Osler's Razor

The University of California at Irvine, an academically distinguished and fast-growing part of the UC system, recently announced that they were going to start a law school. This was an intriguing development in several ways: First, it was the first such high-profile institution to start a law school from scratch in several years. Second, it serves Orange County, an important economic engine for Southern California and the west which already had a law school (at Chapman University). Third, the school faced the task of building a faculty and reputation from scratch.

In accomplishing this last task, UC-Irvine made a bold stroke: They hired Erwin Chemerinsky, one of America's top scholars of the Constitution, as dean. To someone like me, that gave them instant credibility, and I was interested to hear what would happen next.

What happened next was that they fired Chemerinsky before he had a chance to start. Rumor has it that the firing was due to pressure from conservative donors who were opposed to Chemerinsky's liberal politics.

The response from both conservatives and others was uniform in condemning this reversal. To their credit, conservatives held firm to the principle that the presence of ideology should not be equated with a lack of merit, something that had been proven already by the fine job Ken Starr has done as Dean at Pepperdine. Finally, after that outcry, the University has doubled back again and rehired Chemerinsky.

I hope it sticks this time. A few years ago, I had to honor of speaking at Valparaiso Law School; the speaker preceding me was Dean Chemerinsky. He spoke for an hour, without notes, on the tension between fighting terror and the Fourth Amendment, and was brilliant. Following him was a real challenge, and I didn't help myself much by beginning my talk by saying that whenever I wore a wireless mic, it made me want to play air guitar. (Valpo's Law Review to publish the discussion verbatim, and they only took out the air guitar reference after I begged).