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63 U. Colo. L. Rev. 595 (1992)
A Certain Narcissim; A Slight Unseemliness

handle is hein.journals/ucollr63 and id is 611 raw text is: A CERTAIN NARCISSISM; A SLIGHT UNSEEMLINESS JOHN HENRY SCHLEGEL* My first draft of this piece began with a few cautionary remarks on the danger of narcissism when looking back at legal scholarship over so short a period as ten years. I still hold those cautions but, since completing that draft, two things have changed my understand- ing of the matter. First, I have come to realize that most law teachers feel that any systematic discussion of the state or content of legal scholarship is frivolous narcissism (i.e., real men don't do it). Since some of the best scholarship written today in fact focuses on the na- ture and structure of legal scholarship, the notion that such inquiry is inappropriate needs to be stomped out. A certain narcissism is thus a good thing. Second, something wonderfully awful happened to a col- league of mine, David Engel. David has been writing about the way that the simple legal norms of contract and tort come to be deployed to demarcate the bounds of a community and how that same sense of community influences the decision to see law as an appropriate re- sponse to conflict.' Lately David has shifted his research to look at a * Professor of Law, State University of New York at Buffalo. This piece is for Stewart Macaulay whose scholarship is a continuing object of delight and whose aphorism, You can teach anything so long as you call it Contracts has provided comfort and inspiration to many of us for years. Hopefully this article will help him understand why the aphorism now impedes change in legal education and needs to be scrapped. My thanks to my editor Robert Fishman who asked some good questions. A word for a certain species of doubters need be offered at the outset. It may be comforting for some to see this article as the last crabby outburst on the part of one who is soon to leave legal educa- tion. Others have previously been comforted when faced with my incendiary prose. See John Henry Schlegel, Searching For Archimedes-Legal Education, Legal Scholarship, and Liberal Ideology, 34 J. LEGAL EDUC. 103 (1984). Nothing could have been farther from the truth then or now. I write from the firm conviction that we do a piss-poor job of preparing students to be lawyers and that we could do one hell of a better job at this practical task, which I take to be the primary job of a law school. Having been taught as a child that quitters don't win and winners don't quit I am not about to give up on law teaching. Occasionally I gain comfort when contemplating the sub-marginal success of my efforts at improving the education law students receive by remembering that Karl Llewellyn, a far more influen- tial law professor than I, got nowhere with his similar complaints, see Karl Llewellyn, On What is Wrong with So-Called Legal Education, 35 COLUM. L. REV. 651 (1935), and that I am likely to get my way sooner than law professors will choose to get paid the same as janitors or universities will agree to pay janitors the same as law professors. See Duncan Kennedy, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, 32 J. LEGAL EDUC. 591, 615 (1982). 1. See David Engel, Law, Time, and Community, 21 LAW. & Soc. REV. 605 (1987); David Engel, The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders and Personal Injuries in an American Community, 18 LAW. & Soc. REV. 551 (1984); David Engel, Cases Conflict, and Accommodation: Patterns of Legal Interaction in an American Community, 1983 AM. B. FOUND REs. J. 803.

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