Anthony Bradney, Conversations, Choices and Chances: The Liberal Law School in the Twenty-First Century.

• Author: Ogilvie, M.H.
• Position: Book Review

Anthony Bradney, Conversations, Choices and Chances: The Liberal Law School in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Hart, 2003). Pp. xi, 208.

Fiona Cownie, Legal Academics: Culture and Identities (Oxford: Hart, 2004). Pp. ix, 227.

Law professors typically think that they have the best job in the world. Every law professor also typically thinks that only he knows what that job is about. The best job? Why not! Six-figure salaries, approaching $200,000 annually in the richest schools; six months of the year when it is wise to be seen on the job; a paid leave every seven years; few assessments of productivity (whatever that is); and almost complete autonomy: all for thirty to thirty-five years, in a pleasant place to live. Why not, indeed! Compared to other university professors who lack the high social status of association with a well-paid profession, whose salaries rarely reach six figures, whose teaching loads are heavier, whose employment, tenure and promotion requirements are much more onerous, and whose working environments are considerably poorer, the lot of the law professor comes close to that of the fabled leisured classes of old. Bankers, surgeons and judges may earn more, but they have to sweat a lot more and are subject to greater scrutiny and accountability. The law professor's lot is, indeed, a happy one!

Yet not quite. Too much time, too much money, and rot little accountability can facilitate profound ruminations. These luxuries also lead to lethargy, procrastination, superfluousness, narcissism, self-importance, petty jealousies, fractiousness over trivia, and for those aware of these temptations, identity crises. One result of these symptoms of the easy life is the recent propensity of the legal professoriate to proclaim its indispensability to society: the law professor knows best what alls the world and how to fix it (once the curriculum has been fixed in his own image). There are almost as many views about what law professors are good for as there are law professors. And a favourite topic for publication among law professors is themselves: who they are and what they should be doing. (1) The literature on this topic is vast and is itself the topic for self-laudatory study. Two more thoughtful examples of this genre have recently been published in England by an academic couple: Fiona Cownie's Legal Academics: Cultures and Identities (2) and Anthony Bradney's Conversations, Choices and Chances: The Liberal Law School in the Twenty-First Century. (3)

Cownie's book is about who law professors are, and Bradney's book is about what law professors ought to be doing. While the focus of both volumes is the English law professor, their observations are equally appropriate for law professors in the common law world generally for several reasons. First, both authors rely extensively on materials drawn from throughout the common law world, where the same kinds of debates have been carried on over the past generation, and where social and professional interactions--especially among English, (4) American and Canadian scholars--are frequent. Second, the fact that law is taught as an undergraduate subject everywhere except Canada (5) and the United States is a distinction largely irrelevant to the issues discussed in the books. Many law professors have experience as students and teachers at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and can attest to the similarity of experience and issues (although professors at self-proclaimed "high status schools" would disagree in order to protect their elitist aspirations). While the material and creature comforts and compensations are greater in postgraduate law faculties, the issues relating to what they do are no different once it is decided (as it has been) that a "narrow" training for the practice of law is not appropriate. Ironically, once postgraduate law faculties eschew being...