A law professor, writing anonymously, has argued that law school is a scam. See the excerpt on Tax Prof and links to other posts included therein: Anonymous Law Prof: Law Profs are Scamming their Students, Aug. 11, 2011.
Essentially, the anonymous law prof at a first-tier (but not top 10) school says that law profs do very little but reteach the same courses they taught in prior years, with little 'updating' of their own intellectual knowledge or preparation for class, little practice experience in the field they are teaching, and with a lot of bravado to 'fake it' as an authority and avoid the hard questions their students may ask. He claims that legal scholarship was long understood not to be of academic quality (because it was 'doctrinal') and even now fails since journals aren't typically peer-reviewed. But he seems to suggest that the addition of "law and ____" courses and scholarship was a move towards 'real' academic scholarship.
Maybe the description of a typical law professors' workload/work methods is true for someone who teaches a couple of sections of the same first-year course year-in and year-out or even others who teach mostly case-based disciplines of the law where they basically hold easy-going conversations with students around a couple of cases during each class section. The law prof mentions Property and Contracts courses as examples of courses where he thinks most profs just teach from the text and teacher's manual without any relevant experience and without really teaching their students about the difficult transactional and other aspects of contract writing.
As a tax professor, I have to say that this description of typical preparation and typical classes, even if true for most law professors, is something quite different from the norm I believe exists for most tax professors. Most tax professors will have practiced tax law at least a few years (in my case, more than six). There are few people who could get away with teaching anything but the most limited tax course without more practical knowledge than can be acquired from reading the text and the teacher's manual. Most will keep up with key cases, legislation (and there's lots of tax legislation to keep up with) and commentary, meaning that there are many hours each week that must be devoted just to keeping up with what is going on in the field. Many will also research further various topics as part of their preparation for teaching particular classes, because a change in the law may have impacted something that is planned to be covered, and there may be new administrative guidance, relevant cases, or relevant commentary that throws some light on the full impact of the change. That research will be done, even if the class ends up being mostly about the same as the last time it was taught--either because the changes were too nuanced to be covered in an introductory level course, or because there was nothing very helpful out there. Even if not directly taught in the course, the research and reading will give the tax prof more depth in the discussion--something to bring in, if the opportunity presents itself, from the 'real world' of transactions and deal-making. Most manuals (with notable exceptions) barely touch the surface of the issues, and are far too limited to be considered an adequate foundation for a class.
I also question whether the author's apparent view that the 'law and....' type of scholarship is more intellectual and valuable (even more 'academic') than good doctrinal scholarship. For example, much of the law and economics literature (relying on defined concepts like efficiency or rationality and based on assumptions that make the 'theory' reduce nicely to clear mathematical formulae but not very useful, nonetheless, for predicting human bahavior) recycles overly simplistic ideas from one area of the law to the next: in reality, it isn't worth much. But almost every law school has at least one 'scholar' doing 'law and economics' scholarship and most have quite a few: many a full professor at many a law school has gotten there through such scholarship. Similarly, empirical scholarship, now all the rage, has surpisingly weak foundations. Most of it requires initial categorization determinations that have the not unsurprising effect of determining the conclusions.
And in fact when it comes to tax policy decisions, the 'law and economics' approach--like the over emphasis and misused concepts from Friedman and 'free market' economics generally--can be downright detrimental to the kind of thoughtful consideration that we should be giving to tax policy decisions. Frequently, one hears comments about 'efficiency' or 'deadweight loss' or 'the need to support businesses in global competition' as though the mere mention of these concepts provided full justification for tax policies that reverse decades of expecting businesses to pay a fair share of taxes and expecting progressive tax rates to ensure that the truly well-off are paying more than the vulnerable lower middle class and poor. One of the problems of four decades of Reaganomics in politics and Friedman-style 'free market' law and economics arguments in legal academia is that reiteration of wrong ideas starts to become accepted as factual, even when not. Reiteration of law and economics "efficiency is what counts, not fairness" arguments makes it that much harder for considered commentary about fairness to make headway.
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