Cultural knowledge and personal responsibility
Somebody — I think it may have been the most overrated philosopher of all time, J.S. Mill — said that truth goes through three stages. First it’s mocked as absurd. Then it’s declared to be against religion. Finally, it’s said to be what everyone has believed all along.
I think we’re getting to stage three in regard to the proposition that law school has turned out to be somewhere between a very risky proposition and a flat-out ripoff for the vast majority of people who are attending today, and who have graduated in recent years.
This statement, which as little as three years ago would have been treated as either “crazy” or at the least a gross exaggeration by almost everybody in legal academia, is rapidly heading toward the status of conventional wisdom. One sign of this is that a National Jurist poll of the most influential people in legal academia, which was conducted by surveying a group made up in large part of law school deans, has selected Brian Tamanaha as #1 on this list, with Bill Henderson as the first runner-up, should Brian for any reason not be able to fulfill his duties at some point during his reign. (Modesty forbids me from pointing out that I won Mr. Congeniality).
Think about that: law school deans — probably the single most status-quo regarding group within legal academia — selected somebody who wrote a book arguing that the current model of legal education in America simply doesn’t work any more, and is in need of radical reform, as the most influential person in the business.
In other words, the conventional wisdom about law school, both within higher education and in the culture at large, has been changing with lightening speed. This is important to remember when people start reflexively victim-blaming recent grads and even current law students for not being more reasonably prudent rational maximizers of their own utility when they signed up for this thing of ours.
Consider, for example, the class that will be graduating this spring. The class of 2013 applied to law school in the fall of 2009, which means that it is mostly made up of people who got serious about going to law school no later than 2008 or so, if not much earlier (it takes most people awhile to study for the LSAT, pull together letters of recommendation, etc.).
Think about what information was available to prospective law students five years ago about immediate outcomes for law graduates, let alone the long term career trajectories of aspiring lawyers. Compared to today, there were almost no warnings about the fact that, because of the rising cost of law degrees and long-term trends in the market for attorneys, the net present value of a legal education had been declining for at least two decades, and was likely to continue to do so. Bill Henderson made his very first public observations about the bimodal salary distribution around this time. (This Tamanaha post at Balkinization, which is barely two and a half years old, indicates implicitly how little these trends had been recognized outside the still very underground world of scamblogging).
All of which is to say the extent to which responsibility for acting on what has suddenly become the “obvious” truth that law school is a high risk enterprise can be imputed to law graduates and even current law students is very limited. Indeed the cultural lag time involved pushes me, at least, toward the conclusion that only people who enrolled in law school this year can be reasonably held responsible for having some realistic sense of what they are getting themselves into.
Why the gratuitous knock against Mill?
Seriously, Plato was way more overrated. Not to mention the whole “Objectivism” school of bullshit. And don’t even get me started on that bastard Étienne Tempier…
Or poor Plato!
Overrated by whom? I kinda doubt Mill or Plato are overrated in a general way in philosophy departments. Mill might be somewhat underrated, at least, in the attention he receives.
Dunno how either of them fare in polysci departments…
The quote isn’t even from Mill. I suppose someone’s been waiting for the opportunity…
Mill is absolutely not overrated, and that knock was unnecessary and ridiculous.
My sense, indeed, is that Mill is, if anything, underrated, because it’s always more fashionable to write about incomprehensible German reactionaries than about English liberals who write reasonably well.
In fairness to incomprehensible German reactionaries, though, many of the English translations of them are just awful.
My sense was that many of them are just as bad in the original, although I’ve not read them to know.
Hegel, yes. Kant is highly technical but really quite clear. Nietzsche is an excellent writer, and Heidegger… who knows?
Maybe Paul de Man.
Well, in all fairness, you need to be somewhat incomprehensible during a confirmation hearing. SecDef may not be Scotus, but why risk a borking?
most overrated philosopher of all time, J.S. Mill
Martin Heidegger says hello, and resents being denied the title he clearly earned.
That distinction goes to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Overrated by high school boys, maybe. Among the professional community, less so.
See Exhibit A (below):
He has so many great quotes though…
Never mind his actual philosophy, just the QUOTES man! Every paper I ever wrote I could fit one in!
He who calls others overrated must take care he does not overrate himself.
No, the prize goes to Aristotle, who stated that women have a different number of teeth then men do.
I can see why you don’t like Mill, Prof. Campos:
Aristotle was probably the most intelligent man ever to have lived, and certainly one of the top five in total influence.
It’s true that Aristotle certainly came up with some headscratchers, but given the breadth of his work and how influential it was for so long (and to some degree continues to be today), I wouldn’t put him among the “most overrated”.
Bertrand Russell on Aristotle
I’m quite aware of all that, but I take a different view on Aristotle probably because I’m a historian and not a philosopher, and I find Russell’s perspective to be a bit Whiggish.
Russell on the history of philosophy is not remotely reliable. Really.
There’s a hell of a lot in Aristotle and a hell of lot that is still worth reading.
Russell’s reliability on the history of philosophy is spotty, but there is one subdiscipline on whose history he is absolute hell on wheels, and that is logic.
Yes, his only peer in that area was Wittgenstein.
I doubt that Aristotle was the most intelligent man who ever lived, it’s probably the most intelligent man who ever wrote stuff that survived over the course of 25 centuries.
Hmm. Wittgenstien is no where near as important a logician as Russell and wrote, IIRC, no significant history of either logic or philosophy.
(Russell’s work on logic affected many areas of mathematics, computer science, and philosophy. Truth tables are obviously important and Wittgenstein was clearly involved with them (see this for a discussion), but if you consider Principia + theory of types + Russell’s paradox I think that Russell’s logical work, per se, was more significant. If we’re talking philosophy of logic, then the case is way more complex.)
Actually, while Russell is a world-historical figure in the history of logic, his status as a historian of logic is not particularly high.
(This isn’t too surprising. Russell’s “histories” were polemical. Nothing wrong with that! It’s a great mode of philosophy, but it doesn’t make them accurate from a scholarly perspective. It might surprise you as well that Kant isn’t the best Hume scholar, but there you go.)
To be perfectly cleare, Russell made logic history. His writing of the history of logic was not nearly as significant (as history) nor so very superior to his history of philosophy.
Wrong again:
G. E. Moore originally suggested the work’s Latin title as homage to Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
Only someone in academia could produce as much mis-information as you’ve done on this thread.
I presume you meant to reply to the other comment. Again, you refute nothing of what I wrote nor are you even on topic.
Of course the Tractatus is one of the most significant texts in philosophy. But it’s not primarily a logical treatise. It contains a lot of philosophy *of* logic but develops relatively little logic itself. If we are correct to attribute truth tables to the Tractatus, then it is a very significant bit of logic. But it still pales next to Principia or Frege.
This doesn’t put a knock on Wittgenstien. His influence was more on philosophy than logic per se.
I don’t know why you feel the need to cackle and condescend as if you were scoring points, but it might behoove you to understand the comments you are attacking before hitting the Web.
It is not Aristotle’s fault that so little was done to build on his work for the next 2000 years.
I don’t understand why you feel my responses are so poorly reasoned and lacking in fact that you have to point it out time and again.
I think this is decently unfair to Aristotle. Yes, he got a lot of his biology wrong but he was one of the first humans to start thinking about natural phenomena in non-religious terms and theorize about it. He got the ball rolling on the scienses. He was also the first to serious think about what makes art good or bad in quality and why we have art in the first place, the first critic and scholar of art.
Plus his politics were much more practical and less dangerous than Plato’s politics.
He didn’t bother to test his assertion that objects of different weight fall at different speeds to the ground, and so retarded physics until Galileo came along and demonstrated otherwise.
Er, how many of the proto-scientists of Antiquity were really into practical experimentation outside the mathmaticians? Not many, most of them prefered practical experimentation.
Drop a feather and a big rock and see what happens.
Getting the right setup to show how free fall works is actually pretty tricky.
Drop a feather and a big rock and see what happens.
Okay, but is it a giant leap to drop a big rock and a bigger rock?
http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/tns61.htm
And? I’ve no idea what you think you are showing by all this.
Aristotle was unambiguously, hugely wrong on this point (and many others). Descartes was wrong about lots of things. Galileo was wrong about lots of things.
I’m not sure what Galileo’s speculation about what Aristotle did or didn’t do (included, I’m sure, for the nice rhetorical effect) has to do with anything, really.
Interestingly, the reductio ad absurdum technique that Galileo uses in this passage from the Dialogue emulates what Aristotle himself often did when he refuted arguments.
But, as Bijan points out, a lot of natural philosophers were wrong about a lot of things. That doesn’t necessarily detract from their overall importance. Aristotle’s work is foundational in terms of establishing organized scientific inquiry (at least in the West), even if he turned out to be wrong about things like falling bodies.
(As an aside, Aristotle’s work in biology was much stronger; he was, for example, pretty much the creator of comparative anatomy that was a vital component in the development of natural history and modern biology in the West.)
Actually, Galen contributed more to the study of anatomy than Aristotle:
Your desperate sweat is as myrrh unto me.
And? This refutes nothing that Linnaeus wrote.
Galen was the authority on medical anatomy, but note that he employed a comparative anatomy approach, given that he didn’t dissect human body. That comes to us from Aristotle.
Interestingly, Vesalius’s struggle against the authority of Galen (though he demurs somewhat on this issue in De fabrica) can be considered analogous to what Galileo faced with respect to Aristotelianism. Yet I don’t think that detracts from the overall importance of Galen in Western medicine.
There’s recent scholarship that argues that Harvey was himself an Aristotelian.
No need to talk smack; I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that our interpretations of the importance of Aristotle differ.
William Harvey didn’t discover the circulation of the blood first:
http://library.thinkquest.org/23062/blood.html
I can’t speak to Chinese investigations into the circulation of the blood, but as to Harvey’s predecessors in the West, it’s true that Harvey did build on the work of others. He does, for example, mention Colombo near the beginning of De motu cordis. Harvey’s achievement was a much more complete and systematic establishment of the circulation of the blood (throughout the entire body – Servetus and Colombo focused on pulmonary circulation) and the methods by which he did so.
Maybe? At least so that you’d be convinced.
Flip it around…why did it take until Galileo? Why wasn’t it established before Aristotle? People already found anomalies quite early on (what makes an arrow go?). Galileo had some theory and though experiments to guide him.
He takes Aristotles’ assertions about the behavior of dropped objects and demonstrates that it couldn’t have been arrived at by observation, and therefore is worthless as a theory about the physics of falling objects
You seem to be confusing observation and experimentation. Aristotle’s theory were almost certainly derived from observation, just not systematic enough and not coupled with the right experiments.
Yes, I greatly doubt that too. So?
Actually, even if Aristotle did do that, he’d have lots of leeway based on composition. Remember that the element in question is “earth” which he had no pure samples of. Now, the 10 times heavier move is a good one to try to overwhelm possible differences in composition. But none of this was trivial. Galileo was a really smart guy.
(If you look around you see a lot more immediate problems with Aristotle’s theory, esp. with projectiles. People put a lot of work in trying to make it work out.)
Again, if it’s so easy, why did it wait until Galileo?
Nope, he demonstrates that there is no observational data for the specific assertion that Aristotle makes.
Again, if it’s so easy, why did it wait until Galileo?
Because Aristotle’s reputation was such that mere empiric testing of his assertions was unthinkable until Galileo got around to it.
Because Aristotle’s reputation was such that mere empiric testing of his assertions was unthinkable until Galileo got around to it.
Not true. Aristotle was largely forgotten in the west until Averroes’ influence in the 1100s, and Étienne Tempier condemned much of Aristotle as heretical in 1277. The condemnation only lasted 50 years, but Aristotle was seen as controversial by most non-Thomists.
Dude, that’s clearly now what he’s doing. There is observational data. Feather and rock. Done. You can even do an experiment with it! Repeat as often as you like!
That doesn’t make it a good experiment, of course. Nor does it mean that the right theory to draw from such observations is Aristotle’s.
You are aware that there were challenges and modifications to Aristotelean physics before Galileo? You’re also aware that there’s considerable controversy as to whether Galileo actually did the experiment? Or that he mobilzed a set of thought experiments?
I think you overestimate the blight of Aristotle and underestimate the significance of Galileo’s achievement. Understanding motion is hard.
It certainly was unthinkable in between the date you cite and Galileo’s time.
It certainly was unthinkable in between the date you cite and Galileo’s time.
Again, not true. Ballistics began in earnest with the development of cannon in the late 1200s. As soon as you have cannon-fire, and the need to HIT THE WALL RIGHT HERE, you have people paying attention to non-linear motion.
Then, by your own logic, the Chinese should’ve developed and theorized about non-linear motion, being the first people to invent and utilize artillery before the Europeans did.
Then, by your own logic, the Chinese should’ve developed and theorized about non-linear motion, being the first people to invent and utilize artillery before the Europeans did.
But this is not “my own logic,” it is what actually happened. Ballistics in Europe in the 1300s actually did discuss non-linear motion. Really, they did. Albert of Saxony left real writings behind, that you could read.
Yes, I can see how it helped artillery in the 13 Century:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/albert-saxony/
Glad to see you admit Aristotle did not actually go unquestioned, like you first claimed.
Nevertheless, he formulates the idea of impetus in more classical terms(i. e., Aristotelian) as a virtus impressa (impressed force) and virtus motiva (motive force)
Nevertheless, he formulates the idea of impetus in more classical terms(i. e., Aristotelian) as a virtus impressa (impressed force) and virtus motiva (motive force)
That blur you see? Goalposts, moving in non-linear motion.
Any sort of intellectual motion on your part would be surprising.
“In the everyday world, as Aristotle saw, heavy bodies do fall faster than light ones. . . . Galileo himself got the law not from observation, or at least not from new observation, but by a chain of logical arguments. . . Probably he did not perform the experiment at the tower of Pisa. That was performed by one of his critics, and the result supported Aristotle.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=sWScX_aduGMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=galileo&f=false
Kuhn had reason to question whether Galileo did the experiment, although Stillman Drake later argued that Galileo did do the experiment.
Yeah, I don’t want to overstate that point.
It’s clear that Galileo had at least observational data to contradict the Aristotlean notions (e.g., the moon!).
Aristotle made a very important step: he accepted observations as valid evidence for natural law. His influential predecessor and teacher Plato did not. In Plato’s thought, it was possible to deduce the laws of nature from the inborn a priori knowledge. Thus, only logical (and rhetorical) arguments were allowable in the discussion of physics and biology.
The Aristotelian approach, although clearly wrong in actual particulars, allowed, at least in theory, falsification by experiment. (The medieval Aristotelians were not big on this, however.)
And please note that for “the ancients”, the existence of vacuum was by no means clear. On Earth, there are no natural vacuums, and the ancient Greeks could not create artificial vacuums. Thus, for them, any argument that started from the nonexistence of vacuum was observationally valid and even more probable than arguments postulating a non-observable vacuum.
Likewise, the concepts of “weight”, “density” and “viscosity” are by no means clear unless you have a well-developed mathematical machinery of physics available.
As Bertrand Russell noted, Aristotle couldn’t be bothered to count the teeth in his wife’s mouth to determine by observation, if, in fact, women and men didn’t have the same number of teeth, as he asserted.
Considering the state of dental hygiene in ancient Greece, I would not be surprised if this had been his source of information. As far as I understand, Greeks had somewhat oriental tastes, and they ate very sugary sweets when possible. I would imagine that Aristotle’s wife might well have had less teeth than her husband.
You mean, he’d overlook the empty sockets caused by teeth missing due to the ‘sugary diet’ of the ancient Greeks?
It’s somewhat amusing the lengths and contortions some folks go through to make a point.
Bertrand Russell does use that as an example of how Aristotle did not understand the value of observation in reasoning about the world. However, Russell is referring to a passage in which Aristotle is listing observations made about the teeth of various animals, a fact that Russell would have been aware of had he bothered to observe the actual passage he was referring to instead of just spouting off about it.
It isn’t entirely clear why Aristotle observed this (or why someone else observed it), but it’s hard to see how it counts against Aristotle in any serious way.
The actual quote is from History of Animals, book 2 pt 3. It reads:
Saying that men have more teeth than women isn’t an observation, it’s just simply not true.
He also didn’t do much better when it came to women:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_views_on_women
He obviously assigned his graduate assistant, I mean slave, to go count some teeth. Aristotle was a busy man.
“The observation was the earlier thing that he was reporting. The evidence that there was one is that he explicitly says that the observations were made (and that they haven’t been made for other species, and so we don’t have knowledge about them). ”
For the record, nobody could’ve ever ‘observed’ that men and women have different numbers of teeth unless there has been some sort of weird genetic change between his time and ours in H. sapiens.
Period. He was perpetuating a classical version of an old wife’s tale.
That or there were dietary differences between men and women at the time which affected their teeth. Or he had a non-representative sample. Or it was related to wisdom teeth (which tend to come in later in women than men, and which he goes on to talk about immediately afterwards). Huh, turns out there are a lot of possible reasons here aside from “he was lying about making observations for no discernable reason”.
Saying anything isn’t an observation. The observation was the earlier thing that he was reporting. The evidence that there was one is that he explicitly says that the observations were made (and that they haven’t been made for other species, and so we don’t have knowledge about them).
I really don’t see how the confusion enters into this: “in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made” seems like a pretty straightforward thing to say.
As far as the other stuff goes, this is Aristotle being wrong. So, congratulations? What was the point of that, since it’s clearly not about the value of observation anymore.
Also, come on, Wikipedia? You can do better than that for citation – that page manages to cite (for that passage): Generation of Animals I, 728a; Generation of Animals II, 728a; and Generation of Animals VI, 728a. While the substance is probably right, it’s difficult to check something cited in such a transparently inconsistent way. (Especially since 728a occurs in book IV.)
Because Campos is a conservative?
Thanks for being a living example of what Mill was talking about, Manju.
lucky for me he’s the “most overrated philosopher of all time”.
I think that honor belongs to you, Manju.
The most overrated philosopher of all times is not J.S. Mills it is John Rawls by a very large margin. Mills does not have a cult of personality around him rivaling Kim Il-Sung like Rawls does. He also unlike Rawls wrote more substance than can be fitted in small pamphlet.
It’s true. In my grad program we had pictures of Rawls in every classroom, and all department meetings began with songs praising his kindness, foresight, and virile masculinity. I’m ashamed to admit, though, that I found the required first-year seminar on Rawls kind of boring–we just read his little red pamphlet over and over, so we could recite it from memory while indoctrinating undergrads. (Please don’t tell anybody about my weakness, or I’ll be sent to re-education summer camp at the Harvard Philosophy Department–I just don’t think I could take walking the same halls as that running-dog Nozick.)
“…as that running-dog Nozick.”
Esp. since Nozick is no longer alive and the encounters wd thus necessarily take place in the realm of the supernatural.
Are we really to the point where we can’t even read an obviously satirical blog comment charitably enough to conclude that the sentence elides a “did” rather than a “does”?
Was trying to be mildly funny. Obviously I failed!
Oh, heck–now I feel like a jerk. You did manage to be mildly funny; I just took it the wrong way. Perhaps I was too primed to see an accusation of ignorance, since I was tweaking JOP for his obvious silliness.
Mills does not have a cult of personality around him rivaling Kim Il-Sung like Rawls does.
That is just so awesomely wrong.
Maybe it is true in Ghana. Why don’t you ever consider the Ghanaian perspective, Scott?
Yeah Scott. Maybe if you had read his dissertation you would be better informed!
Fixed that for me.
Paul, see how you trolled your own post?
Mill does have a cult of personality to rival Kim Il-Sung?
People find utility in the damndest things.
J. Otto,
This is complete and utter bullshit. I doubt you have ever read more than a page or two of Rawls.
I suggest you stick to Soviet nationalities policies, African history, and other subjects you know something about rather than spreading libelous idiocies on high-traffic blogs.
I read about 50 pages of a Theory of Justice , but I kept falling asleep. So I won’t pretend to be an expert on what he actually wrote. But, I will take the compliment about knowing something about African history. Two years ago I knew nothing about Africa.
It’s this sort of comment that totally convinces me of your intellectual prowess.
I have a number of friends who were all part of the same law school class, and the most miserable by far are the ones who began law school immediately after they completed their undergrad degrees. Personally, I don’t think real change will come until undergrad advisers stop telling English and poli sci majors that law school is a quick and easy way to get a cush job that pays $150K/year on graduation.
Maybe the real change will come when those majors get eliminated entirely because they aren’t “useful”.
That’s not at all what I was suggesting. I knew from the start that I was studying poli sci because it’s what I was interested in, not because it was preparing me for a career. But I’m also glad I wasn’t steered towards law school with false promises.
Oh, I know you weren’t. Sorry if I implied that. I was making a general tongue-in-cheek comment.
No worries. Hard to detect what’s sarcasm on a blog that’s new to me.
Rick Scott is already working on that, but he wants to start with Anthropology.
I don’t know about eliminating them. But what has to stop is the charging of parents of young people $50,000 a year in order to fund “research” that does nothing to educate their children and that no one reads anyway. Used to be that professors could tell their students, don’t worry, we’re preparing you to be lawyers and you’ll all make more money than we do. That’s not working any more.
Well, I’m supportive of the notion that something needs to be done about rising higher ed costs; far too many people are priced out and that will just get worse. As for this:
…I have a couple of responses.
Given the growth in the use of part-time/contingent academic labor in teaching and research, I’m skeptical that the bulk of the cost growth is going to lavish faculty salaries. I suspect it’s going more to the administrative layers of colleges and universities. What’s more (though maybe it’s just a minor factor), colleges and universities are providing a lot more in terms of services and infrastructure than they did in years past.
Regarding research, I am of the view that research is an intrinsic good in any field of intellectual endeavor and it ought to be encouraged, even if a particular research program is not something I find interesting or would read myself. Research can certainly help educate students; a reading list in any course in my field today would be different than such a list, say, 30 years ago, and that’s because of scholarly research in finding new sources, offering new perspectives, etc.
But if we as a society decide that some kinds of research aren’t worth doing, or that we don’t have the resources to support it, then let’s have a conversation about that and be open and honest about the decisions that follow.
First they came for the classicists, but I was silent, because I was not a classicist.
Scott Lemieux gets it right. Heidegger belongs on the short list at least.
You know, as a 2012 grad (so, matriculated in ’09), I feel like I had a pretty decent sense when applying in mid-late 2008 that the legal job market was in bad shape and getting worse. Wasn’t ATL running frequent posts around that time talking about mass layoffs and big firms in danger of going under?
Not that lower-information applicants who were sold a bill of goods by law schools should be blamed, but just that I don’t think the notion that law school might not be a good career move was as underground as Campos seems to suggest in 2008 and 2009.
I believe you have just illustrated the terminal phase of the progression Paul cites (Wikiquote has that saying under Gandhi, as contested, with a link to someone else saying it.)
Most of the quotes attributed to me were actually something Abraham Lincoln said.
I am shattered to find out that the mahtama didn’t say “Fuck the rebs.”
Maybe, but am I wrong on the facts here? Obviously law school deans weren’t lining up to warn about the risks of legal employment in 2008, but despite this not-particularly-important poll, I don’t think they’re doing that now, either.
Um, “This is important to remember when people start reflexively victim-blaming recent grads and even current law students for not being more reasonably prudent rational maximizers of their own utility when they signed up…”
And:
“…lower-information applicants…”
Condescend much, do we?
It’s just a fact. What do you want me to say, here? A lot of people go to law school without knowing much about it or the legal profession; that’s the fault of law school admissions departments and probably undergrad career counselors. I knew a fair amount about both.
Which again, goes to the point that applicants shouldn’t be blamed for making what turned out to be a bad choice in the face of a lot of misinformation. My point was just to correct Campos on the idea from his penultimate paragraph that this information was underground.
Yeah, I have “the talk” with a few undergraduates every year who ask about a letter of recommendation for law school, and most of them are pretty shocked by a rudimentary sketch of the range of employment outcomes for JDs. I believe the culture change is starting to happen, but it has definitely not reached a lot of intelligent college students.
My econ major son has given up on the idea of going to law school. He’s thinking about business school, which is not as bad but has the same issues –
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/there-are-officially-too-many-mbas/266880/
If nobody knows about “this information” except for a genius like you, then, yes, it’s “underground.” Thanks for making Campos’ point for him.
Above the Law is and was in no way underground. I’m not the only pre-law student who ever read it. And past that, some of the law discussion boards where applicants sometimes show up were sounding the same warnings when I was applying.
“Above the Law is and was in no way underground.”
It’s not a pamphlet handed out on street corners, no. But it’s not exactly the editorial page of the New York Times, either.
You come off like all of the overprivileged, third-generation-lawyer douchebags I had to deal with in law school (incidentally, even though I have practiced law for fifteen years, I had never heard of ATL until this discussion). No matter how much you want to claim otherwise, you are blaming the victims’ of a huge, affluent institutional structure for their victimization.
A fair reading of Campos’ point is unassailable: job prospects for graduating law students have been steadily diminishing for at least a decade. Not only have law schools not informed prospective students of those trends, they have actively deceived those prospective students about their career oppotunities during that time.
Also during that time, no mainstream media outlet picked up on any of these facts in a way likely to reach the typical law school applicant. And now that these facts can no longer be denied, everybody knew or should have known of them before enrolling in law school.
Again, thanks for making Campos’ case for him.
Again and again, you’re putting words in my mouth. Applicants aren’t to blame; this is at least the third time I’ve said that.
It is possible to correct someone on a misstated fact without disagreeing with their conclusions. See here for a recent example.
“Wasn’t ATL running frequent posts around that time talking about mass layoffs and big firms in danger of going under?”
Yes.
How many undergrads do you think regularly read ATL?
Just me, I guess. Once I was actually at law school it lost its appeal.
Campos, you are a bullshitter sometimes, but you are def fun to read.
Obviously, that which is forbidden is mandatory.
Badabing! Nice one, Don Campos (Paulie “BigBooks” Campos, that’d be).
Ah. Nice catch…didn’t even see that clever reference.
Is there even such a thing as an underrated philosopher? Aren’t they pretty much all overrated is they have even the slightest notoriety?
Mark Twain
Will Rogers
Ben (Poor Richard) Franklin
Will Shakespeare
The most overrated philosopher is clearly Jesus.
That was indeed a memorable moment in the history of presidential debates. Give GWB a sliver of credit though for coming up w an answer without much hesitation at all.
No mention of Slavoj Zizek? For shame!
I think there’s one guy at an ecole somewhere in France that still thinks he’s good. Which still leaves gun massively overrated.
Lacan too.
Lacan is a massively over-rated psychologist, where again there is some tough competition.
American English departments loves them some Zizek.
Oh, I know. Derrida.
Not next to Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Derrida is overrated in some places and underrated in others.
Not next to Bernard-Henri Lévy.
You win.
The problem is I don’t feel like anybody takes BHL seriously. He’s awful, to be sure, but also the butt of a lot of jokes. Especially since he got caught citing fake philosophy books.
That BHL exists is sufficient for him to be overrated.
Exists, gets published, has funding, etc.
For the sabermetrics fans among LGMers, he’s a below-replacement-level philosopher.
Yeah, but have they got any up-and-coming thinkers in their minor league system, is what we want to know?
Apparently AC Grayling coached the German team for the rematch.
Derrida is overrated in some places and underrated in others.
I think this is exactly right. It would be almost impossible to say that Derrida is the most overrated, given how much he is maligned in loathed in many circles (and I would add that I find much of this dislike of him to be unfair). On the other hand, his supporters are legion and often annoying too. My own pet theory is that, in many philosophers who are difficult to read (e.g., Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, among many others), there is a tendency to mistake understanding the philosopher’s point with agreeing with it. As in: “it has taken me many hours to discern what this passage means; I now understand it! What a profound point!”. I hasten to add that this pet theory occurs to me because I have had this experience and often have to be on guard against it.
I have a pretty simple solution to the legal employment crisis. We need people to run for leadership positions in their state bar associations, and seize power. Once in power, we should reduce state bar pro bono requirements, and replace them with a progressive fee indexed to legal employment income that will be used to provide extra funding to legal aid organizations, and other community legal groups like immigrant rights networks and domestic violence legal clinics. These organizations can then hire more lawyers. This will neatly solve the dual problem of our country being over-lawyered, yet under-served in the courts.
Far be it from me to suggest that I was the first person to come up with this idea, but I haven’t actually seen it mentioned anywhere else. There are plenty of statistics about the dual-problem out there, so I think every legal blogger can and should be making this case, or at least engaging with it. Charismatic, underemployed, and progressive lawyers should start preparing campaigns.
Hi there.
I’m a tax lawyer. (Kinda.) (Mostly.)
Are you trying to tell me that you think you can have any significant part of my “fees” indexed to my bar dues and have my “fees” by anything other than minimal the second you pass that regulation? I can make a looooooooot of money on $20 photocopies. From my separately-owned and operated LLC. That bills out to my law firm at cost.
But more importantly, there’s zero interest in this outside of the professariat. If the state bar is collecting the money, do you think that a conservative government is going to let the money go to the ACLU and Public Counsel? Not a chance. It’s going to anti-tax, pro-business, pro-religion groups. I guess if the goal is to create huge fights over funding of non-profit groups, awesome. I’d skip it.
If there’s a stupider idea out there for reforming the legal business, I can’t think of it. But there’s never a floor for stupidity, so I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.
Well, as an expert in stupidity, perhaps I should clarify for you. I want the state bar associations to increase annual fees/dues required for membership, and I want that increase to be progressively structured to account for the variation in lawyer incomes. To make it very simple, I want to force people like you to pay more money to retain their legal license, and I want to use that money to pay people like me to work for non-profit legal organizations. Trust me, there is plenty of interest in this among the millions of unemployed and underemployed lawyers in this country. Start preparing the end of your legal career, or the end of your greed.
State legislatures don’t get to have a say in how professional organizations spend their licensing fees. Not without a huge legal fight anyway.
when Eugene Volokh or Orin Kerr (I can’t remember which one, actually writes a post on a discussion at a conference and the author chooses not to fellate the status quo ante, I think Paul is right.
For an overrated philosopher, J.S. Mill certainly was pretty good at getting in right from the start on truths where he was in his stage one and we are all now in stage three. It’s always seemed to me that he was right, or speaking truths, a hell of a lot. True, there is no philosophical batting title, but hitting 200 points better than almost any other historical philosopher is impressive to those (those few?), like me, who value the notion of truth in philosophy…
Nuthin like philosophy fanbois for an interestingly pointless ‘discussion’…
And here’s me having seen that quote attributed to Haldane. My guess is it was made up by some journalist who thought it would circulate better if attached to a famous name.
Often attached to Schopenhauer also too.
Haldane of course translated Schope, if anyone does not already know that.
I really cannot believe this discussion of overrated philosophers has gone on this long without a mention of John Locke, who for my money is the most muddy-headed philosopher to have made it into the canon.
and Rousseau gets no love, either?