Justice Scalia Suggests that the Legal Academy is Out of Touch: Is He Right?

Michael C. Dorf writes at Findlaw: “Justice Scalia was simply injecting a bit of comic relief into a tense oral argument, but underneath his joke was a more serious charge, one that he and other judges have made repeatedly for some years now. They complain that law professors produce scholarship that has no practical value to judges who must resolve hard cases. If a legal theory is ‘the darling of the professoriate’ and thus a fit subject for a law review article that will earn its proponent a tenured faculty position, Justice Scalia implies, it cannot have any practical utility. Is Justice Scalia right? In this column, I contend that the answer is mostly no.”