This piece was originally published here by the James G. Martin Center for Higher Education.
Recently I urged top law schools to stand up to the excesses and abuses occasioned by the ministrations of the American Bar Association (ABA). These schools could band together and follow the lead of the journalism schools at Northwestern and Berkeley, which dropped their accreditor, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, earlier this year because accreditation standards were outmoded and not worth the cost of compliance.
But states can also fight the ABA and are arguably in a better position to do so.
The ABA is a nonprofit organization incorporated in Illinois that operates like a trade union for lawyers. Founded in 1878 by a small group of prominent East Coast lawyers, it has accredited law schools under the authority of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) since 1952.
Why, exactly, would states want to push back against the ABA? There are two reasons, the first involving economics and the second involving racial diversity in the legal profession. In other words, both the Right and the Left have a standing interest in diminishing the ABA’s power.
The Economic Reason
The ABA remains the sole accreditor for legal education in the United States. Its onerous and in many cases outmoded regulations drive up the price of law school, forcing schools to reallocate resources away from students and education and towards regulatory compliance.
The high costs of legal education resulting from ABA regulations are passed off to ordinary consumers over time.
As one example, ABA Standard 701 states, “A law school shall have facilities, equipment, technology, and technology support that enable it to operate in compliance with [ABA] Standards and carry out its program of legal education.” To address this standard, law schools have furnished computer labs with fancy equipment to give the appearance of technological sophistication. But the labs and equipment often go unused.
The legal profession is notoriously behind the times on the technology front, and it takes advantage of anticompetitive restrictions regarding the unauthorized practice of law to push out innovative companies like LegalZoom that offer creative and inexpensive services. If the ABA were serious about technological innovation in law schools, it wouldn’t burden online and distance education the way it does in Standard 306. It bears noting, as well, that the ABA’s official interpretation of Standard 306 includes the “Internet,” “video cassettes,” “DVDs,” and “CD-ROMs” as examples of “technology.” Not exactly inspiring or pioneering. No wonder some analysts predict that computers and artificial intelligence will replace lawyers.
The high costs of legal education resulting from ABA regulations are passed off to ordinary consumers over time. They also prevent people with low to modest incomes from attending law school. According to Law School Transparency, the cost of legal education at private schools has risen from an average annual tuition of $7,526 in 1985 to $41,985 in 2013. The average cost of legal education for in-state students at public schools rose from $2,006 in 1985 to $23,879 in 2013 (for non-residents, tuition increased from $4,724 in 1985 to $36,859 in 2013).
These figures suggest that disadvantaged students do not have the financial means to delay or suspend a career to pay for legal education, or to take out student loans with an interest rate that exceeds that of the housing market. Thus, the ABA not only inadvertently drives up legal costs for all consumers, but also prevents many consumers of certain income levels from entering the legal industry to reform it from the inside.
The Diversity Reason
The ABA has an ugly history of targeting ethnic minorities who aspired to become attorneys. For most of the 20th century, it openly discriminated against African Americans, officially excluding them from membership for 66 years.
In 1912, the ABA ousted three African Americans from membership and issued a resolution proclaiming, “it has never been contemplated that members of the colored race should become members of this association.” Recent decades have seen the ABA attempt to make up for its racist past by instituting committees and programs aimed at racial diversity and championing what are widely considered to be leftist social causes.
These efforts, however, seem insincere—just another PR tactic—because the very purpose of the ABA’s accrediting arm (the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar) is to exclude people from legal education. To this day, the exclusionary policies and practices of the ABA disproportionately impact African Americans and other racial minorities. In other words, the ABA still does precisely what it was designed to do: keep African Americans, other minorities, and poor people out of the practice of law.
Law schools that are not ABA-accredited often offer inexpensive, part-time evening or night programs that enable students to work during their studies. Students who cannot afford to take off years of work to pursue legal education can complete these programs in four to five years. This affordable option provides needed access to legal education for low-income students who wish to become lawyers.
The ABA was formed, in part, to segregate the legal profession from ethnic minorities. It can’t be used now to the fix problems it caused and exacerbated.
Under present conditions, however, a graduate from one of these unaccredited schools can sit for a bar exam only in the state in which the school is located—and only if the state allows that. Unaccredited law schools also carry a stigma.
For these reasons, among others, ethnic minorities and disadvantaged students who are able learners with competitive test scores and academic records typically forego affordability and choose to attend ABA-accredited schools with a higher sticker price. These students thus take out massive loans and dig themselves deeper into a financial hole from which it’s difficult to emerge, even with good jobs coming out of law school.
Critics of unaccredited law schools point to high attrition rates and low success on bar exams to rationalize increased restrictions and stricter standards. But if the ABA no longer accredited law schools, capable students would begin to populate what are now unaccredited law schools, if for no other reason than affordability. Expensive law schools that are currently ABA-accredited would be forced to find cost-cutting measures to remain competitive in the market and attract new students.
The prevailing justification for ABA accrediting authority is that such superintendence is necessary to protect consumers. But protect consumers from what? From a more diverse legal community? From black people? From poor people? That is the message the ABA is sending.
The ABA would never defend itself in these terms, nor purposefully discriminate with the goal of ensuring that the profession remain predominately white. Yet it can’t deny the realities that flow from its very purpose for existing. The ABA was formed, in part, to segregate the legal profession from ethnic minorities. It can’t be used now to the fix problems it caused and exacerbated. It simply lacks the institutional incentives and infrastructure to realize the objectives of diversity or inclusion.
Revising Standard 316
To make matters worse, the ABA is considering revising its Standard 316 to require law schools to maintain a 75 percent bar passage rate among its graduates in at least three of the last five years. Law schools failing to meet this standard face potential consequences for non-compliance, including loss of accreditation. The ABA House of Delegates rejected this measure in February, but the ABA has issued a questionnaire to law schools pending the possible reconsideration of this revised standard in 2018.
The ABA Council for Racial and Ethnic Diversity opposes the revised standard, which was proposed to address concerns that greedy law schools, faced with declining enrollments, were admitting unqualified students to generate tuition revenue. Although this criticism has merit, the revised standard is the wrong remedy. It will disproportionately impact schools in states like California, where bar passage rates historically have been low. Moreover, it could limit educational options for minorities who aspire to practice law by punishing schools with high minority enrollment.
You might be asking, “Why is the author advocating reform that would lower standards? Don’t we want better attorneys? And don’t we have enough attorneys already?” If the bar exam measured the ability to practice law, it might be a reliable indicator of a person’s legal skills. But it has little to do with actual practice; therefore, passing or failing it doesn’t measure one’s legal skills. It also delays what has already been delayed during three years of law school: the practical experience necessary to make a good lawyer.
If there were no law schools, no bar exams, and no barriers to entry, we could still figure out how to weed out the good lawyers from the bad. In fact, we might even see exciting new advances in the field of online reputation markets that could rank and assess lawyers, giving a feedback mechanism to consumers.
If there were no law schools, no bar exams, and no barriers to entry, we could still figure out how to weed out the good lawyers from the bad.
And sure, there are a lot of attorneys. But having a lot of attorneys is not necessarily a bad thing. If we were to roll back all the anticompetitive practices perpetuated by the ABA, state bar associations, and their lobbyists, which work together to solidify lawyers’ monopoly on the practice of law, the costs of legal services could be drastically reduced. An overabundance of lawyers would simply mean that hiring lawyers would be cheap. It’s unlikely, at any rate, that we’d ever see an overabundance of lawyers in such a competitive market because intelligent people would choose to enter a different profession where salaries are higher.
The ABA discusses the bar exam in several standards: Standard 315 (the official interpretation), Standard 316, Standard 504, and Standard 505. The unintended consequence of this emphasis is to unreasonably encumber students and schools with red-tape administrative measures that have no proven effect on the quality of legal services.
Conclusion
The economic function of the ABA is, as I’ve said, to serve as a barrier to entry. Milton Friedman once declared that “[t]he overthrow of the medieval guild system was an indispensable early step in the rise of freedom in the Western World,” adding that it was also “a sign of the triumph of liberal ideals.” Recently, though, there’s been what he called a “regression,” and the ABA is a case in point.
Combating the ABA isn’t easy. This organization is equipped with powerful lobbyists and enjoys longstanding relationships with influential politicians. Still the states, through their supreme courts and bar associations, remain in control over the admission of candidates into the legal profession in their jurisdiction.
State bar associations are typically corporations to which state legislatures have granted monopoly powers over the legal profession, subject to the oversight of state supreme courts. They are not affiliates or adjuncts of the ABA. If several state supreme courts and state bar associations allowed all graduates of non-ABA accredited law schools to sit for the state bar exam in their state, they could curtail the ABA’s authority and diminish the ABA’s credibility. To this end, they could also enter into reciprocity agreements with other states to allow graduates of non-ABA accredited schools in those states to sit for the bar exam.
State supreme court justices—or justices sitting on the highest court in their state—are elected in a majority of states. And of course judicial appointments are always political to some degree. Thus, these justices are likely attentive to the demands of an informed public. Citizens should press their state supreme courts about the ABA, especially during campaign season when seats are up for grabs. Moreover, citizens should urge their legislators to interrogate state bar associations about the ABA. After all, state legislators can undo legislation empowering state bar associations.
Citizens should press their state supreme courts about the ABA, especially during campaign season when seats are up for grabs.
Of course, the Obama administration contemplated another alternative that would likely appeal to both President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos: the DOE could strip the ABA of its accreditation authority altogether, in effect getting the federal government out of legal education. (Obama was motivated by animus against for-profit colleges, as reflected in his Education Department’s gainful employment rule, whereas Trump’s interest would be in scaling back federal meddling.) This solution would leave matters of accreditation and bar eligibility to the respective states. Stripping the ABA of accrediting powers, however, raises other concerns, given that, at present, a law school’s eligibility to receive federal funds is tied to accreditation.
In this period of political rancor, reining in the ABA should appeal to both the Left and the Right, the former on grounds of racial diversity and fundamental fairness and the latter on grounds of decentralization and economic freedom. Despite the vitriolic and malicious rhetoric emanating from our politicians and media pundits, I believe most Americans want to get along and facilitate constructive dialogue about pressing issues. Why not refocus our attention on matters about which there is critical consensus? Why not work together, as a start, to curtail or revoke the ABA’s ability to accredit law schools?
This move could reduce the costs of legal education and, hence, of legal services. It could go a long way towards restoring confidence in the legal profession and freeing up law schools to work more closely with state supreme courts and state bar associations to meet the needs of local markets, adapt to new industry technologies, and satisfy the changing demands of consumers.
This post is adapted from a law review article that may be downloaded here (citations available in the original).
Sir Matthew Hale and Sir William Blackstone explained that judicial opinions in England traditionally were a source of unwritten law, or lex non scripta, derived from custom and read from the bench but not transcribed in official reports or indexed in a formal corpus. Judicial opinions began as an oral medium, not a written record. They were considered evidence of what the law was, but not the law itself.
From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, opinions were often written down, in French, and compiled in Year Books. Lawyers began citing opinions—some written, some unwritten—in their arguments before the courts, although there was no systematized mode of citation. As early as the fifteenth century, lawyers produced abridgements, or digests, to review the state of the law across England. These sketchy compilations summarized and classified opinions and could be referenced in the courtroom as authority for particular propositions. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a comprehensive scheme of methodical and widespread adherence to written precedent emerged gradually by slow degrees. However, not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did judges and litigants treat opinions as authoritative and binding in a manner that resembled the modern sense of precedent. The publication of Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England over the course of nearly two decades during the early seventeenth century provided direction for both jurists and attorneys who wished to substantiate their arguments with concrete holdings. Still there were no certified court reporters or verbatim transcriptions; the enterprise of publishing reports or digests was often personal and selective, insofar as reporters often chose to record only cases they liked and to disregard cases they disliked.
From approximately 1600 to 1800, the British House of Lords enjoyed supreme appellate jurisdiction over cases in common-law and equity courts. During that time, the House of Lords did not publish reports of its decisions, seriatim or otherwise. Most cases were ultimately determined by intermediate appellate courts, including the Exchequer Chamber, the Court of Common Pleas, and the King’s Bench, which regularly issued seriatim opinions that were transcribed by reporters. Prior to American independence from Great Britain, appeals from colonial courts went before the Privy Council in England. The Privy Council reached decisions by majority vote but issued those decisions as unified pronouncements, regardless of dissenting views. Because all decisions of the Privy Council were subject to the King’s review, and the King, the site and symbol of the law or body politic, could not articulate simultaneous, contradictory positions, the appearance of unanimity within the Privy Council was paramount.
In its early years, after the adoption of the Judiciary Act of 1789, the United States Supreme Court (“the Court”), following the practice of English common-law courts—specifically the King’s Bench—typically rendered decisions in the form of per curiam and seriatim opinions. The near obligatory practice of rendering written opinions was an American innovation and a departure from the English custom of residual orality. The fact that the United States Constitution was written perhaps necessitated the textual documentation of judicial opinions in books, digests, and reports.
During the tenure of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth (1796–1800), the third Chief Justice of the Court, seriatim opinions became less common and were abandoned during the tenure of Chief Justice John Marshall (1801–1835), who orchestrated consolidated opinions among the justices, much to the chagrin of Thomas Jefferson. Justices who concurred with the prevailing rationale no longer authored a separate opinion to express their agreement. Justice William Johnson, a Jeffersonian Republican, was the notable exception, authoring nearly half of the dissents that were produced by members of the Court during his tenure on the bench. Chief Justice Marshall, for his part, authored most of the Court’s majority opinions, which were issued with the phrase “opinion of the Court” to lend the impression that the justices spoke with one voice. Collegiality and consensus-building must have been a high priority because, after work hours, the justices resided and dined together in a small boardinghouse on Capitol Hill, away from their families, where court conflicts could have incited personal quarrels. Abandoning the seriatim mode and dissenting opinions also quickened the publication process; over a quarter of the cases decided by opinion between 1815 and 1835 were published in no more than five days.
The period late in Chief Justice Marshall’s tenure to approximately 1905 involved the rise of dissenting justices. Chief Justice Marshall himself began to author dissents as the Court increasingly decided cases through majority rather than unanimous opinions. Dissents proliferated during the mid-nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Justice John McLean and Justice Benjamin Curtis authored memorable dissents in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Forty-eight years later, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s three-paragraph dissent in Lochner v. New York became one of the most influential legal writings in American history. Blackstone’s conviction that opinions were evidence of law but not actually law continued to some extent throughout the nineteenth century, yet it had been diminishing since the mid-eighteenth century. The notion of “caselaw,” or the idea that judicial opinions constituted law, did not gain currency until the twentieth century. Today it is mostly accepted without question or qualification.
The twentieth century ushered in the era of the “Great Dissenter,” a label that has been conferred on Justice Holmes and Justice John Marshall Harlan. By the 1940s, most cases involved separate opinions. Dissents and separate writings are now common. A jurist’s reasoning and argument typically enjoy precedential effect, but historically, under the English tradition of the common law, the judgment of the opinion was authoritative, and later courts could disregard the analysis from which that judgment followed. The results of an opinion, in other words, took priority over its reasoning.
This review originally appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of the Journal of Faith and the Academy.
Brent J. Aucoin’s new biography is a probing treatment of the neglected figure of Thomas Goode Jones. To some, Jones is discredited because of his ownership of slaves and military leadership in the Confederate Army; to others, he’s a wounded war hero, distinguished jurist, and revered governor who sought reconciliation with former slaves. The truth, as always, is more complex.
Jones does not fit neatly into simplistic categories; he defies the trite labels of current political vocabulary. He even cut across partisan divides in his own day. His story is not a crude morality tale, nor does it contain clear lessons for posterity. Aucoin calls Jones “enigmatic.” He seeks to consider Jones “holistically.” His studied reflection on Jones reveals a complicated man who’s both congenial and flawed, ahead of his time and yet a definite product of it.
Born in precarious circumstances in what today is Macon, Georgia, Jones had family roots in Virginia. His father, Samuel Goode Jones, worked for the railroad and moved the family from place to place, trying to earn an honest living. They settled in Montgomery when Samuel took a job there as an engineer. Thomas Jones was five at the time. He and his family attended St. John’s Episcopal Church, downtown, where the pew in which Jefferson Davis worshipped remains intact, the other rows of pews having been replaced long ago.
A romantic childhood it was not. Jones was sent to Virginia to study at academies that fed into the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). He was groomed to be a soldier. By the time he enrolled at VMI, the Civil War had broken out, and he joined the ranks of his professor, Major General Thomas J. Jackson. Jones transferred units and worked his way up the chain of command, barely avoiding death on more than one occasion. Legend has it that, while riding horseback, he saved a wandering child during the heat of battle. This and other tales of heroism earned Jones the reputation as a valiant warrior. General Robert E. Lee himself selected Jones, among others, to deliver the flag of surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.
After the War, Jones returned to Alabama to begin a new career, or careers. He married, sired 13 children, and enjoyed a rapid rise to fame and distinction, first as an editor of The Daily Picayune and later as a speaker, lawyer, and Democratic politician. Believing it was God’s will for the South to fully reintegrate into the Union, he championed reunification, receiving honors and awards for his efforts to this end. His celebrated 1874 Memorial Day Address was a reconciliatory precursor to that of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. a decade later.
Jones is known, in our day, mostly as a legislator, judge, and governor—and indeed the bulk of Aucoin’s book is dedicated to these periods of Jones’s life. Aucoin pays close attention to Jones’s often contradictory, always multifaceted, and sometimes disturbing views on race and race relations. Following Booker T. Washington, Aucoin says, “Jones eschewed the idea of a political solution to the so-called Negro problem—namely, the passage and enforcement of civil rights legislation—but also . . . opposed the political effort to disenfranchise blacks.”
Jones supported segregation of the races under a separate-but-equal scheme, yet he backed the creation of Alabama State University, a black college founded in 1867. He advocated the education of blacks to varying degrees, but his rhetoric on this topic can sound paternalistic and hollow to the modern ear. That he opposed educational prerequisites to voting, however, suggests he was willing to risk clout and status to take an unpopular stand on behalf of former slaves. He also, quite controversially at the time, sought to abolish the exploitative convict leasing system that carried with it the residual features of slavery.
Aucoin describes Jones’s politicking in great detail, from probable election fraud to campaigns for higher taxes. As governor, Jones decried the mob violence that had become common in Alabama. Later, as a judge, he attempted to charge a lynch mob under federal law.
Jones’s popularity waxed and waned. An economic crisis befell the state during his governorship, and workers from different industries began to strike. This once gallant soldier grew tired and frustrated and lost much of his charisma. During one ceremony as governor, suffering from “cholera morbus,” he fell from his horse as he tried to dismount. Word of this clumsy incident spread quickly, and Jones was humiliated.
Yet he always drew admirers. His work on race relations, if not always courageous, was at least a step in the right direction. When he died, an unexpected number of blacks attended his funeral, watching solemnly. “Jones may not have been a hero,” Aucoin submits, “or someone on the good side who was unfaltering in his fight against evil, but there appears to be cause for concluding that he distinguished himself from the more rabid racist leaders of the South.”
The institution I work at bears the name of this curious man, whose bust is displayed prominently at the top of the stairs of the entry rotunda, looking down on the busy law faculty and students who come and go without the slightest concern for, or even knowledge of, his life. I’ve placed my copy of Aucoin’s biography beneath that bust with a short note: “Free copy. Learn about a fascinating person.”
It seemed like the right thing to do.
This post is the reproduction of portions of a series of pieces originally published at Atlas Society’s website. The original series of posts is available here, here, here, and here.
Section II features autobiographical reflections on Branden by his friends and associates Roger E. Bissell, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, Tal Ben-Shahar, Deepak Sethi, and Michael E. Southern. Limited space for review necessitates that I roll my thoughts on these reflections into one sketch. Compressing several autobiographical accounts into one summative analysis does not mean the accounts are unimportant or uninteresting. In fact, they are among the most enthralling contributions to the collection—in particular, Southern’s highly detailed tribute that contains a wealth of insight and information.
But the appreciative tone, personal nature, and intimate recollections in this section are difficult to fully and justly convey as a secondhand report. I thus urge readers interested in Branden’s private friendships and relationships to consult this part of the collection for themselves. I hope that highlighting a few anecdotes will suffice to show the depth and quality of the stories involved.
In one, Bissell relates that, while he was in high school, at the suggestion of his band and choral teacher, he read an essay by Branden. He then read Atlas Shrugged. Testifying to the transformative power of these experiences, he claims that the two texts “irreversibly changed” his life. He suddenly knew he should pursue music, ideas, and writing rather than mathematics. Southern had a similar experience: He read Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Breaking Free, and The Disowned Self, and immediately withdrew from graduate school and flew to California to meet Branden.
Bissell recalls an exchange in which Branden responded to a question about how effectively to promote Objectivism. The answer, Bissell says, was simple: “to be as rational and productive as you could be at whatever you most loved to do, and to let your success at that be your testimony to the worth of Objectivism’s principles.” Still recapping Branden’s response, Bissell adds that “Objectivism exists to help you live a good life, not to require you to sacrifice your one and only, precious, individual life to its furtherance.”
In another anecdote, Ben-Shahar recalls how Branden comforted him after the death of a friend in a plane crash. In yet another, Sethi remarks that Branden helped him, an immigrant, flourish in American culture by cultivating Sethi’s self-esteem. Later, Sethi and Branden used Braden’s self-esteem techniques on business leaders.
Southern, who also participated in such sessions, relates that they involved “a powerful mechanism for self-discovery,” namely an exercise called “sentence completions.” He tells the story of how Branden once called an agitated woman to the front of a room of 100 people to participate in sentence-completions. She discovered, at length and through many tears, that she had never properly mourned the death of her father, a heartbreaking revelation that jarred Southern to the point that he later raised concerns with Branden, who in turn applied the sentence-completion exercise on him. What happened next was surprising. Southern allowed himself “for the first time to voice . . . all the pain growing up without a father had caused me.” “I was told throughout my childhood,” he recounts, “that I was better off without my father and continuously heard how much he had hurt those around him who loved him. And so I dutifully repressed the longing.” Southern thus realized firsthand the therapeutic benefits of Branden’s methods.
These moving portraits of Branden suggest that he valued friendships and mentorships. The contributors affectionately refer to him by his first name and dub him a “hero” and “my Aristotle.” Southern claims that Nathaniel and Devers Branden “saved years of my life.” Whatever else he accomplished, then, Branden clearly impacted the lives of those who knew him well. He satisfied felt needs and helped others take responsibility and achieve self-actualization.
Section III, the final section, will be the most trying for readers who, like me, lack training in clinical psychology—first because we have no background or abiding interest in the subject, and second because we have no expertise with which to evaluate the significance of these contributions to the field. Without knowing Branden’s importance or unimportance within professional circles, or whether his techniques and practices are rare or common, strange or normal, exemplary or bizarre, one has difficulty determining if this section represents a necessary corrective or merely wishful thinking. I get the feeling, though, that these contributions would not have appeared in a journal edited by professional clinical psychologists and that their value is therefore bound up in Branden’s significance as an historical figure.
The essays featured here respond to a Branden-inspired sentence-completion prompt: “If Branden’s works were studied by more academic and clinical psychologists…..” The five contributors then finish—or were supposed to finish—the sentence by saying what would have happened had the condition been fulfilled. Fittingly, they each have backgrounds in psychology, but surprisingly they steer wide of their cue and answer a different question from the one posed. For instance, Robert L. Campbell, the coeditor of the collection, offers what he calls a “memorial tribute” that has more to do with Branden’s uniqueness among psychologists than it does with some hypothetical readership of Branden’s work. It comes off like an encomium and partly a sympathetic memoir, except for the reserved, professional critique of Branden’s inability to bridge the gap between exploratory research and clinical practice.
Cautious neither to condemn nor celebrate Branden’s more peculiar methods, such as hypnosis or “energy therapy,” Campbell suggests that Branden’s career coincided with the rise in the prestige of clinical psychology. This temporal correspondence, however, did nothing to elevate Branden’s profile within the profession. In fact, Branden was, in Campbell’s words, merely “an occasional consumer” of psychological research who was accused of “pop psychology.” As Campbell does little to recover Branden’s reputation in this regard, or to mount a storied defense on his behalf, one wonders, only one essay into this section, whether Branden the practitioner should be written off as unserious or amateurish. Campbell tempers his vague criticisms with admiring praise and the attribution of his entire career to Branden’s influence. But the point of his essay is to portray Branden as an engaging and enthusiastic expositor of Rand’s ideas, not to evaluate Branden’s contributions to clinical psychology on their substantive merit.
Walter Foddis, a doctoral student in clinical psychology whose essay possesses the tone and style more typical of scientific writing, suggests that Branden’s work never gained academic recognition because he addressed a popular rather than a scholarly audience. Foddis might have published his piece in a journal of clinical psychology because it is primarily about scholarly views of self-esteem with concluding remarks about the practical application of his argument in light of cognitive-behavioral theory. He reviews the relevant literature on self-esteem and traces its various treatments by researchers over time.
Branden is thus a mere stepping stone for Foddis to present his own model of self-esteem—in addition to a “qualitative and quantitative instrument” called the “Self-Esteem Sentence Completion Instrument” that can be employed in experimental studies with human subjects—which readers outside the field will be unequipped to measure and assess with proficiency or competence.
Foddis doesn’t tell us why Branden remains important to clinical psychology so much as he shows us through the working out of his own unique arguments and findings in which Branden plays a key role. Saying Branden is important to the field is not as convincing as demonstrating his importance by incorporating his ideas and research into novel studies and ongoing conversations. Of the contributions to this section, then, Foddis’s does the most to recover Branden’s professional reputation even though—or rather because—Branden is not the central figure. Perhaps inadvertently, Foddis, with his references to a pragmatist, William James, as a recognized authority, coupled with his passing mentions of “human fallibility and limitations,” reveals how much distance there is between scholarly consensus in the field of clinical psychology and the more abstract, less practical theories of Objectivism associated with Rand, who despised pragmatists and systems of thought premised on the putative restrictions and limitations of human intelligence.
Teresa I. Morales Gerbaud summarizes Branden’s theories rather than applying them as Foddis does. “Branden’s body of work on human psychology,” she pronounces, “exhibits a remarkably consistent thread of logical reasoning that shapes and defines critical ideas, including notions of the key role of self-esteem in human behavior.” She calls Branden’s work “pioneering,” “critical and compelling,” and “novel.” She praises his “visionary intellect,” “the authenticity of his method,” the “salience and importance” of his ideas, “the depth of [his] thoughtful words,” and his “carefully thought-out example” of the integration of conscious and unconscious modes of knowing. And she refers to the “deep gratitude for the joy and inspiration that his work has brought to my life.” These laudatory lines, even when accompanied by the contextualization of Branden’s ideas alongside those of other experts, do not prove Branden’s significance to his field. What they prove is that Gerbaud really likes Branden.
Whereas Foddis uses Branden’s work for practical and theoretical ends—as building blocks for original research—Gerbaud merely celebrates Branden, compliments his methods, and asserts his significance. Ironically, insisting on his greatness and importance without demonstrating the practical or theoretical value of his ideas may actually undermine Branden’s reputation. At a minimum, it makes him susceptible to accusations of the kind he leveled against Rand: that his popularity has more to do with the cult of personality and adoring loyalty than it does with the operative quality of his concepts.
Andrew Schwartz does more than Gerbaud to situate Branden’s innovations in their historical context. The most important of these were, he submits, Branden’s “theory of self-esteem” and “his clinical method of sentence completion”—elements of his work that receive regular and sustained treatment throughout this collection and that, according to Schwartz, were prefigured by the Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler. This chapter may lend credibility to Branden’s accomplishments, but the inexpert reader is unable to reach that conclusion with clarity or conviction.
Joel F. Wade’s descriptive essay functions as a “bookend” for this final section, corresponding as it does with Campbell’s opening essay in its approbatory approach and character. Like Campbell, Wade shares personal accounts of time spent with Branden and pays close attention to Devers Branden as well, who surely deserves the attention. Like Gerbaud, Wade has little negative to say about his friend and sometime collaborator. He privileges personality and anecdote over scientific validation of Branden’s working theories and clinical applications. Not that negativity is required, but critical distance and tempered critique add the kind of credibility that makes flattery appear well-earned.
It’s evident from a dispassionate reading that this section, however affectionate and endearing, will not establish or renew scientific interest in Branden among clinical psychologists. Its contents could have fallen in the earlier sections, or the second and third sections could have been collapsed into one, but in either case Foddis’s essay, a work of scholarship, would have seemed out of place.
The contributors to the third section represent a network of friends and associates, not a disinterested community of impartial researchers jealously guarding high academic standards and ensuring strict quality controls. They give Branden a pass. Those outside the field may appreciate the admiration of trained professionals who knew or followed Branden. Yet even non-experts will recognize that clinical psychology as we know it will be virtually unchanged or unaffected by these eulogistic essays, which are worthwhile not because of what they reveal about clinical psychology, but because of what they reveal about Branden the man.
The soaring tone struck by most of the contributors to the final section would have been more fitting for the epilogue, although one doubts they would have matched the flair and sensitivity that characterizes the essay of Stephen D. Cox, a literary critic and English professor at the University of California in San Diego. Cox’s touching epilogue is principally about Branden’s literary labors and talents. He claims that he saw Branden “in a way in which, perhaps, nobody else saw him—chiefly as a craftsman, busy in a literary workshop.” It’s from this unique vantage that Cox shares his learned opinions. “Our relationship was almost entirely literary,” he muses, “almost entirely concerned with what is ‘beautiful’ in writing.”
The two men had their differences—one was a Christian, for instance, and the other an atheist—but they cultivated a relationship based on shared interests and a mutual love for the written word. They started off as pen pals—Branden having initiated the first contact—and quickly became members of a discussion group at Branden’s home. Then they met regularly, one-on-one, over lunch or dinner and talked about literature—everything from the structural composition of novels (Branden had been working on one) to diction and syntax and the romantic love triangle between three of Branden’s fictional characters. “I didn’t feel it was my role to question Nathaniel about the psychological motivation of his works,” Cox explains of this love triangle, which loosely resembles the complex relationship between Branden, Rand, and O’Connor. Voyeuristic types will, I’m confident, wish he had questioned Branden to elicit salacious details.
While several characters in Branden’s novel appeared, to Cox, “to represent different aspects of Nathaniel himself,” Cox didn’t see autobiography. Rather, the novel was, in his view, about “the mistakes, and the maturity, that can come with age,” as well as the need “to discover one’s course in life, even after one experiences great intellectual, material, and social success.” Eventually conversations about this novel turned into scrutiny of a draft play involving the same plot and theme; it turns out Branden was something of a dramatist in the vein of Henrik Ibsen. In fact, Rand had once gifted him thirteen volumes of Ibsen’s plays, which Branden later gifted to Cox. “I’m looking at them now—a princely gift,” Cox remarks of these keepsakes, and you can imagine him sitting by his computer gazing wistfully at his bookshelf.
The Branden of Cox’s rumination is witty, charming, considerate, and friendly. When Cox says that “I never saw Branden try to impress anyone,” he implies that Branden was impressive in spite of himself. In the end, perhaps the most profound and lasting compliment that could be paid Branden comes in one simple line: “He was a fine literary companion.”
No appraisal of this collection could go without mentioning the excellent work of the editors, Campbell and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Along with Cox, Bissell, and Roderick T. Long, they have put together, at the end of the collection, what appears to be an exhaustive annotative bibliography of references to Branden to date. I’m not aware of any works about Branden that don’t appear on this list.
Although I discussed Campbell in the context of his essay contribution, I saved my praise for his and Sciabarra’s editorial efforts for the end of this review—not just because I have so far focused chiefly on the content of the essays (and hence, in large part, on the authors of those essays), but also because I wanted commendation of the editors to remain fresh on readers’ minds by placing it at the end.
Editors receive too little acclaim for their grinding and painstaking intellectual exertions, from proofreading and organizing to sourcing and advising. Editing can be a thankless, time-consuming struggle with little monetary benefit or professional recognition. Campbell and Sciabbarra should be celebrated and congratulated for their significant, impressive work. They have accomplished what they set out to do: inaugurate a “critical reassessment” of Branden by providing his theories about Objectivism and his “eclectic clinical approach” with a wider audience. They demonstrate that Branden is an important figure in his own right, a man worthy of sustained attention and scholarly exploration.
If this collection inspires future studies of Branden, then Campbell’s and Sciabarra’s quiet industry will have paid off. And they will have enabled future knowledge about Objectivism—its principles, founders, and controversies—to multiply. The roots of such education may be bitter, but the fruit will, indeed, be sweet.
This post is the reproduction of portions of a series of pieces originally published at Atlas Society’s website. The original series of posts is available here, here, here, and here.
The inclusion of Branden’s lecture and question-answer session in this collection gives him a voice in his own commemoration. Published here for the first time, and transcribed by Roger Bissell, the lecture was given to the California Institute for Applied Objectivism in 1996. Its tenor can be gleaned from the opening paragraph in which Branden compliments his audience for being “dedicated to the broad philosophical ideas of Objectivism, but not in a religiously constricted and independent-thinking-discouraging way.”
Here Branden echoes his implicit criticism of the ARI camp. Debates between the Branden-ARI factions go beyond the personal disagreements between Branden and Rand to a broader philosophical question: is it better, at the outset of an intellectual movement, to insist upon the purity of a set of ideas at the expense of its slower adoption or to engage in an open dialogue that allows for give-and-take?
This is not a subject that can be answered by labeling either side as “religionists” or “compromisers.” It’s a unique problem elevated to historical significance by the profundity and uniqueness of Objectivism. If Objectivism is the most exceptional philosophy to emerge in over two thousand years and one believes, as Objectivists do, that philosophy is the motive force of history, then the answer could reasonably impact the course of civilization itself. The stakes, in other words, are high for those involved.
The question-answer session thus raises an issue of great magnitude in the Rand-Branden divide: How should Objectivists relate to libertarians? The underlying debate is that, on one side, Rand and ARI reject the label “libertarian” or affiliations with libertarian groups (exceptions such as the Foundation for Economic Education and the Cato Institute exist) because they claim that self-identifying libertarians often embrace a sort of “libertarianism by any means,” foregoing philosophical foundations.
Rand and ARI have argued that because philosophy guides human thinking in all areas of life and constitutes a fundamental, salient force, it is unacceptable to categorize their beliefs under a name that permits just any possible philosophical argument for a political conclusion. Objectivism is not primarily an economic or political calculus but a philosophical system whereby the means by which one arrives at conclusions matters. Branden and others critical of Rand have argued that accepting the libertarian label is unobjectionable and better promotes the popularizing and engagement that Branden values. Disciples of Rand disagree to varying degrees.
Branden speaks about himself in the third person (“you had to know Nathaniel Branden or Barbara Branden, and you had to impress them sufficiently to get an introduction to Ayn Rand”) and with superlatives of the sort employed by the sitting President of the United States (“the wonderfully exciting opportunity to read,” “a very special world, which is very close to being incommunicable,” “it was a very intoxicatingly pleasant and enjoyable way to process experience,” “we are somehow participating in this marvelous, exciting and inspiring reality,” etc.).
His accounts are fascinating; whether they’re entirely true is another matter. His portrayal of a dinner with Rand and O’Connor during which he articulated anxiety about the publication of Atlas Shrugged is telling, as is Leonard Peikoff’s announcement, on a separate occasion, that, as Branden puts it, “in six months of the publication of Atlas Shrugged, we’ll be living in an Objectivist society.” “Now,” says Branden of Peikoff’s comment, “we knew that this was excessive, and this couldn’t be true. . . . But what it also reflects is something of the highly excited, intoxicating mental state of the period.”
Stories like this help those of us who were not alive at the time develop a fuller sense of what these individuals were like. Branden and Rand and their followers set out to form an exclusive community and were often impatient with outsiders who didn’t understand their positions, or so Branden claims. He regrets that their tactic was first to insist on conformity before initiating dialogue with outsiders, rather than initiating dialogue with outsiders to recruit new adherents. “[I]t was very, very tempting to retreat into self-righteousness,” he reflects about his encounters with those who were not yet initiated into his manner of thinking. He also depicts the group—The Collective—as elevating Rand the person over her principles: “In those days, it was made abundantly clear to us that fighting for Objectivism meant fighting for Ayn Rand. Loyalty to Ayn Rand was an issue of the highest possible value in the hierarchy.”
Therein lies much of the controversy surrounding Branden and his legacy. These “fighting words” give the strong sense that battling for Objectivism meant battling for Rand. Those of us who were not present for the conversations, meetings, debates, and interactions of that time cannot speak to the extent to which this is true. However, the accusation seems at odds with Rand’s explicit statements enjoining those who studied her philosophy that thinking for themselves and making their own evaluations of every idea were the only rational means of ascertaining truth. She rejected arguments from authority, even or especially when she was the authority in question. Whether that was conveyed in her personal relationships, though, we cannot know. It is imaginable that someone with such a forceful personality, so certain in her beliefs and ideas, would be difficult to oppose and that the environment of The Collective may have made any but the most resilient participant demure in her presence.
Branden’s stories about Rand are almost invariably unflattering, which is understandable in the context of their personal conflict, but perhaps unproductive in maintaining his broader position of extolling her philosophy and even, in large part, her character. He argues for understanding her as “conflicted” and complex rather than saintly, but he hardly counterbalances his negative portrayals with anything positive. She is, in his renderings, almost universally cranky, rude, aggressive, and bitter—a figure who seems to have gained a following for her ideas despite her horrid persona.
Moreover, he sometimes assumes a condescending tone towards those associated with her. He represents Peikoff and George Reisman, for instance, as being inextricably caught up in her world, coloring Peikoff as an emotional dependent and Reisman as a social hostage. In all cases, however, Branden remains the sound-minded individual who, if a bit naïve in his youth, learned the error of the Randian ways and parted with her. This attitude dismisses some independent and analytical minds as fragile or conformist. One could argue that Branden’s characterizations of events weren’t wrong—again, we weren’t there and so don’t know for sure—but they also gloss over the fact that now, as older men of prominence, Peikoff and Reisman stand by her legacy and take her side in the split.
It’s clear that Branden detested what he portrays as a culture of loyalty that did not admit of dissent or disagreement and that, in his depiction at least, was unwilling to improve upon or revise Rand’s ideas, which some of her associates, again in his view, assumed to be without flaws. Branden locates the origin of this allegedly rigid groupthink in Rand’s early years. Defenders of Rand will disapprove of Branden’s characterization of this period as “the very dark side of the early years,” just as they may wince to hear Branden describe how her closest associates refused or hesitated to acknowledge their errors or ignorance about certain matters, as though they needed always to pretend to possess perfect knowledge. Although Branden criticized what he dubbed “Orthodox Objectivism,” of which he remained critical until the end, he was equally clear that he wished Objectivism to continue spreading, and he offered pointed suggestions about how to accomplish that, namely by gaining credibility and acceptance within the academy and finding publishers within mainstream peer-reviewed journals.
As much as I have hoped to avoid engaging the Rand-Branden split, it is a major part of Branden’s speech and the question-answer session deals with it. Given that Branden delivered the talk in 1996 and that, as he notes, he rarely spoke on Objectivism by then, one could take his comments as at least somewhat representative of his hierarchy of concerns on the subject. The talk and question-answer session reveal that his fallout with Rand remained a considerable part of his legacy and that he felt the need to defend himself by attacking Rand. That would explain why his answers can, at times, seem unfair to Rand. For example, asked why Rand supported Richard Nixon over George McGovern—rather than the Libertarian Party candidate John Hospers—Branden stated that she should’ve supported Hospers, that she was “uninformed” about libertarianism and political issues, and that she associated libertarianism with anarchism, which she despised. In truth, Rand had contempt for Nixon and a well-reasoned argument against Hospers, even citing his campaign views and the Libertarian Party’s platform. If I know this, then Branden certainly should, so his comment reads as if he’s giving her as little credit as possible and characterizing her as an angry zealot.
Whatever one thinks of Branden, there’s merit and perhaps a degree of honor in his hope that “there is a tremendous area of work that needs to be done, that will be done, … that is nowhere to be found in the Objectivist literature.” His disagreements with other Objectivists did not lead him to give up on Objectivism or abandon its central tenets. He remained ever devoted to this philosophy even if his commitments to knowledge and learning lost him friendships and widened the gulf between his ideas and those of other followers of Rand. It is worth asking whether Branden, despite his implicit discounting of the early years as too preoccupied with “fighting for Ayn Rand,” did not spend much of his remaining years fighting against Rand. Did his autobiographical writings and the writings of Barbara Branden on their relationships with Rand take up too much of his post-Rand career as a psychologist and philosophical thinker?
This piece originally appeared here at the Library of Law and Liberty.
The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications is a nonprofit accrediting agency for journalism programs. Bradley Hamm, the dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has called the council’s accreditation-review process “flawed,” “superficial,” “extremely time-consuming,” and “sort of a low bar.”
So he’s gotten out. Northwestern University has effectively terminated its relationship with the council, calmly embracing its new status as unaccredited.
The online journal Inside Higher Ed, which points out that the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has done the same, quotes Dean Hamm as saying that, “as we near the 2020s, we expect far better than a 1990s-era accreditation organization that resists change—especially as education and careers in our field evolve rapidly.”
This is a tremendous blow—when two of the most prominent and celebrated journalism programs in the country refuse to acknowledge the authority and legitimacy of an accreditor, it’s tough for the accreditor to argue that the resistant institutions are merely upset about their ability to maintain accreditation. If other journalism schools are frustrated with the council’s obsolete standards, and its tendency to micromanage curricula, more of them will likely follow the example of Northwestern and Berkeley.
The social and financial costs of burdensome accreditation standards and procedures are even more pronounced in the field of law. Small businesses and Americans of modest income struggle to afford the high costs of hiring an attorney or litigating a case. Access to justice or quality representation is a constant concern within the legal profession.
Meanwhile, the American Bar Association, which remains the only accrediting body for law schools in the United States, regulates legal education in a way that drives up costs for law students, and for the consumers onto whom those costs are eventually projected.
The ABA restricts innovation by fixing the number of credit hours necessary for law students to graduate, effectively eliminating the possibility of a shorter program than the standard three years. It discourages law professors from honing their practical skills by narrowing the designation of “full-time” faculty to exclude those who maintain an ongoing remunerative relationship with a law firm or business. Its requirements regarding equipment and technology mean, in practice, that many schools are buying expensive computers and furnishing computer labs that students may never use.
ABA scrutiny of attrition rates has also contributed to a change in law-school culture and practices. There was a time when law schools could accept a high percentage of applicants who, as students, had to prove their competence in the classroom and stand or fall on their academic merit. Those who couldn’t cut it flunked out. They didn’t incur three years of debt only to take and retake a bar exam they weren’t equipped to pass.
The ABA position penalizing schools for high attrition—the result of a new interpretation of Standard 501(b) that prohibits law schools from admitting applicants who aren’t “capable” of completing a Juris Doctor or passing a bar exam—now arguably causes law schools to seek to retain students who can’t cut it. To that end, it encourages grade inflation and heavier use of student loans.
Law schools recently came under criticism for hiring their own graduates as a way to boost their post-graduation employment statistics. In response, the ABA instituted procedures to prevent the spread of misleading data. What seemed like a good-faith effort to enhance transparency and accountability has led, instead, to flawed incentives. Law schools have taken to promoting “JD-required” and “bar-passage-required” jobs to their graduates more strongly than corporate or financial positions that pay higher salaries but don’t require either a law license or bar membership.
If you graduated from law school today and became the CEO of a large, multinational company tomorrow, you would skew your school’s data in an unfavorable direction.
This changed emphasis neglects the realities of a marketplace in which the availability of traditional law jobs remains stagnant. To best serve their students, law schools should feel free to guide them toward alternative careers based in new technologies and businesses that would benefit from the knowledge and leadership that legal education supplies.
The ABA’s ministrations also help drive up the price of legal education, forcing law schools to direct time and resources toward ABA compliance that could be put toward student scholarships or improving the curriculum. And a higher price tag means that members of the legal profession, and young lawyers in particular, in order to pay debts or compensate for opportunity costs incurred during law school, pass these costs on to consumers in the form of higher legal fees.
The bottom line is that, when a substantial portion of the population cannot afford to hire an attorney, or at least feels that way, the legal system has failed in its chief purpose: to ensure that wrongs are righted and justice is served.
Unintended harm, however, is nothing new for the ABA.
Founded in 1878 by “leading” or “representative” lawyers who were selected by an elite group of men from states along the East Coast, the ABA sought to nationalize professional and ethical standards with these goals: “to advance the science of jurisprudence, promote the administration of justice and uniformity of legislation throughout the Union, uphold the honor of the profession of the law, and encourage cordial intercourse among the members.”[1]
Noble ambitions indeed. But the organization soon became a fraternal guild that sought to enforce rigid barriers to entry into the legal profession with the assistance of independent bar associations in the 50 states. “For many years,” explained legal scholar Philip J. Wickser in the 1920s, “the Association fought hard to retain its selective quality, and not to forget that a relatively small homogenous group could get the most done.”[2]
The ABA officially excluded African Americans for 66 years, according to Susan D. Carle in her 2013 book Defining the Struggle. Its ouster of three African Americans in 1912 on the basis of their skin color drew protests from the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That same year, the ABA issued a resolution stating that “it has never been contemplated that members of the colored race should become members of this Association.”[3]
Although the ABA has since sought to make up for its racist past by increasing the ethnic diversity of its membership, creating a commission on sexual orientation and gender identity, and strengthening its rules prohibiting racial harassment or discrimination, part of its purpose historically has been to regulate entry into the profession and decrease the number of low-income, immigrant, and minority lawyers[4] (though in recent decades such decreases have been a consequence, not the purpose, of ABA regulation).
No matter how hard the ABA attempts to distance itself from its origins, it cannot escape the fact that its function is to exclude certain groups from membership to enable a monopoly on legal services by its members. Such exclusion has tended to fall along racial lines. One law professor has thus complained that “all of the ABA’s diversity efforts ring hollow” because the ABA “caused blacks to be excluded from the profession in the first place.”[5]
Given its racially charged beginnings and racially dividing regulations and standards, it’s surprising that the ABA is still considering revising Standard 316, which addresses the bar-passage rates of law-school graduates. Compliance with the revised standard would require bar passage by 75 percent of the graduates of a currently approved (as opposed to provisionally approved) law school in at least three of the last five years.[6]
A few months ago, Lawrence P. Nolan, the president of the State Bar of Michigan, penned a letter to ABA delegates to point out, among other things, that minority organizations—and even the ABA Council for Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Educational Pipeline—were against the proposed revision to Standard 316. “The collective judgment of those committed to [reducing] the . . . racial disparity in the legal profession,” he said, “is reflected in their unanimous opposition to this amendment.”
Nolan also stated that the ABA’s own data “confirms the large gap for African-American bar passage rates, which are lower than overall rates, particularly on the multiple-choice test.” Statistics cited by Nolan show that African Americans pass the bar exam at a lower rate than whites and that the percentage of white repeat takers of the bar exam is 3.2 percent whereas the figure for black repeat takers is 14.1 percent. If those statistics are accurate and predictive, then the effects of the revised standard would fall disproportionately on those schools with higher numbers of African American students.
Supporters of the proposed revision portray law schools as exploiters of racial minorities that have been admitting underqualified applicants to make up for diminishing admissions applications. There’s truth to this characterization. Law-school admissions standards have dropped precipitously as enrollment has declined.
But why trust the organization that caused or at least exacerbated many of these problems to fix them? We need imagination and rational risk to move forward constructively and creatively. Proposals as wide-ranging as abolishing the bar exam or developing non-JD curricula in law schools ought to be seriously considered. Another idea would be to strip the ABA of its accrediting powers altogether, something the U.S. Department of Education might consider.
During this moment of social unrest, when rancorous partisanship seems to permeate all fields of discourse, faculty and administration all along the political spectrum can agree on one thing: The ABA is systematically harming ethnic minorities and becoming as obsolete as its counterpart in journalism education.
It may well be time for top-ranked law schools to follow in the footsteps of the J-schools at Northwestern and Berkeley. Only if several leading law schools joined to seek an end to the ABA’s accrediting function would this reform stand a chance. Law schools with lower rankings may lack the credibility to resist, given their stake in the accreditation process. Their administrators already, in my view, avoid speaking out against the ABA due to their reasonable fear of retaliation. (My own trepidation almost prevented this piece from reaching print.)
Granted, it might give the law schools pause that in most states, admission to the bar (by authority of the state bar or the state supreme court) is conditioned on holding a degree from an ABA-accredited law school. Still, the journalism-school revolt demonstrates that a mass rebuff of the ABA’s accrediting legitimacy is neither extreme nor absurd. Prominent law schools are already experimenting in other areas, such as considering GRE scores (rather than just LSAT scores) for admissions purposes. Such experimentation is all to the good.
The legal profession is, in the words of Benjamin Barton, “facing a major retrenchment” and remains mired in outmoded tasks that artificial intelligence may replace. It’s stuck in a bygone period when lawyers felt threatened by entrepreneurial upstarts who breached longstanding protocols such as prohibitions on advertising or contingency fees. It’s time for an energetic rethinking of the goals and purpose of legal education and the legal profession.
Ending ABA accreditation authority would be an exciting first step. It would enable administrators to reallocate resources to lower the costs of legal education and, consequently, of legal services. And it would allow them to focus on their true mission: not lining the pockets of accreditation agencies and bureaucratic guilds but educating prospective lawyers and bringing justice and order to rich and poor alike.
The views expressed herein are solely the author’s, and do not reflect those of Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law or its Blackstone and Burke Center.
[1] Simeon E. Baldwin, “The Founding of the American Bar Association,” The American Bar Association Journal 3 (1917), 659-62, 695.
[2] Philip J. Wickser, “Bar Associations,” Cornell Law Quarterly 15 (1929-30), 398.
[3] Susan D. Carle, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 281-82, and 541-43.
[4] Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 65: “During the second decade of the twentieth century the American Bar Association began to assert itself aggressively as a professional protective organization. Its purpose was twofold: to preserve its own exclusiveness (and the status that accompanied its preservation) and to exert professional leverage upon the political process.” For admission of minorities, see Auerbach, pp. 65-66, 71, 107, 131, 159-60, 200, 216, and 295.
[5] George B. Shepherd, “No African-American Lawyers Allowed: The Inefficient Racism of the ABA’s Accreditation of Law Schools,” Journal of Legal Education 53 (2003), 104.
[6] The ABA Council and the Accreditation Committee of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar operate independently of the ABA pursuant to regulations of the U.S. Department of Education, which recognizes these bodies as authorized accreditors. For ease of reference and understanding, and because of the connection between these accrediting bodies and the ABA, the taxonomy I have adopted simply lumps these bodies together under the heading of “ABA.”
Julia Jordan Weller, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, attended Hollins University and obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Alabama in 1985. She obtained her Juris Doctorate from Cumberland School of Law in 1988. Since that time, she has served as a law clerk to the Honorable Joel F. Dubina on both the United States District Court and the United States Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Mrs. Weller practiced law with firms in both Montgomery and Birmingham where, in addition to handling litigation throughout the State, she also served as an Administrative Law Judge for the State Health Planning and Development Agency. In 1998, Mrs. Weller became an Assistant United States Attorney, eventually becoming the First Assistant United States Attorney (Chief of Staff) in the Middle District of Alabama. She later worked as the Chief Administrative Law Judge for the State Personnel Board and thereafter as the Chief Administrative Law Judge for the Office of Attorney General. She became the Clerk of the Supreme Court of Alabama on July 16, 2013. Mrs. Weller is married to Christopher W. Weller, Sr., a shareholder with the law firm of Capell and Howard in Montgomery, Alabama. The Wellers have two children, Christopher Weller, Jr. and Florence Weller, and attend St. Peter Catholic Church.
If the walls of courthouses could talk, they would whisper the experiences of those who worked, litigated, and governed over the last 150 years or more. Some courtrooms have evolved from open air forums, such as those held in Wedowee until 1836, to some of the grand domed buildings that seem to radiate the authority of the court.
Author Delos Hughes escorts the reader through a journey stopping in each Alabama County, beginning from the outset of Alabama’s judicial history. Hughes explores Alabama’s earliest architectural expressions of justice, ranging from log cabins to Neoclassical Revival. He notes that courthouses often reflect through their architecture a sense of presence and the ideals of the communities which built them. These elements not only demonstrate the artistic preferences of the county, but also tell stories about the county’s politics, economies, class structures, and ethnic backgrounds.
Hughes writes, for instance, that the courthouse built in Baldwin County in Daphne, Alabama, and designed by the famous architects Frank Lockwood and Benjamin Bosworth Smith, “conveyed permanence, stability, seriousness—just the message that Bay Minette wanted to convey.” Of the Bibb County 1902 Courthouse, Hughes states, “the building conveys an impression for ecclesiastical rather than governmental or administrative or political.”
Interestingly, in Centre, Alabama, in Cherokee County, fire consumed two courthouses: one in 1882 and, later, the successor that was built in 1895. Thus, “befitting a facility so prone to burning, the commanding architectural feature” of the 1896 Cherokee County Courthouse included a bell tower to alert citizens of any further fire dangers.
A photograph of the Wilcox County Courthouse of 1859 depicts a grand Greek Revival building with fluted Doric columns and exterior iron stairs to the second floor courtroom. In contrast, a simple white board fence surrounds the majestic building, apparently for the practical purpose of keeping the livestock, which roamed freely through the streets, from wandering into the courthouse. The image creates an ironic contrast between the community ideals and perceptions against the backdrop of the county’s practical economic realities.
With witty dialogue and interesting insight, this collection of history and photographs is a must for any individual involved in litigation throughout this great state. Having handled litigation in nearly every county, I can say what a treasure this book would have been in my earlier years of law practice.
Hughes’s book provides a new set of viewing glasses to observe the personality and expressions fused into Alabama’s earliest judicial architecture. These historical backdrops shed both a serious and whimsical light on the buildings, some of which still exist, as well as on the tales of Alabamians—their roots, experiences and growth. Historic Alabama Courthouses is a delightful necessity for any Alabama lawyer and a guilty pleasure for lovers of the courtroom.
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 
American Government, An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government, Antonin Scalia, checks-and-balances, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Federalism, James McClellan, Jeff Sessions, Law and Liberty, Liberty Fund, Liberty Order and Justice, Natural Law, republicanism, Rule of Law, separation-of-powers, Sir William Blackstone
A Better Sort of Constitutional Learning: James McClellan’s Liberty, Order, and Justice
In American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Britain, History, Humanities, Law, Philosophy, Scholarship on July 25, 2018 at 6:45 amThis piece originally appeared here in Law & Liberty.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions not long ago characterized the office of sheriff as a “critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.” This plain statement of an incontrovertible fact should not have been controversial. Yet with clockwork predictability, social media activists began excoriating Sessions for his ethnocentrism.
Even those who should have known better—Bernice King (daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.), the NAACP, college-educated personalities in the Twittersphere—piled on the criticism, accusing Sessions of racism and suggesting the term “Anglo-American” was a dog whistle for white nationalists and the alt-Right. It was another sign of how uninformed many in our society have become, and of how name-calling and crude labeling have replaced constructive dialogue and civil conversation in the political sphere.
Fortunately, there’s a good, levelheaded primer for understanding the basic framework of American government that teachers and other leaders should recommend and assign to our ignorant masses: James McClellan’s Liberty, Order, and Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government, which the Liberty Fund published in 2000.
McClellan, who passed away in 2005, was a proud Virginian who taught at several universities, including the University of Virginia, and was, among other things, the James Bryce Visiting Fellow in American Studies at the Institute of United States Studies (University of London) and president of the Center for Judicial Studies at Claremont McKenna College in California. He was also for a time a senior resident scholar at Liberty Fund.
Liberty, Order, and Justice is McClellan’s best known work. It maps the history and philosophy that shaped the U.S. Constitution and its amendments and is separated into seven parts, each appended with primary sources that are reproduced in full or in part: Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the English Bill of Rights, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, the Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan, the Northwest Ordinance, and many others.
As a straightforward overview of the seminal concepts that characterize American government—separation of powers, republicanism, federalism, checks and balances, rule of law—this volume could serve, and probably has served, as the principal textbook for a high school or college course. The “Suggested Reading” lists at the end of each of its sections provide more than enough supplemental material to round out a semester of comprehensive study.
A work of such breadth and scope is impossible to summarize. McClellan begins with British history, in particular the emergence of Parliament, the evolution of the common law, and the development of legal doctrines and principles that responded to changing circumstances. He discusses the differences between the French and American Revolutions, and their respective effects upon the imaginations of Americans who were alive at the time. He devotes an entire section to the Philadelphia Convention, which he says, perhaps overstating, was “often more like a gathering of polite friends than an assemblage of angry political zealots.”
McClellan’s chief concern is federalism, a principle that appears throughout. He highlights disagreements between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, warning that “we should not presume that the Anti-Federalists were wrong.” He adds: “The inquiring student, having examined the debates thoroughly and objectively, may well conclude that the Anti-Federalists were right about certain matters.”
Lest his readers get lost in the historical and conceptual details, McClellan prefaces each section with the heading “Points to Remember,” followed by numbered outlines of central facts and themes. This feature enables easy memorization and study—another reason the book is suited for the classroom.
For the most part, McClellan recounts historical events dispassionately, and lays out influential concepts with no personal pique or ideological bent. Only occasionally is he tendentious, and then only subtly so. For instance, his judicial hermeneutics seek out authorial intent, thereby rejecting textualism and signing on to a now passé version of originalism. “The basic interpretive task,” he submits, “is to determine the intent of the Constitution, laws, and treatises, and to construe all instruments according to the sense of the terms and the intentions of the parties.”
This statement might have made Justice Antonin Scalia unhappy.
He’s also skeptical of natural law, stating:
This statement would have made Justice Scalia happy.
McClellan calls Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England a “great compendium of learning,” a term of endearment that applies equally to Liberty, Order, and Justice. The two have a similar aim: to synthesize disparate principles into a coherent treatise and to explain the origins and foundations of the current legal and political order. In a different age, when information wasn’t immediately available and students couldn’t google their way to quick answers, this book might well have become as important as the Commentaries.
Its cheerful conclusion, at any rate, seems naïve in our present moment: “What we have offered you in this book is the basic structure of America’s constitutional order. It is up to you to preserve and improve that structure; and you have a lifetime in which to work at it.” Were he alive today, McClellan might not be so optimistic.
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