No one in one’s right mind would claim to be a scholar of chemistry after just three years of courses even if all of them were in natural science or even just chemistry. Nor would a business student, after just three years in a business school, claim to be a scholar of business, even if those three years were filled with only courses in business. My first degree comes very close to that (which is why I later studied humanities at Yale), and yet it took two more years in a MBA program and six more in a doctoral program (business and religious studied) before I was declared to be a scholar. So it is with a cringe of incredulousness that I read an opinion piece on MSNBC.com in which the author, Jamal Greene, put in his essay’s title, “I’m a legal scholar.”[1] That he avers that the U.S. was then in a constitutional crisis is hardly a trivial claim in American politics, so his claim of being a legal scholar, rather than only a practitioner and instructor, is important and thus should be subjected to a critique.
That Greene and the university
where he was teaching at the time claim in writing that he “is a constitutional
law expert whose scholarship focuses on the structure of legal and constitutional
argument”[2]
gives the American electorate as well as their elected representatives,
including the federal president, the impression that the United States really was
in a crisis in governance at the federal level. That he had studied at Harvard
and Yale does not mean that his B.A. at Harvard counts as a first degree in
law, such that his law degree at Yale is therefore a graduate degree in law.
To be sure, his J.D., which is just degree name-change from the LL.B. (the B
stands for bachelor degree), was not his first degree in college, but what most
Americans do not realize is that the shift from studies in Liberal Arts and
Sciences to Law (or any other school of knowledge) is lateral rather than
higher. Ironically, I learned this from the registrar of Yale’s law
school when I registered to take the Law and Religion course in the law school.
I wondered out loud why the J.D. program was not in the Graduate Programs
Office. “The LL.M. and J.S.D. are the graduate degrees in law,” the registrar replied.
She wrote the citation of a book on the history of the degrees, and I did not
lose much time in reading it.
That law schools in the U.S. (but
not in the E.U.!) hire faculty who have just three years studying law and even
title them as professors rather than lecturers or instructors can thus be seen
as a capitulation to practicalities and expediency. That the undergraduates in
law schools even edit and select papers for law journals means that being
published in such a journal cannot count towards tenure in other disciplines.
Even law journals edited and reviewed by law faculty who have only the first
degree in law cannot count because those journals are not peer-reviewed by
other scholars.
I have read essays running fifty to a hundred or more pages in law journals. The essays that I read on federalism resemble undergraduate essays sans editing, and neither underlying political theory nor history figure much in the analyses. When I was a student at Yale, I asked a law student why he thought he could select papers from political science scholars on international law in spite of the fact that the student had not yet taken international law. “Because I can,” he defiantly replied. He had been given the authority.
It is with a similar unsubstantiated leap of authority that Jamal Greene and many other instructors at American law schools claim to be legal scholars. They are thus disproportionately able to influence public policy and the American electorate. Lest it be countered that law schools in the U.S. do not offer the graduate degree programs in law, at least Harvard and Yale do, because Europeans go to those schools after having graduated elsewhere with a degree in law in order to get a masters and doctorate in law so to be able to be hired as a professor of law in Europe. In fact, I used to invite some of those students to a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner when I was a student, even though I studied historical theology and philosophy of religion. The Belgian couple would bring chocolate and the Italian guy brought wine, and I furnished some American traditional cuisine. Our shared vocation was scholarship.
2. Ibid.
