Kennedy Vs Moore Notes

Kennedy vs Moore: Legal Education, Hierarchy, Ideology, The Law Student and the Alternatives. Duncan Kennedy: Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy: Law schools are intensely political places, despite the fact that modern law school seems intellectually unpretentious, barren of theoretical ambition or practical vision of what social life might be. Ideological training for willing service in the hierarchies of the corporate welfare state. Because students believe what they are told, explicitly and implicitly, they behave in ways that fulfil the prophecies the system makes about them and about that world. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole a patina of consent, and weavign complicity into everyone's life story. The First Year Experience: A surprisingly large number of law students go into law school with the notion that being a lawyer means something more, something more socially constructive than just doing a highly respectable job. The role of service through law, carried out with superb technical competence and also with a deep belief that in essence, law is a progressive force. People think of law school as extremely competitive, as a place where a tough, hardworking, smart style is cultivated and rewarded. Social mobility - law school is an advance in terms of the family history. It is rare for parents to disapprove of their children going to law school. The teachers are overwhelmingly white, male, and deadeningly straight and middle class in manner. The classroom is hierarchical with a vengeance, culturally reactionary, but it is also engaging. It quickly emerges that neither the students nor the faculty are as homogenous as they at first appeared. There is an intellectual experience that somehow corresponds to the emotional one: the gradual revelation that there is no purchase for left or even for committed liberal thinking on any part of the smooth surface of legal education. The actual intellectual content of the law seems to consist of learning rules. The choice is to develop some calluses and hit the books, or admit failure almost before you've begun. The Ideological Content of Legal Education: Law schools teach rather rudimentary, essentially instrumental skills in a way that almost completely mystifies them for almost all law students. Students don't know when they are learning and when they aren't, and have no way of improving or even understanding their own learning processes. The law schools teach skills in isolation from actual lawyering experience. "Legal reasoning" is sharply distinguished from law practice, and one learns nothing about practice. The intellectual core of the ideology is the distinction between law and policy. The curriculum as a whole is not really a random assortment of tubs on their own - there are contracts, torts, property, criminal law and civil procedure. Teachers teach students that limited interference with the market makes sense, and is as authoritatively grounded in statutes as the ground rules of laissezfaire are grounded in natural law. Everything taught, except the formal rules themselves and the argumentative techniques for manipulating them, is policy and nothing more. These errors have a bias in favour of the center liberal program of limited reform of the market economy and pro forma gestures towards racial and

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