Is there anything the law schools do to facilitate this, or is it a purely accidental connection? I have elsewhere described the so-called legal mind, as selected and turned out by the best national law schools, as the nonlegalistic mind: the mind that has learned skepticism of abstractions and yet at-homeness with them. 9 The atmosphere of such schools, moreover, may help narrow the range of curiosity for some of the more humanistically oriented, but, unlike what sometimes happens in graduate school to social scientists, law students do not become more stupid and more cowed than they were as undergraduates. Or perhaps I should qualify this, bearing in mind the loss of curiosity and breadth of perspective that one often finds as students "progress" from their first to their final years in law school, especially if they are gifted but neither make the law review nor get involved in legal aid work. I should say instead that law students may get more stupid in the sense of a constricted Weltanschauung, more ready prey to a fundamental complacency; but at the same time they are apt to gain in confidence and craftsmanship.
This is a somewhat different process from that at work in comparable graduate schools, at least in the social science departments. Students in the latter emerge often less confident than they entered, less "promising." Just as they seldom get their doctoral degree within a regulation three or four years, but remain instead in an amorphous zone of delayed maturity; so they sometimes (unlike most law students) reach for an identity by incorporating a professor's definition of what they "are," while being subjected to his personal view of the "field" in grading, in thesis supervision, and orals. In contrast, law students do not to the same extent find their identity as lawyers by "incorporating" their professors, who may or may not qualify as practitioners as well as teachers; and the system under which the law students operate is far more impersonal. People do get through law school in three years; there is very little of the protracted uncertainty of much graduate study, or of the umbilical clinging to one's teachers that failure to finish a thesis permits. This happens, in part, because law professors, whether full-time or part-time, are more worldly and better paid than most social scientists; they are intelligent, but rarely intellectual; student devotion is nice, but they have alternative ways of "spending" their affects, and relatively little need constantly to prove the validity of their profession or their specialty through the shining eyes of indoctrinated students. The validity of their profession is only marginally in question: its success is historically solid and daily attested in the market place of American careers. Although, to be sure, sensitive lawyers and law professors suffer because of some popular disesteem for lawyers and because they realize that some of this disesteem is deserved, it seldom shakes their belief in the legal career as such, but rather reinforces their belief in a variant model of it, such as the Brandeis-at-the-bar model, or the small-town independent lawyer model, or that of the crusading government lawyer.
Intellectual craftsmanship in the law, moreover, is a fairly visible and surprisingly unidimensional thing, so that law professors (with whatever unconscious injustices) can evaluate each other's competence rather readily, as mathematicians are said to be able to do, or organic chemists.
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