Why the Interdisciplinary Movement in Legal Academia Might be a Bad Idea (For Most Law Schools)

Interdisciplinary studies are currently the rage in legal academia. An increasing number of law schools are touting their interdisciplinary programs, which include offering courses from other academic disciplines (economics, statistics, anthropology, etc.) in the law school curriculum, creating law and social science institutes of various sorts within the law school, offering joint JD/PhD programs, and hiring JD/ PhD faculty.

It seems like an irresistible movement with the potential to transform legal academia. But based upon the historical evidence and the nature of legal practice, I’m skeptical.

First the historical evidence: this idea has been tried before with no evident success.

William Draper Lewis published a paper in 1913 entitled “The Social Sciences as the Basis of Legal Education.” Lewis argued in the paper that law should adjust to changes in society, and that lawyers and judges need training in the social sciences to properly carry out this task. He proposed “adding to the present course in the law school modern teaching in economics, sociology, history and political science …provided the course in law can be extended beyond the present limit of three years.” Lewis went on:

If I may make an attempt at a practical suggestion, let those of us who are connected with Law Schools and those who are connected with departments of Philosophy, try the experiment of conducting joint seminars open to students of law and students of the social sciences, these seminars to discuss legal theory and social ideas, or, if you prefer, the development of law as affected by economic conditions. We may not at first educate our students, but we will educate each other and perhaps lay a foundation which will result in developing a class of law teachers, and may I also suggest perhaps a class of teachers of the social sciences, better able than we with out one-sided education, to perform our respective task.

Lewis, it should be noted, had an LL.B and a PhD in economics. He was the Dean of Penn Law School for several decades (including when he gave this speech), the first Director of the American Law Institute, and an early President of the American Association of Law Schools.

If anyone was in a position to make this idea work, Draper was the person. But little came of it.

The later Legal Realists—sometimes mistakenly credited with being the initial promoters of this idea—also argued that the social sciences should be integrated into the study of law. Various reasons come to mind when we speculate about why this initiative failed—the social sciences were immature, the Legal Realists were overly optimistic about what the social sciences could deliver, or the conservative legal academy repelled this as an invasion of law by alien intruders. Perhaps all these factors contributed, although it’s hard to know.

There may be a more fundamental reason for the failure: perhaps detailed knowledge of the social sciences—anything beyond rudimentary information every educated person should possess—is irrelevant to the practice of law.

It seems evident that one can be an excellent lawyer without knowing any of this interdisciplinary stuff, while it is not obvious that learning this will make a person a better lawyer. A stronger case can be made that this information might improve the performance of judges, but a more efficient way to deliver this benefit is to set up classes (in economics, statistics, etc.) for sitting judges—programs which now exist.

Law constantly deals with every day problems through the terminology, practices, and processes of the legal tradition. It has always interacted with and absorbed surrounding social circumstances and ideas, and will continue to do so. Consider the example of law and economics, often identified as the most successful social scientific approach to law. A student can learn everything necessary about this subject by reading the casebooks in subjects that have incorporated aspects of economic analysis. Because this has been internalized within the legal discourse (to a limited degree), there is no need for a special course or program on the subject.

The social sciences, on their end, have their own orientations and concerns that do not easily translate into legal contexts. So bringing these courses and programs into the law schools does not necessarily mean they will be integrated in any real sense.

Don’t get me wrong—I am not anti-intellectual nor a legal traditionalist. My own work is immersed in the social scientific and theory literature as least as much as the legal literature. But I am an academic, not a lawyer. My job is to gather and develop knowledge about law, not to engage in the practice of law. There is no question that knowledge about law is enhanced through an interdisciplinary perspective.

I doubt, however, that the knowledge I have acquired about law would in any way improve my performance as a lawyer. As far as I know, no convincing evidence has been provided to demonstrate that “interdisciplinary studies” will help one whit in the training or performance of lawyers.

So why is this the rage?

It appears to be the latest stage in the general movement of law schools toward becoming more academic (more like institutions of learning than trainers of a profession)—it’s another step in the divorcing of legal academia from legal practice that many have observed (a phenomenon which Lewis first noted in a 1924 speech, “The Law Teaching Branch of the Profession.”). Perhaps another contributing factor is the natural tendency toward empire-building in elite law schools, which are flush with money.

If the above speculation is correct (and admittedly it is speculation), it does not suggest that the trend toward interdisciplinary studies in elite law schools is a bad idea. What it is does suggest is that we should be clear and honest about the rationales behind it, and we should also recognize that it is not necessarily a model that all law schools should emulate. Building knowledge about law is important and valuable, and bringing other disciplines into the law schools can help advance this (or at least it has that potential). But that is entirely different from the dubious proposition that interdisciplinary studies will help train better lawyers.

In a series of Balkinization posts I have raised the various worrisome implications of the increasingly distinct two universes of legal practice (corporate law and all the rest), more or less matched by the two universes of law schools (elite and all the rest)—which, by the way, I learned about from reading social scientific studies of the legal profession.

In the elite law school universe—with huge endowments and ample resources, with large faculties, with graduates who become corporate lawyers and donate more money, with graduates who become academically-oriented law school professors—the interdisciplinary movement can be justified.

In the non-elite law school universe—with schools almost entirely dependent upon tuition, with a majority of graduates who do not get corporate law jobs and only rarely become law professors—the interdisciplinary movement cannot be so easily justified.

Let me just give three reasons why it might be a bad idea for non-elite law schools. First and foremost, as argued above, there is no evidence that it will make their students better lawyers. Second, it costs a lot of money to go interdisciplinary, and (because non-elite schools are tuition driven) this money will come out of the pockets of the students. Third, their education might suffer if their faculties emulate the elite law school trend toward hiring JD/PhDs with little or no practice experience (assuming a person with some experience in the practice of law has a bit more insight to impart to students about how to be good lawyers).

Fortunately, even if their law schools do not go interdisciplinary, law students at non-elite law schools can obtain whatever benefits might accrue from interdisciplinary training without paying the cost because (given current hiring patterns) most of their professors will be graduates of elite law schools.

Annual tuition at elite law schools will likely hit $50,000 within five years. This hefty price tag (gulp!) is still a good investment for graduates of elite law schools, who are in line for lucrative (albeit life-draining) corporate law jobs. The same cannot be said for graduates of non-elite law schools. Non-elite law schools must find ways to keep their tuition down.

The bottom line of this post: the notion that interdisciplinary studies within law schools promises to improve the practice of law is an old idea backed up by little evidence. Non-elite law schools might not be serving their students well if they get caught up in this trend.