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August 31, 2006

Friday Night Law Review Fights

I
was going to post something quasi-lengthy about the head-turningly nasty exchanges between Yale lawprof Jed Rubenfeld and Minnesota lawprof Michael Stokes Paulsen in the most recent issue of the Yale Law Journal, but I see that Paul Horwitz and his commenters already said much of what I planned to say.

In the issue, Paulsen (very) negatively and (quite) snarkily reviews (pdf file) Rubenfeld's new-ish book presenting his (Rubenfeld's) own personal Unified Field Theory of Constitutional Interpretation, and Rubenfeld responds (pdf file), shall we say, ungraciously. The very first sentence of Rubenfeld's response: "I do not know Michael Stokes Paulsen or his writings."

SNAP!

A very intense line -- delivered, it must be assumed, entirely for effect, since it turns out not to be true.

The blogosphere has nothing on academia at its nastiest.

UPDATE: Welcome, visitors from Instapundit. I've been blogging about music most recently; my guest-blogger Shertaugh has been blogging about politics (here, here, and here, too). Make yourselves comfortable!

Posted by Eric at August 31, 2006 7:55 PM

Comments

I have been in academia, and I was appalled at how petty and vicious the politics are. Someone once explained to me that the politics in academia are so nasty because the stakes are so low.

Posted by: Major K at September 1, 2006 3:15 AM

It's not just that the stakes are so low, but that the egos are so huge as well.

Posted by: Tom Ault at September 1, 2006 9:09 AM

Having just read Paulsen's article and Rubenfeld's response, my take is that Paulsen's was extraordinarily obnoxious (as well as demonstrably wrong in at least the ways that Rubenfeld noted in his reply) and he deserved whatever obnoxiousness he got back. (I dealt with Rubenfeld long ago, re his RIght of Privacy article, and found him not difficult to work with.) Sure, law professors do tend to have big egos -- but anybody who writes as Paulsen did, in the first leg of a back-and-forth between people who have no preexisting reason to be nasty to each other, deserves to be taken down several notches.

Posted by: Sam Heldman at September 1, 2006 11:17 AM