I didn’t have access to the NYT article which sparked Orin Kerr’s post, but it reminded me enough of some favorite themes of the returned-to-blogging Hopefully Anonymous that I felt it merited a post here. Charlie Nesson is a prestigious expert in the field of law by virtue of his position at Harvard. There is widespread agreement that he just did a poor job as a trial lawyer, and that for many of the same reasons he does a poor job of preparing students to be lawyers. Harvard Law is where the best lawyers are supposed to come from, there is immense competition to get in, and Harvard’s reputation has brought in vast amounts of money. Something just doesn’t seem right here, although there are also other Harvard professors who are really brand names who do little of the work credited to them. Is this the case for other fields? I read more about economics, and there it seems that while lefties might think Mankiw hackish and disingenuous, they still consider him smart and his textbook good (although his students have reported that his lectures aren’t great). Similarly, strident libertarians consider Dani Rodrik a good economist despite his anti-Washington Consensus approval of industrial policy (and most congratulated Krugman’s Nobel as deserved). A commenter at a different Volokh thread on how Duncan Kennedy got tenure at Harvard law said “publication requirements for tenure in the legal academy are appallingly low in comparison to other disciplines”. It is also only recently that the first peer-reviewed law journal which is not specialized by methodology or subject matter appeared (usually students edit law review journals).
n/a of the race/history/evolution notes blog had a post on the old “white-shoe” WASP law firm which looked down on trial lawyering. Could Nesson be adhering to the lingering ethos of that old model which prized status above cut-throat victory in argument? I don’t usually buy into cultural explanations for why inequality or CEO pay increased, why medicine has gotten more expensive or in this case why law firms for so long didn’t exploit such opportunities. The old way of negotiating in boardrooms seems to share the ideals behind Robin Hanson’s Efficient Economist’s Pledge and so it may have been to the advantage of firms to set up a structure in which there was mutual disarmament. How did they accomplish that and what caused the gentleman’s agreement to erode?
August 12, 2009 at 12:46 am
He does. Nesson is a rare summa cum laude grad of HLS. He did have impressive litigative achievements prior to becoming Harvard faculty. Since then he seems to me to have become more of a mythie than a techie though. A contrast with Sunstein and Posner, who seem more driven to make law more grounded in regulation, experimental and empirical social science (and their quantitative underpinnings).
August 12, 2009 at 8:08 pm
I know a mythie is one who promotes myths. How do you define “techie”? Merely a non-mythie, someone interested in knowledge for knowledge’s sake?
A commenter at the original post imagines an ulterior (rational) motive for Nesson’s actions.
August 12, 2009 at 11:15 pm
No, I wouldn’t define a techie that way. techie = a specialist in society’s technologies.
mythie = a specialist in society’s myths.
August 12, 2009 at 9:26 pm
OT,
Eric P. Kaufmann is debating Kevin MacDonald over whether it was the WASPs or the Jews who are responsible for the extermination of WASP America.
Kaufmann basically takes the side of Herr Moldbug i.e. the Jewish liberalism of today is actually crypto-Calvinism and it was the WASPs who did themselves in while MacDonald takes the side of, err, MacDonald.
What do you think, T?
http://vdare.com/misc/090812_kaufmann.htm
August 12, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Also of interest, here is the late Sam Francis’ take on the WASPs and the progressive movement:
http://www.amren.com/ar/2003/07/
Sir — While I appreciate Prof. Steven Farron’s description of my review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in the March 2003 issue of AR as “perceptive,” I have to disagree with him and maintain what I said in the review, that “much of what the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society did or tried to do was justified in terms of the blank slate doctrine.” Prof. Farron writes that he “cannot see how any of the programs of the Progressives … or New Deal … were motivated or justified by” that concept.
But the “blank slate doctrine” is essentially the idea that the minds and behavior of human beings are not the products of nature or genetic inheritance but of the social environment. As historian George E. Mowry wrote of the intellectual atmosphere of the American Progressive movement in The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912 (p. 37), “Central to this new intellectual formulation was the firm belief that to a considerable degree man could make and remake his own world … Both the rising social sciences and the new social gospel promised that basically men were more alike than different and that they were not evil by inheritance, but, if anything, were inclined by their own nature to be good… the great inequalities existing among them at the moment were not natural, and from the viewpoint of social peace and human welfare were decidedly bad.”
Historian Eric Goldman in his standard account of Progressive Era political thought, Rendezvous with Destiny (pp. 78-79), explains how the thought of Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty, the “most rounded and powerful note in a growing chorus,” helped popularize the idea that “an environment that had been made by human beings and could be changed by human beings” “determined all men, institutions, and ideas,” and that “legislating a better environment, particularly a better economic environment, could bring about a better world, and bring it about before unconscionable centuries.” Goldman also discusses the role and impact of Franz Boas himself on Progressivist thought and policies about race.
Historians Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick write in their monograph, Progressivism (p. 24): “Since social scientists accepted environmentalist and interventionist assumptions implicitly, they believed that knowledge of natural laws would make it possible to devise and apply solutions to improve the human condition. This faith underpinned the methods used by almost all reformers of the time: investigation of the facts and application of social-science knowledge to their analysis; entrusting trained experts to decide what should be done; and, finally, mandating government to execute reform.”
The New Deal ideology was not distinct from that of the Progressive Era from which it emerged. As historian William S. Leuchtenberg writes in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (p. 33), “The New Dealers shared John Dewey’s conviction that organized social intelligence could shape society, and some, like [A.A.] Berle [Jr.], reflected the hope of the Social Gospel of creating a Kingdom of God on earth.”
Sociologist and historian E. Digby Baltzell in his classic work, The Protestant Establishment, also discussed the importance of Boas as well as of John B. Watson, founder of behaviorist psychology, and his brother-in-law, New Deal Interior Secretary Harold C. Ickes, who was so solicitous of blacks that he was sometimes called the “Secretary for Negro Affairs.” “It is important to see,” Baltzell wrote (p. 271), “that the New Deal’s efforts to change the economic and cultural environment, largely through legislating greater equality of conditions between classes of men, were a reflection of the whole intellectual climate of opinion at the time. In almost every area of intellectual endeavor — in the theories of crime, in law, in religion, and in the arts — there was general agreement as to the sickness of the bourgeois society and the need for environmental reform.”
Prof. Farron describes the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal eras as consisting of “direct election of senators, referendum and recall at the state and municipal level” and “social security [and] the National Labor Relations Act.” These were certainly reforms of those eras, but much of their theoretical rationalization as well as that of the many other measures supported by reformers in these periods was grounded in the environmentalism advanced not only by Boas and Watson, but also by even earlier environmentalists such as Charles H. Cooley, Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As Baltzell also writes (p. 162), “All were opposed to racism, Social Darwinism, imperialism, and all forms of hereditary determinism; and all assumed the malleability of human nature which was capable of responding to improved social conditions,” and (quoting Dewey), “there must be a change in objective arrangements and institutions; we must work on the environment, not merely in the hearts of men.”
Samuel Francis, Arlington, Va.
August 13, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Sam Francis is off-base. The New Deal should be distinguished from the Progressive Era. The former was actually quite nativist, eugenicist, racist (Woodrow Wilson segregated DC, the much maligned Harding & Coolidge duo were more racially liberal) and so on. Da Joos actually played an important role in papering over the bigotry of Progressive hero Oliver Wendell Holmes (lets thank da Joos, self-obsessed and self-hating in accordance with stereotype, for pointing that out). Steve Sailer did a good job of pointing that out in his recent piece at Takis.
The New Deal was different in that blacks were a relatively significant part of the coalition, but the “solid South” was much moreso and they ensured much New Deal legislation at first excluded non-whites.
I think there are pre-existing tendencies that might be related to what happened later even if those at the time wouldn’t approve. Many of the abolitionists were quite anti-black and wanted white labor to be free of them, but the civil rights movement still owes them a big debt for getting the ball rolling. Jefferson was at first an admirer of the French revolution (and denounced slavery in writing), but as secretary of state he tried to intervene in the Caribbean to put down slave revolts inspired by it.
August 13, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I think there are pre-existing tendencies that might be related to what happened later even if those at the time wouldn’t approve.
Good points.
Where do you think the political continuities between the old Progressive movement and the modern left are strongest?
August 13, 2009 at 9:01 pm
The Progressive movement represents the clearest beginning point of the modern left (so its sensible that many have now taken to calling themselves “progressives” these days). Progressivism marked a definitive break with classical liberalism. Many socialistic movements had listed its inadequacies before, but this was a mainstream political movement made up of people that might be expected to be liberals (and may have previously been liberals). I think liberals before may have had an ideal, but this was more along the lines of the Renaissance humanists echoing classical civilization and its ideals. Progressives were not content merely to cease unvirtuous governance and let freemen blossom, but were going to push and guide society forward using the “strong arm of government” in Bush’s terms. It couldn’t be summed up in one word like “liberty”, so I don’t completely understand what its basic precepts are. I guess they can never be fulfilled, so they must always seek a new avenue of progress.
August 12, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Individual trials are even lower class than the corporate ones the white-shoe firms avoided. Bancruptcy and hostile takeovers involve judges, but not really argument. I’m not sure what was meant by the other kind of litigation, but I’m pretty sure they don’t involve low-class juries.
Newsworthy cases, like this one, or the Pentagon papers, where Nesson made his name, are high-class, but it’s hard to get practice just doing high class trials.
One reason litigation is low class (I don’t know why bancruptcy, etc) is that it’s easy for the client to measure success. That’s not Harvard’s niche. Harvard niche is to annoint the lawyers high class and send them to high class firms, which people are afraid not to buy from. Lawyers make partner based on recruiting clients, not quality of lawyering, which is left to associates, anyhow.
August 13, 2009 at 8:12 pm
A good point about measurable results. Arnold Kling associates that with preference for ignorance, which benefits the “experts” in the field.
August 15, 2009 at 11:53 am
Very interesting characterization.
Elite institutions become de facto priests anointing/approving certain individuals. Logic rejects authority as a fallacy, but mere mortals do not.
August 15, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I think authority counts for Bayesian evidence, but that works best if the authority is in a field with measurable results.
August 13, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Ah, but the real questions are firstly;
1. where did Calvinism come from, and secondly,
2. How did the ancestors of the those early English Puritans evolve into Puritans?
August 13, 2009 at 8:14 pm
#1: Calvin, thanks to Luther, Hus, Wycliffe and so on before him.
#2: Have you read David Hackett Fischer’s “Albion’s Seeds”? The regions of England in which Puritans and Quakers came from had long had a tradition of dissent under various banners.
August 13, 2009 at 2:51 pm
1. where did Calvinism come from,
If you go far back enough, the blame for all the horrors and crimes caused by the various sects of Christianity must ultimately fall on the shoulders of Jesus.
Jesus was a Jew.
And you know what that means…
August 13, 2009 at 9:11 pm
What do we know genetically about WASPs? WASP elites?
August 13, 2009 at 9:14 pm
You might want to ask n/a. He’d probably know.
August 15, 2009 at 6:42 pm
[...] Those Who Can’t Do and Those Who Can’t Teach by TGGP [...]
August 24, 2009 at 9:59 am
This is what i like in your posts. You are perfect in what you say.