Osler's Razor

One of the blogs I check every day is UT law prof Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, which offers an intriguing melange of commentary and news about what is going on at various schools, including lateral moves by professors. In a recent post, he commented on some hyperbole by Michigan's PR department about that law school being the "International center for interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship." Certainly, every school has, at one time or another, engaged in similar puffery. My favorite Baylor claim (now removed from the web site) was that Baylor turned out "crack lawyers." As someone who has spent considerable time in the last year as a crack lawyer, I thought that was great, but others disagree.

At any rate, interdisciplinary study is on my mind, as I have just finished up a week in criminal practice class teaching negotiation with business prof. and negotiation expert Blaine McCormick. As always, Blaine added inestimably to my own knowledge, and created three great exercises.

However, this practice-based interdisciplinary work is coming at it from the opposite direction from much of the "Law and..." school of interdisciplinary studies. That is, I started with the practical problem, and then drew in expertise from another field. Very often, legal interdisciplinary studies start with the other field, through the person of an expert in that field or a theory, then apply those concepts to law. In some cases, this is a natural. For example, law and philosophy have long been intertwined, something ingrained in me by reading Aristotle's On Rhetoric every year. I regret that I never took a legal philosophy class, in the same way that I wish I had taken Practice Court before becoming a lawyer-- both would have informed my career, albeit in different ways and times.

While Baylor certainly will always be a practical-knowledge-oriented school, we have a lot to learn from those with a broader focus. One of the breakthroughs in interdisciplinary study was the hiring of Stan Wheeler as a prof. at Yale Law in the 60's, and as I reflected upon earlier, he was one of the great influences on me. This was true, yes, even as I worked as a civil and criminal trial lawyer. There is no such thing as too much knowledge, and considering topics broadly need not be done at the expense of the particular.