According to its new Dean, Harold Koh, it was. Discuss. No anonymous posts.
What’s wrong with it is it’s so terrifying I don’t want to read it
12 responses to “Was Yale Law School the “Greatest Law School of the 20th Century”?”
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Dean Koh says: "..we must stay true to our values and traditions, while at the same time changing to meet four key challenges"
I'd like to stay true to my vegetarian diet, while at the same time eating 4 different cuts of beef!
Globalization? Why not teach students how to try and win cases or appeals.
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You'd have to conclude that the Appointments Committees at (most) American law schools agree with Dean Koh.
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Well, what does it mean to be the greatest? For much of the late 20th century Yale was the consensus number one school for one group or another.
In many ways, by turning out fewer graduates, it has guaranteed that it will be dependent on polls to preserve its position, as in most areas where one measures which is the best, there will always be 4 Harvard graduates to every Yale graduate — but then, across the board that rough (and I mean rough) ratio applies.
Guess it really depends on how you view President Clinton (the last of the gentleman graduates) and how you view the world since then.
Not sure what kind of discussion you expect, but it is an interesting topic.
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I'll take a stab at it:
Yale's claim to being the greatest law school of the twentieth century may be related to its place in the development of legal realism. Laura Kalman's book discusses the development of legal realism at Yale.
On the other hand, I've never been convinced of Yale's primacy in this area. Many of the legal realists started at Columbia, and the movement only shifted decisively to Yale after Columbia politics forced out some leading legal realists. Much (most?) of the interesting work had been done by then.
Has Yale participated much in the other movements of the twentieth century? I'm not sure. I think CLS, and I think Harvard; I think L & E, and I think Chicago.
Have leading legal figures of the twentieth century been Yale affiliated? Putting aside that it's a very complicated question who the leading legal figures even are, and going with a quick back-of-the-envelope list of some names that come to mind quickly (a list which is certain to be missing many important names) with affiliations:
Llewellyn – Yale / Columbia / Chicago
Pound – Harvard
Hand – Courts
Hart – Oxford
Fuller – Harvard
Hart & Sacks – Harvard
Wechsler – Columbia
Black – Columbia / Yale
Ely – Harvard / Yale / Stanford
Posner – Chicago
Dworkin – NYU
Bickel – YaleIf we're looking for Yale dominance, it's not there. It looks like a Harvard/Yale wash at best, and a Yale / Columbia tie for second at worst.
And of course, there is today, when Yale has the best faculty of any law school. But that shouldn't be given excessive weight; the claim isn't to be the greatest law school of the year 2000, it's a claim that covers an entire century.
Bottom line, it's very clear that Yale was one of the great law schools of the last century, but I don't think that Yale has a particularly strong claim as "the greatest" school of the century.
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One thing that is clear is that Yale has dominated American legal education for the last two decades (which explains the fact noted, above, by Professor Alces). Part of the narcissitic hyperbole, however, of the quoted remark is that it generalizes from this two-decade dominance to an entire century and without any evident limitation to American legal culture. (How are we to compare Yale as against Oxford or the Sorbonne or Heidelberg and on and on?) But when we look at a whole century, it is hardly obvious, as Mr. Wenger notes, that it really makes sense to single out Yale. And the winds of fortune change even more dramatically in legal education than in other disciplines–many of the greats of the Yale Law faculty at, say, mid-century (e.g., Underhill Moore or Myres McDougal) are today simply intellectual curiosities or embarrassments.
Thanks to all who have commented so far.
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As a current student of the University of Minnesota Law School, I would like to note that Yale stole Minnesota's dean and 80% of its faculty some time in the 1950s in its quest to become the greatest law school of the twentieth century. Kind of cheating, isn't it?
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Globalization? How many foreign law professors does Yale Law School count? None, I believe. Well, you might of course say that US law schools teach US law and that they should thus be composed of US law professors with the classic JD, Law Review, Clerckship pedigree. But it should not matter in a school like YLS, which apparently does not seek to teach black letter law. So why so few foreign professors? Do you need to have a US passport to be onsidered as smart?
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We might want to separate the question, "Was Yale Law School The Great Law School of the 20th Century?" from "Was Yale Law School the Greatest Law School of the 20th Century?" The second question is the lower hurdle. All we'd have to decide is that Yale Law was marginally better than Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, and so forth.
Whether any law school was great before 1960 seems doubtful to me, at least if we're speaking of scholarly achievement. Law schools just weren't that scholarly. The legal world didn't have that many new ideas during that period, and with the decline of formalism, no outstanding champions of the old ideas.
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It was hyperbole. The same folks who think they can delimit the "best of the best" as if it were the 100M at the Olympics are conviced that Dworkin's "Law's Empire" is a significant piece of legal/philosophical scholarship (yet alone has a meaningful sentence).
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Thanks Brian for circumventing the qualification to the American legal culture. I agree with you that we cannot compare Yale against Oxford, Sorbonne, Heidelberg or Bologna or on and on (at best we can compare departments or influence of departments in the school’s country or abroad). Nor can we speak about Yale as “the Greatest Law School of the 20th Century" but only if 1: we assume that the American Law is “the greatest Law of the 20th Century” compared with other countries law, and 2: we determine (measure) by one method or another that Yale is the "mother of all schools" in this American greatest Law. To be sincere, I doubt we can agree on a method of determination or quantification of this Greatest-ness all over the world(or even in a culture), other than people’s (from one culture or another) impression(I have my doubts that the American Realists are more known in the French Africa than saying, Planiol, for example, as I have my doubts that Yale model is emulate in Putin’s Russia). Anyway, more interesting seems to me if we would be able somehow to determine the influence of an idea or another in the world and to draw an intellectual map of these big idea(s) in comparative perspective. Just after we have such map and look in all directions, or at a minimum, just after we agree that Yale’s model is the best product of the civilization (for this or that reason we all agree on), we might be able to say that Yale was “the Greatest Law School of the 20th Century". Otherwise, with all respect and admiration I have for Yale, and in general for American Law Schools, “Yale Greatest Law School of the 20th Century” cannot be something else that a parochial or provincial pretension.
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