Comments on: The Failed Conservative Revolution

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:04:45 +0000

Picador- I think the claim is pretty clearly that, at most schools, a course in law and economics isn’t required, not that the methods of it are not used (usually at a pretty shallow level of understanding) in many classes. My understanding is that one of the ways in which GMU is distinctive is that a specific course in law and economics is required. As to your other point, you can quibble about who counts as a “liberal”, but on pretty much any plausible account, Howard Chang, Chris Sanchirico, Matt Adler, Kristen Madison, and Friedrich K. Kubler, all law professors at Penn who work in, around, and with, law and economics (3 of the 5 have PhDs in economics as well as law degrees), count as “liberals”, so I think your claim is pretty clearly false. Other examples, from many schools, are not hard to find, and I pick these ones because they are personally known to me.

By: Picador

Picador — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:55:17 +0000

It’s no longer the case that law and economics is exclusively done by conservatives, or that it supports conservative policy prescriptions…
The average law student is not required to take law and economics, nor does the average judge automatically rely on economics as an analytical tool.

I’d like to see your support for both of these propositions. My own experience at Columbia and NYU was that 1) every law student, even at very liberal institutions, is inundated with L&E from day 1 of Torts class, and it permeates the materials for almost every black-letter law course; and 2) L&E relies on shockingly anti-democratic, gilded-age assumptions about human behavior using economic models formulated 150 years before the modern sciences of psychology and sociology came into existence.

I suppose some L&E discourse might qualify as “liberal” if you consider a Clintonite free-marketeer like Cass Sunstein to be a “liberal”. I found it to be directly at odds with every assumption about a functional democratic and civil society that my New Deal Democrat upbringing and education instilled in me.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:21:05 +0000

There’s a segment of American Catholicism – I’m thinking not just of the TMLC, but people like Bill Donohue as well – which more closely resembles Southern Baptism than post Vatican II Catholicism in the rest of the world.

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:26:36 +0000

Well, the weird thing is is that TMLC is nominally a Catholic organization (not officially, but Monaghan is Catholic). That’s the last source from which I’d expect lawyers with poor logic. Of course, Monaghan might be at the point of being a start-my-own-sect fudamentalist by now.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:08:35 +0000

To be honest, I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s an identity thing. TMLC is very open about its mission and its beliefs, and argues its cases exactly as a not very bright fundamentalist with a vague grasp of constitutional law would. Maybe this appeals to not very bright fundamentalists with a vague grasp of constitutional law. TMLC also seems to be more willing to chase obvious lost causes than some of the savvier Christian law firms.

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:59:24 +0000

Good point, Ginger; I’ll take a reading comprehension pill. However, it does lead to a question – why can’t the cultural right get good lawyers? They’ve got enough money to pay for some, I’m sure, and there should be some who’d work pro bono.

By: MarkUp

MarkUp — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:39:46 +0000

I’ve got two words to say about this “failure”…. [i]National Council for a New America[/i]

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:13:50 +0000

That’s why I specified the “cultural” right.

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:32:49 +0000

‘Big fights’? I’d place the TMLC as a loud little yelping poodle, which deals with creationism and trying to reduce religious freedom in schools. The true big fights would be the economic fights, where the high-paid big guns work.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:09:49 +0000

I don’t know if Teles covers this in the book, but it seems to me that a fairly sizeable part of the reason for failure could be that the (cultural) right is often happy to leave their big fights to demonstrably incompetent law firms like the Thomas More Law Centre and to financially support crappy law schools like Regent. Meanwhile the left-leaning ACLU has a pretty good track record.