[T]hings have now gotten to the point that almost no one, not even someone with an excellent JD, can do competent, cutting edge work in interdisciplinary areas like law and economics, or law and philosophy, or law and psychology. In those cases, the PhD training is essential.I strongly disagree. While PhD training can be immensely useful -- I often wish I had such training -- I think Leiter overstates the case that it is "essential" to do competent cutting edge interdisciplinary work. Leiter’s statement appears to rest on the assumption that one needs a PhD in order to understand and write in certain fields, such as economics, philosophy, or psychology. With all due respect, I believe that it is possible to understand and write about philosophy and other disciplines without a PhD.
1. Leiter’s statement appears to assume a strong distinction between interdisciplinary legal scholarship and legal scholarship more generally. I wonder whether such a distinction is valid. I believe that law is inherently interdisciplinary. What exactly is non-interdisciplinary legal scholarship? Law has internalized philosophy, economics, and other fields. Is there such as thing as “pure” law? Given that the study of law is inextricably immersed in other disciplines, I doubt one can be an “excellent JD” without having had some background in other disciplines.
2. The idea that a person without a PhD can do competent cutting edge work in law and philosophy, law and economics, etc. strikes me as facially false. Having a PhD is not a sufficient condition for writing good “interdisciplinary” legal scholarship – people with PhDs can write crap with the best of them. Having a PhD is not a necessary condition either. The issue isn’t whether a person has PhD training, but whether somebody is sufficiently immersed in the literature to engage in the debate. The most important criteria for good legal scholarship is whether the scholar has a good background in the relevant texts of the discipline and is an excellent thinker, not what credential that person may hold. Under Leiter’s view, can Judge Richard Posner and Judge Guido Calabresi make “competent” and “cutting edge” contributions to law and economics today?
Cross-posted at PrawfsBlawg; check there, in addition to here, for comments.
BRIAN LEITER WRITES IN REPLY: "Re: Daniel's lengthy reply: One can justify a claim either by appeal to what one knows and has evidence for or by appeal to the judgments of qualified experts; obviously my view about work in law and philosophy is of the former kind, my view about work in, for example, law and economics, of the latter kind. It will be easier to show that the second kind of justification is faulty by adducing qualified experts who dispute it, though, to the best of my knowledge, we have heard from none here.
ReplyDeleteWhat Daniel calls the "faulty logic" of my generalization based on a sample is not faulty logic at all, unless one thinks all inductive inferences are unjustified, which, to be sure, some (e.g., Popper) have thought. I would hope we don't have to solve the problem of induction to observe that with a rare exception purportedly philosophical writing by JDs in the law reviews over, say, the last decade has been of an extremely poor quality, and that this might be rather good evidence that if you want someone doing very good work in law and philosophy, you had better look for more than the JD by way of formal training. We can, of course, supplement the empirical observation with an explanation for the observed phenomenon (e.g., why it is someone with a JD would make the kinds of mistakes that we observe) that would support the thought that if you're hiring a jurisprudent you had better hire a JD/PhD in philosophy if you want someone competent.
I would assume we would look to philosophers and economists, for example, to figure out what philosophy and economics involve. Those understandings are transitory, of course, and may evolve radically over time, but that is neither here nor there: I am only making a claim about the here and now. There are also no disputes among philosophers in the here-and-now about what philosophy is that have any bearing on the point I am making (Daniel cites none, of course, referring only in the abstract to the possibility of such "contested" claims about philosophy). I have no idea what it means to say "law could be understood...as a branch of philosophy," unless the point is that one can stipulate anything to mean anything, which, of course, is true, but then I'm not sure how it is relevant. Since the debate here is fundamentally an evaluative one, it is, of course, true that it has a normative component; that is quite compatible with it having an empirical component too, e.g., the interdisciplinary work actually done, the empirical data which is then to be subjected to evaluation. (The other kind of evidence I'm going on, by the way, comes from years of doing appointments, and looking at the work of candidates with JDs who purported to be doing work of a jurisprudential nature.)"
Posted by: BL | Sep 11, 2005 9:19:51 AM at PrawfsBlawg
I suspect I am closer to Leiter than Solove on this one, with the following observations and modifications.
ReplyDelete1. We should be more suspicious of interdiciplinary legal work published in law reviews than in peer reviewed journals. Peer review journals also have their problems, but if a law professor consistently publishes, say in good quality literary journals, seems to be, a rank amateur in that area, that the person is probably doing professional quality work.
2. Lots of subjects exist on the borders between disciplines. I've done a lot of amateur, semi-pro at best, history and philosophy, because that borders on subject matters where I do have some credentials. And I have seen some very weak law by PhDs who would benefit by a law degree.
3. But I think the vast majority of people with a JD and a PhD in another subject think that the PhD training prepares one better for interdisciplinary scholarship than the JD. My graduate students regularly have professional historians and sometimes law professors on their PhD committees. Rarely true for law review types.
Hippocrates said it best: "The art is long, life is short". It is difficult enough to master one profession, let alone two. Is there a point where one can say "I am as good a lawyer, doctor, biologist, geneticist, etc. as any human being can possibly be and it is time to achieve perfection in another profession"? I do not think so. Achievement is the result of dedication. The lawyer continues to try to be the best lawyer he can be and the biologist maps the human genome and the two together persuade the judge and jury. If we are talking about "cutting-edge work". If we are talking about being "credentialed" so that we can participate in discussions in other fields then a Ph.D. will add to our credibility but the cutting edge work will still be done by the single-minded, dedicated specialists in that field, whether they are lawyers, or AIDS researchers or astrophysicists, etc..
ReplyDeleteI feel its necessary. With economic fields becoming as complicated as they are, higher levels of education are a must. I consider myself pretty educated, but even I had to consult a consumer credit counseling service just to handle my finances.
ReplyDelete