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21 Law & Soc. Inquiry 967 (1996)
The Lost Law Professor

handle is hein.journals/lsociq21 and id is 977 raw text is: The Lost Law Professor Daniel R. Ernst JOHN HENRY SCHLEGEL. American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 418. Of all the groups of thinkers left homeless by the parcelling out of the boundless intellectual domain of the Victorian gentleman, few have felt their loss more keenly than full-time law professors in the United States. Of course, scholars in other fields have sometimes fretted over the costs of the professionalization of their discipline, and several have recently mourned the passing of the public intellectual. In law, however, such anxieties have been endemic. One source of these worries is the unusual, if not unique, dependence of the law schools, in comparison with other university depart- ments, on a powerful and independent profession that never fully relin- quished the production of expert knowledge in the field. Compared with the lay consumers of intellectual activity in other disciplines, judges and lawyers are remarkably confident in their assessments of the value of legal scholarship and the quality of legal education. Within the last decade their concerns have acquired a broad audience through widely noted articles and symposia and vigorously argued bar association reports. Such critiques from beyond the legal academy would not have acquired their present force were it not for divisions among the law professors them- selves. Rare is the law faculty that agrees on the audience for legal scholar- ship or its place in the mission of their school, and even scholars who write for other scholars often find themselves on either side of an intellectual divide, separated by their growing sophistication in one or another of the social sciences or humanities, with no shared disciplinary competence to bridge the chasm. In many cases this extralegal expertise was self-acquired, but often the interdisciplinarians became what they are after extensive peri- Daniel P. Ernst is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is grateful to Laura Kalman for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay. © 1997 American Bar Foundation. 0897-6546/96/2104-967$01.00 967

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