The Waste of Legal Scholarship

This shouldn't surprise anyone, but Richard Neumann of Hofstra has pointed out that legal "scholarship" costs almost $100,000 per article by a full-tenured professor during a recent educational conference on tenure and the future of legal education:

Even articles written by assistant professors at lower-paying law schools come with a price tag between $25,000 and $42,000, he estimated.

Neumann also pointed to research suggesting that 43% of law review articles are never cited by anyone. "At least a third of these things have no value," he said. "Who is paying for that? Students who will graduate with six figures of debt."

Neumann actually uses this as a reason to argue for protecting tenure; he seems to believe that the tenure protection will allow faculty to think creatively about revamping legal education. I think he's a bit biased by his stake in the fight, but no one's perfect, and his realization that student's increasing debt loads are caused in some small part by subsidizing worthless research is a good start.

Also on the panel were Dean Yellen of Loyola-Chicago and Dean Matasar of NYLS. It seems like these guys do nothing but travel to conferences and pontificate. I wonder if Neumann will ever talk about the wasted money paying deans to fly around the country. There's nothing really unexpected from either.

Those unread articles in law journals cost tens of thousands to produce with very low benefits (as in, more people will read this sentence than who honestly read most secondary journals). Under no cost-benefit analysis would these things ever get greenlighted, but unfortunately, American universities not only eschewed cost-benefit analysis, but most made production of this worthless crud the hallmark of a tenure-worthy professor (instead of, say, teaching). Instead of producing only truly meritorious scholarship, the academy (including its legal peers) took to publishing as a CV-stuffer and convinced itself that its "scholarly mission" requires constant publication regardless of the quality. Their work becomes important because they produced it, not because it shares any qualities with truly important work.

And the students are left shouldering the cost of these things, all so the university can feel better about itself under standards and "missions" it fully made up.

I'm not saying all scholarship is worthless, not even all legal scholarship; that would be absurd. But the system we have now is a crap machine that has allows people to be employed at lucrative salaries for writing things no one wants. For the time, effort, and energy spent on articles that have no economic value, all to impress some students on a law review board, these individuals could be doing things that have some value to society, like running clinics to represent indigent clients. At the very least, it's unjust to have students subsidize these quixotic efforts, just as it would be to force students to subsidize novel or screenplay or poetry anthology attempts.

$100,000 with a good chance it never proves worthy enough to cite. If you think of all the alternative uses for that $100,000 per full-time professor article and you write out all the possible options, your list is guaranteed to be far more interesting than 95% of what's come out of legal academia in the last few decades. And it will probably contain some items the paying customers would actually use and appreciate.