legal topics (e.g. civil procedure, evidence) but most are not. For instance, we have classes on sports, network television, animal rights, the Internet, education, poverty, quantitative research methods, stem cell research, sexual orientation, real estate finance, international taxation, economics, feminism, history, film criticism, etc.

The heterogeneity of law school is both an asset and a liability. You can see why law has become the preferred finishing school for liberal arts nerds who have $100K to spare: you have the pleasure of getting a practical, professional credential, but meanwhile, you don't actually have to settle in and focus on any one thing in particular. Animal rights on Tuesday, real estate finance on Wednesday, sports on Thursday.

However, it's an open question whether law scholars really work up to the same standards as scholars in parallel fields, in terms of conceptual and methodological rigor. Maybe that's an argument to have more law review articles jointly authored with folks outside the legal academy, though that rarely seems to happen. But the result is — any professor who teaches a class on a specialized legal topic is regarded as a de facto expert, which may not be a valid interpolation.

Or is it? "You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone." If nothing else, law is leverage. Arguably, someone who's in a position to control legal regulation of stem cell research is potentially in a far more influential position than the best stem cell scientist, even though the regulator knows much less about the nuts and bolts. If you wanted to achieve the greatest effect on the direction of stem cell science with the comparatively lowest effort, you'd probably be better off at law school than med school.

Maybe that's what makes government as magical (and scary) as it is. One professor I know has described law school as teaching you the architecture of society — how everything fits together. I don't agree that law has that much explanatory power. Many times, law is running (well, more like walking) to catch up to social and economic changes. If you want to know how everything fits together, you'll need to crane your neck farther.

Most areas of the law follow a predictable pattern: At first, there are no rules. At some point, big guys develop an incentive to pick on little guys. Then, lawyers start filing complaints. At first they lose, but eventually, they start winning as courts recognize the rights of the little guys. After that, legislatures also recognize the little guys by memorializing those rights in changes to the law.

But sometime after that, the process reverses. The big guys re-assert their rights using economic and political leverage. Eventually, there's some combination of legislative and judicial limiting of the little guy's rights. The little guys end up better off than where they started, but never as good as the peak.

But I digress.

18 Jan 07