The good thing about being a lawyer is there’s always someone to tell you you’re wrong.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Houston-Victoria, writes in “In Praise of Tough Criticism” that academics are reluctant to criticize one another and that, as a result, their disagreements are couched either in faint praise or anonymity, both of which neutralize the very disagreement that ought to be the foundation of intellectual life:

[G]iving faint praise is far worse than saying nothing at all. Why? Because silence is not a critical judgment—but faint praise, in contrast to honest and direct criticism, is empty criticism, the most banal form imaginable.

Another way that compassionate, caring critics get around their credo is to shroud their negative comments in anonymity. . . .

Like faint praise, anonymous criticism is empty criticism. Consider a recent example from The Chronicle Review. Carlin Romano’s article “Heil Heidegger!” was savaged in numerous anonymous comments. “Romano writes like an undergrad convinced by the argument of the last book he has read,” wrote one critic. “And, yes, he is a professor of philosophy, and yes, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, but his understanding of philosophy is so paltry that it beggars belief.” To that and other similar comments, Romano responded: “Those who savage me and my article from behind anonymous Internet tags emulate the cowardice, dishonesty, and taste for mobbing of the Nazi thinker they revere. It has often been that way with dupes who defend Heidegger—an abysmal thinker and writer, an immoral monster, and a disgrace to the historic enterprise of philosophy.”

Whether or not one agrees with Romano’s views of Heidegger, his take on anonymity is worth thinking about. Anonymity has more in common with cowardice than with courage—and is antithetical to critical dialogue. The common rationale for academic anonymity is quite clear: Honesty and truth require anonymity. To offer critical judgment anonymously, or, as Michel Foucault puts it in The Archaeology of Knowledge (Pantheon Books, 1972), as “a nameless voice,” allows one to stand outside the order of discourse, dialogue, and language. Writes Foucault, “I don’t want to have to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one.” In other words, anonymity is more calming and less risky—or even more cowardly—than named criticism.

The inclination to pull one’s punches, to refrain from stating straight out one’s disagreement with one’s colleagues and the reasons for the disagreement, seems to me a particular problem in law schools. I always tell my students that one of the blessings of being a lawyer is that there’s always someone telling you you’re wrong, whether it’s your adversary, a judge, or even your client. That constant challenge to your views forces you to both be as thoughtful and well-spoken as is possible, and it forces you too to trust in your own judgment, not to defer always to authority. Lawyers disagree as a matter of professional duty. If law professors refuse to voice disagreement, they are therefore doing their students a disservice. they are like parents who model irresponsible behavior to their children.

I’m not suggesting one not be civil. Nasty adversaries make wonderful work unpleasant. But professional adversaries are a pleasure. They recognize that disagreement is one’s professional duty, and they don’t take your disagreement with them personally.

Addendum: Law professors don’t like telling their students they’re wrong either.

Law students: what you learn is more important than your grade!

Ray Ward is a wise man. He sums up in a sentence what I often spend a year trying to get through to my students:

What you learn in a course is more important than your grade for that course.

It’s a particularly difficult point to get across to law students. One reason is that law school itself is packed almost entirely with people who feel that there’s a strong correlation between what you’ve learned, your intelligence, and your grade. Virtually all law professors had the highest or near the highest GPAs in their graduating classes from elite law schools. In my experience, people who succeed in an institution tend to believe that institution is very good at measuring success. Thus, law professors tend to think law school grades are good measure of success at learning law. And law students don’t know any better. They have no way to measure their success but grades. There is virtually no other feedback on their performance and their progress.

Lawyers I know genuinely do feel differently — that law school grades are poor predictors of success as a lawyer, and what studies there are confirm that the typical predictors of law school success are not good predictors of success in legal practice.

But it’s not easy getting that message across to law students, especially when your law professor colleagues don’t agree.

Is Elena Kagan’s “thin” record of legal scholarship a disqualification for the Supreme Court? Only if you’re a law professor.

My one reservation about Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court justice has been her extensive experience in legal academia. As readers of this blog know, the disconnect between law professors and law practice is a matter of grave concern to me. I do not understand why the great mass of legal academics consider legal practitioners lesser beings who really don’t belong in law schools and, if they are there, certainly don’t deserve the same status that the pure “scholars” do.

But now I can rest easy — law professors don’t consider Kagan one of them. Why? Because she’s practiced law too much!

Kagan taught at the University of Chicago Law School before going to work for the Clinton White House. During her time at Chicago, as the Chicago Tribune reports, “[s]he did publish several articles and won tenure in 1995, and was even chosen by students as teacher of the year. . . . [Se left to join the office of legal counsel in the Clinton White House shortly after that. As fellow West Wing veterans tell it, she quickly became an aide Clinton would pull aside for hallway conversations about his legislative initiatives on the Hill.”

In 1999, she sought to return to Chicago, but was unable to do so because, the law faculty decided not to give her an offer. They rejected her because her talents were as a lawyer and an administrator! We can’t have any of them cluttering up legal faculty:

“She turned out to be truly great at what she did,” said David Strauss, a U. of C. law professor and one of Kagan’s closest friends on the faculty. If things had gone as she’d planned at the time, he said, “maybe she wouldn’t be where she is now.”

The truly perverse thing is that in retrospect the Chicago professors don’t consider what they did a mistake. Rather, they are proud of it. As Richard Epstein — one of the most respected “scholars” in the U.S. — explains that her talents as a lawyer and an administrator don’t qualify her to teach law students:

Her papers were well-done, but they show exactly the same qualities of mind that prevent you from reaching the top ranks in academia. . . She is good at advising people, fixing things, putting programs in place.

I am not suggesting that legal scholars don’t belong on law faculties. I am suggesting that there are talents other than those of legal scholars that do deserve to be on law faculties and deserve equal status and respect. Why would you not want people who are good lawyers teaching law students who are in law school to become lawyers?

But most of all, I’m suggesting that the criticism of Obama’s choice of Kagan on the grounds that she is not sufficiently “scholarly” is a bunch of b.s. Why wouldn’t being a great teacher, a great administrator, and a great lawyer qualify you to  be on the Supreme Court?