I OFTEN wonder just how many undergraduates could get to the University’s Law School without looking for it on a map or asking directions. It is probably not a large percentage, and that’s a shame. In a time when so many complicated legal issues are facing the country, one of the failures of the University is that there is so little contact amongst students in different areas of it.
I don’t think the Law School is terribly upset by this state of affairs, and I can understand why. If the Law School were to allow, for instance, undergraduates to audit law classes, there could be a rush of ambitious undergraduates trying to score points for their future law school applications. What’s disappointing is not the absence of available credits, but the absence of an interchange of ideas.
To be fair, there are very successul joint degree programs at the Law School. There are joint degree programs with the Business School, the Medical School and several departments within the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Olin program brings together Law faculty and students with Economics students. There is, however, next to no contact with the undergraduate college.
James Ryan, the Law School’s academic associate dean, pointed out to me that, in addition to the joint degree programs there are open lectures at the Law School that welcome undergraduates very frequently. The reason there is not even more interaction than there is, he argues, is that the means of communicating these ongoing events needs improvement. This is certainly true.
Now, a fair question is what kind of contacts could there be and what purpose could they serve.
Consider the massive legal issues facing the country. The economic crisis has been precipitated by complicated securities transactions that are rooted in equally complicated regulatory and political decisions. Our foreign policy has upended decades of painstakingly crafted international law regarding detention and conflict initiation. The federal government embraced torture as a policy tool of the federal government in its counterterrorism policy. The Justice Department’s hiring practices were corrupted and politicized both at the bureaucratic level and within the U.S. Attorney’s offices.
One specific possibility is for the University to offer an audit-only course on contemporary topics in law that could be taught collectively by a group of Law School professors. An expert on securities law could explain the crisis in the financial sector, an expert on international law could explain the potential direction of America’s role in shaping international institutions under the next Presidential administration, and a professor of Constitutional Law could discuss the implications of the politicization of the Justice Department, which most people have hardly heard of.
The benefits of greater intellectual interaction between the Law School and other parts of the University are not a one-way street either. Like the other graduate and professional schools, the Law School community is quite insular. Professional and graduate schools are the incubators of professional castes, and their students embrace their cultures almost to a fault. With that in mind, interaction with students from other parts of the University can contribute to a wider perspective on life, intellectually and socially.
It is certainly the Law School’s prerogative to be exclusive. The school receives little public money and is essentially a private institution that shares a name with the undergraduate college and the other graduate and professional schools of the University. The University, in that sense, is a bundle of educational services and independent research faculties, combined out of tradition but not so much out of necessity. The different schools confer on one another’s mutual prestige, but feel little obligation to invest their resources in ways that don’t lead to direct benefits.
Of course, one of the big reasons for the intellectual separation of the Law School from the rest of the University is simply physical separation. It is either a 25 minute walk from Central Grounds or a similarly length commute on the bus given the time it takes to wait.
Improving the connection between North Grounds and Central Grounds is a challenge of both distance and perspective. Improved communication is one step, but the Law School should consider expanding its mission, at least in small part, beyond North Grounds.
Andrew Winerman’s column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at a.winerman@cavalierdaily.com.
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