Ten Thousand Cases, Maybe More – An Essay on Centrism in Legal Education

Law school training has a certain centralizing, homogenizing, tendency . . . Centrism pulls to the center, not because the center has any particular content, but because, well . . . it is the center . . . [I]n the American law schools a particular school of jurisprudence has already won out. The triumph of this school of thought is so complete, so pervasive, that it is not even seen as a school of jurisprudence, but as “law,” pure and simple . . . [T]he school that has won out “case law positivism”. . . is an unsteady amalgam of beliefs about law . . . One would think, given the centralizing effects of law school training, that at the center of the discipline of law one would find a solid core. After all, that is one of the enduring images of case law positivism. But paradoxically, this is not the case at all . . . The tacit compact of the law professor and law student is that each will submit to case law positivism . . . because coming face to face with the infirmity of the core is just too damned scary. “Well, yes, but no court would ever consider that.” Anonymous East Coast Law Professor Law school training has a certain centralizing, homogenizing, tendency. This tendency – I will call it centrism – can be seen in the celebration and institution of moderation, reasonableness, good judgment, avoidance of extremes, passive acquiescence, judicial minimalism, the passive virtues, balancing, and the middle of the bell curve. Centrism pulls to the center, not because the center has any particular content, but because, well . . . it is the center. Described in this way, law school centrism exerts influence on any political spectrum one might imagine as being in place (no matter how skewed to the left or the right this spectrum might be). Centrism is not just (nor perhaps even mainly) an ideology. It is not just a constellation of beliefs that are invoked repeatedly as the prisms or templates or frames through which law is described and experienced. Centrism is also a set of practices, institutional norms and behaviors. As such, the effects of centrism are registered not only in the realm of ideological beliefs, but intellectual style, psychological orientation, the presentation of self and so on and so forth. What follows is a brief description of a few related law school training processes that combine in various ways to yield this centralizing and homogenizing effect. Law school training, of course, has