… asks Algernon, in The Importance of Being Earnest; and it is a question a number of law professors have been posing lately about law students, whose duty is to set us (law profs, that is) a good example by paying $50,000 and up (plus living expenses) a year for law school, and then being unemployed or taking a public interest job that may pay close to nothing.

As you probably know, law jobs are collapsing in this country, largely due to far too many law school graduates constantly being added to the job-seeking pool. Some schools are looking for ways to respond to this problem. Others are not.

In response to this New York Times opinion piece, written by two law school professors who basically deny the problem, Paul Campos first debunks their optimistic statistics, and then remarks:

The most nauseating aspect of …this [op-ed] is the gelatinous patina of sanctimony the authors slather onto their exercise in profoundly anti-intellectual — if “intellectual” is taken to mean “minimally honest” — hucksterism. “Legal education is still an excellent choice for those committed to serving others in a rewarding career,” they primly observe. Yes, it’s certainly been an excellent choice for them. Let’s take a moment to contemplate how well these public-spirited scholars are doing for themselves by “serving others.”

The first person Chemerinsky hired onto the UC-Irvine faculty when he got this self-abnegating enterprise rolling five years ago [Erwin Chemirinsky, notes Campos, is dean of a brand new law school that, “in a hyper-saturated legal employment market,” [charges] $47,300 in resident and $53,900 in non-resident annual tuition.] was his wife. In 2012 this dynamic academic duo pulled down a combined salary of $597,000 from the University of California’s perpetually cash-strapped system.

Meanwhile [the co-author of the NYT piece] took home a salary of $320,000, so it’s safe to say a career in public service is working out OK for her as well.

Obviously there’s plentiful comic territory here for those who enjoy either Wildean languidity about class privilege or straightforward Tartuffian riffs on hypocrisy (if you haven’t read Brian Tamanaha’s hilarious classic on this subject, do so).

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Add to Chemerinsky’s hearty assurance that all is well the rage of University of Oregon professor Robert Illig at the possibility that he and his colleagues in the law school might not get raises this year. The blog UO Matters quotes from two emails Illig sent to the faculty in which he worries about the possibility that the dean of the school (this might be a faculty proposal rather than something from the dean; it’s not clear at the moment) might take away raises and invest them instead in enhancing job prospects for recent graduates.

I feel that having given up the chance at a seven-figure annual income [for a six-figure one] is charity enough for the students.

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Campos wonders if Illig’s thing is “an elaborate parody.”

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More information on the faculty resolution.

… the dean of the recently opened, totally unnecessary, school of law at the University of California Irvine.

In response to the terrible crisis in that state’s public system, Erwin Chemerinsky warns darkly against

freezing or decreasing executive and faculty salaries. If the University of California is going to retain and attract high-level faculty, it must pay the same as comparable schools across the country. Over the last few weeks, I have negotiated salaries with superb professors we are attempting to recruit who are currently teaching at Harvard, Northwestern and Yale. The University of California must match their current salaries or they will not come. As much as I love living in Southern California, I could not have afforded to leave Duke University if it meant taking a substantial pay cut.

Well, let’s get to it. How much do you make? How much do your law school colleagues make? How much do they teach? How many of your graduates get jobs as lawyers (the Irvine school opened despite the fact that California has a glut of lawyers, and large numbers of unemployed law school grads)? And, uh, didn’t you tell me, when justifying your unjustifiable new school, that your faculty would be all about turning out public interest lawyers? So… hard-nosed, hyper-capitalist, private sector salaries for our faculty, but of course! And crappy non-profit positions for our idealistic students.

I mean, I ask how much you make because you say you couldn’t afford to live in California unless you earned what you earn. What do you earn?

Let’s say at Duke you earned $300,000. Are you saying that you couldn’t afford to live on less than that?

Remember the University of Chicago’s Todd Henderson. And he teaches at a private school…

Vous savez… UD‘s father, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, made a lower salary than he would have in the private sector; but he didn’t seem to mind, because he thought public service was a high calling. What happened to that whole thing?

Listen to Kristin Luker, Chemerinsky. She’s a colleague of yours at Berkeley.

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UPDATE: From the comments at TaxProf blog:

Going from US News rankings, at the top [of California’s universities] are Stanford and CalTech– both are private and so from the state’s point of view are cheap/free (never mind federal research dollars for a second). Then we get to the state university system: UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara.

Then, after all these schools, you finally get to UC Irvine. I can see the rationale for their flagship schools (and even having more than one flagship given the size of California). I can see the argument for a strong set of second-tier institutions, too.

Can anyone explain why Irvine, ranked ninth in the whole wide state, is recruiting from Harvard, Northwestern and Yale? Just what is Chemerinsky saying here? By his own argument, being world-class is expensive, and so from a return-on-taxpayer-investment perspective, Irvine shouldn’t be frozen, they should be gutted to keep the top California universities on top.

Chemerinsky is arguing against freezing or cutting the law school. What he should be defending is the law school’s existence in the first place.

In the aftermath of an organized shout-down of a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador, UC Irvine’s Erwin Chemerinsky clarifies the way free speech works:

The government, including public universities, always can impose time, place and manner restrictions on speech. A person who comes into my classroom and shouts so that I cannot teach surely can be punished without offending the 1st Amendment. Likewise, those who yelled to keep the ambassador from being heard were not engaged in constitutionally protected behavior.

Freedom of speech, on campuses and elsewhere, is rendered meaningless if speakers can be shouted down by those who disagree. The law is well established that the government can act to prevent a heckler’s veto — to prevent the reaction of the audience from silencing the speaker. There is simply no 1st Amendment right to go into an auditorium and prevent a speaker from being heard, no matter who the speaker is or how strongly one disagrees with his or her message.

UD‘s already posted on the absurd over-production of lawyers in this country, a fact overlooked for so long by law schools that now even the most elite boast plenty of unemployed graduates.

That hasn’t stopped any number of new law schools from opening their doors in the last few years, and UCLA professor and blogger Stephen Bainbridge proposes one particular demolition as part of a solution:

In 2006, California did not need a fifth public law school. We certainly didn’t need one in Irvine, when much of the growth in UC admissions is in places like Riverside.

Today, with state revenues having plummeted faster and further than Regent Montoya might have expected, we simply can’t afford Irvine’s law school. Odds are, with the California economy doing even worse than the nation as a whole, we have even less need for extra lawyers than we did when the [California Postsecondary Education] Commission rejected the Irvine proposal back in 2006.

I’m firmly convinced that UC Berkeley and UCLA will come out of the current troubles in excellent shape. We have great alumni whose support continues to grow despite the economy.

But I see no reason for the state to spend a dime on Irvine. Kill it now and put the money to better use, such as helping reverse some of the cuts to undergraduate education.

UD wrote the same thing a week before Bainbridge did:

UD’s angle on the new Irvine law school has nothing to do with whether its liberal dean can get a balanced faculty. UD wonders why America’s opening another law school. You want a debacle, look at the number of lawyers in this country. Many of the new graduates among them can’t find jobs. Harvard alone, which each week seems to add about ten new faculty to its law school, could train most of the nation’s attorneys.

How in the hell does this new law school justify itself?

I know a rich guy gave Irvine twenty million because he wanted the school to do this. But, you know, you’re not supposed to just lie there and do what rich people tell you. Rich people can be eccentric. This one likes the prospect of lots of unemployed California attorneys. Your university doesn’t have to agree with him, even if he’s waving money at you.