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Sunday, December 04, 2005

Intellectual Diversity
at Harvard Law




Worthwhile article in the New York Observer about Harvard Law School’s recent “barrage of additions to the faculty — among them prominent conservative scholars.”


For a seemingly interminable stretch from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, Harvard Law was emblematic of academic ideological warfare, its infighting aired like dirty laundry in Eleanor Kerlow’s 1994 book, Poisoned Ivy, its campus derided in a 1993 article in GQ as “Beirut on the Charles.”

Members of Harvard’s Critical Legal Studies school attacked the traditionalists, arguing that their approach perpetuated a ruling class in America. The traditionalists struck back, led by Ms. Kagan’s predecessor, Robert Clark. In 1985, at a debate before alumni in New York, Mr. Clark charged that the C.L.S. adherents were engaging in “a ritual slaying of the elders.”



Now, the writer reports, there’s more intellectual diversity and less bloodshed at the school.