Susan Cartier Liebel comments to my lament about the law schools obsession with ranking:

This will change. It has to because the paying customer, yes, the student, will demand it. The holdouts, the committee members, those tenured professors who have not been engaged in the practice of law since tuition was affordable, hold the publication criteria out like a necklace of garlic to keep the ‘practicing’ attorneys outside the hallowed halls. But it will change.

Will this change?  Susan’s post makes perfect sense in a rational world, where the consumer (in this case the law student) drives the market.  But is it really the stodgy old tenured professors who are the stalwarts of the old ways?

From everything I’ve seen, the young turks are far more protective of the new elitism than anyone else.  They have come to the job for a different purpose than the Prof. Kingsfields; they are scholars.  They have gone through the law professor meat market, or beauty pageant (whichever analogy better suits you), where their law school pedigree got them past the first cut.

Today’s law professors, more so than years ago, see their role as authors of learned writings. They  would prefer that the “school” part be eliminated completely.  Intellectual curiosity is vaulted as the primary value to be sought in a new law professor.  But unmentioned is the absolute belief that one’s intellect is unworthy if it was unable to get the Beauty from Idaho into Harvard.  What strikes me time and again is the absence of any mention of interest or ability to train young men and women to be lawyers.  They  argue against students going to classes.

What do law students  have to say about this?  They no longer want to go to classes.  They find classes worthless, professors boring and disengaged.  Law school is viewed as a pointless obligation on the path to Biglaw salaries.  They are not interested in learning how to practice law, but how to  get a job with an obscenely high salary. 

The elitism propagated by the lawprofs is reflected in the attitudes of the students.  Neither sees much point in the other, except as a means to an end.  For the lawprofs, it’s publication to bring their school to the top tier of the rankings, or keep it there while the others are nipping at your heels.  For the students, it is to get Biglaw to hire them so they too can make the $190,000 first year salaries.

Where are the young public defenders, environmental lawyers, consumer-rights lawyers?  Who cares, because they are just the losers in the law school game of upping the rankings and making the big money that proves self-worth. 

The same rational system that would put the consumers in charge would similar value the services of lawyers who provide the greatest social utility highest.  As the incredible popularity of blawgs like  Above the Law makes abundantly clear, winners and losers in the law school game are based on whether they get the big bonus.  There’s no mention of ability or service or purpose, but there’s post after post about how much money they will make if they come from a Tier 1 school and get a Biglaw job.

So will the consumers of law schools demand that lawprofs put down their law reviews and start giving a damn about their classes, their students and what type of inchoate lawyers they are turning loose on the world?  Not if the young turk professors have anything to say about it, and not if the students think that their profs efforts in elevating their school’s ranking has the potential to land them a Biglaw job. 

In fairness, there is a contrarian point of view promoted by MoneyLaw, where they aspire to end the Beauty Pageant and elitism for its own sake.  But even there, the internal struggle between hope and reality is clear and disappointing.  While disavowing that the Tier 1 pedigree is a first cut necessity for anyone desiring to become a law professor, the stats show that the interest at the meat market is still for those with only the best law schools in their background.  But not because of the law school name; because they lack any other viable criteria to determine who has the most intellectual curiosity.  And the little detail about who has something to offer students remains unmentioned.