Jotwell

“What’s in a name?”: Titles and Entitlement in the Legal Academy

Jan 3, 2023 Carole SilverLegal Profession

Rachel López, Unentitled: The Power of Designation in the Legal Academy, 73 Rutgers L. Rev. 923 (2021).

Juliet’s soliloquy notwithstanding, how naming happens and what you’re called matters in the legal academy. In Unentitled: The Power of Designation in the Legal Academy, Rachel López illuminates the ways in which faculty titles and their corresponding categories function as drivers of inequality – an inequality that is difficult to discern because it is presented as justifiable, enmeshed within a seemingly merit-based difference that in turn is framed by the regime of tenure. Titles reflect and create difference: they function as proxies for the hierarchy inherent in the world of legal academia, and at the same time structure expectations, interactions and opportunities while signaling status. Nevertheless, these same titles are at odds with the commonalities that increasingly cut across faculty categories, and they mask the impact of different policies and perceptions that fall particularly heavily on women of color, and women generally. (P. 924.) To address these effects, López offers several concrete suggestions for law schools pursuing an anti-racist agenda.

López’s positionality matters in making this case: she is a boundary crosser, having begun her career in a non-tenure clinical role and then purposefully moving into a tenure-line role, where, among other things, she has continued her involvement with clinical legal education through teaching and administration. This history of crossing categories enables her to perceive the “problem of academic exceptionalism in the legal academy—hierarchy and exclusion are others’ problems, not our own.” (P. 925.) The orientation in the legal academy towards preserving the power and centrality of tenure-line faculty, which extends from governance to resource allocation, can be blinding to those within the system who may not perceive inequalities embedded both in the functional differences attributed to particular faculty roles and in the notion of merit that is seen as the foundation of these categories. Continue reading "“What’s in a name?”: Titles and Entitlement in the Legal Academy"

The Economic Style

Jan 2, 2023 Kunal ParkerLegal History

Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy (2022).

Kunal Parker

Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy is a very smart book that deserves a wide audience. The book explores the rise to prominence of an economic “style of reasoning” in U.S. policymaking in the post-World War II decades. Between 1950 and 1980, Popp Berman shows, this style pervaded realm after realm of policymaking, from social welfare programs to the regulation of markets to the management of the environment.

The chief institutionalizers of the economic style of reasoning were not neoliberals or libertarians (these would become truly prominent in government only after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980). Instead, they were Democrat-appointed economists and the bureaucrats they worked with and influenced. Albeit not ideologically opposed either to social programs or to market intervention, these economists and bureaucrats insisted that social goals be met as efficiently as possible and that market solutions were generally preferable to interventionist ones. Wherever possible, they pushed cost-benefit analyses and reviews within administrative agencies, urged the dismantling of early-twentieth-century market controls, and sought to achieve ends by creating markets for entitlements rather than by imposing standards by fiat. In all this, they shared much with those further to their right. Continue reading "The Economic Style"