The Quality of Law Schools





A recent post raised questions about what it takes to be an education professor in the US. However, a recent exchange in The Chronicle of Higher Education makes one wonder whether faculties of law are much better.

Nancy Lemon teaches Law at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of a well known textbook on domestic violence. She has been taken to task by Christina Hoff Sommers of including errors in the textbook.

Lemon’s attempted rebuttal is interesting. Summers takes issue with her claim that a very large proportion of women admitted to hospital emergency rooms were victims of domestic violence. Lemon’s response is to cite figures that show that a large proportion of the women admitted because of violence were victims of domestic violence, apparently not realising that she is moving the argumentative goalposts quite a lot. Lemon also insists that March of Dimes, a well known charitable organization, had sponsored a study that showed that battered women were more likely to have miscarriages when in fact the organisation’s involvement was peripheral.

Lemon’s worst error was her solemn claim that the traditional chroniclers of Rome were totally accurate and that Romulus, when not busy being suckled by a wolf and watching birds, had promulgated a misogynist law allowing men to beat their wives, which "continued into England" It is bad enough that Lemon is totally credulous about traditional historians but that she has apparently never heard of the Anglo-Saxon conquest that removed Roman law from England and prevented any transmission into common law is remarkable.