Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week I'm chatting with former Creighton law professors Nicholas Mirkay and Palma Joy Strand about their new article recounting the struggles they faced as campus reformers, and why the legal academy is so resistant to change. Next up is a look at how University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum is using a $1 million prize to foster cross-political discourse at the school. Finally, Georgetown University Law Center has hired a computer scientist without a J.D. for a tenure-track position—a first for a U.S. law school—and the new professor is an expert code cracker to boot. 

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ

When Disruption Goes Bad on Campus

“Innovation” and “disruption” are terms that get thrown around the legal academy more and more these days, but what happens when so-called disrupters run headlong into traditionalists who think the status quo is pretty darn good?

Faculty clashes are nothing new, but rarely do they get a public airing in the form of a law review article. Enter “Disruptive Leadership in Legal Education,” an article posted to SSRN this month by Nicholas Mirkay, a professor at the University of Hawaii William S. Richardson School of Law, and Palma Joy Strand, a professor in Creighton University's Department of Interdisciplinary Studies. 

Mirkay and Strand employ their unsuccessful effort to push for change at Creighton's law school as the backdrop for a wider inquiry into why transformative change is difficult to achieve within the legal academy. Without wading too far into the weeds of the Creighton clash, the basic outline—as told by the authors—is as follows: Mirkay and Strand, along with former dean Paul McGreal, were among a faction of the faculty who, starting around 2014, wanted to update the curriculum with more interdisciplinary offerings, embrace assessments of the J.D. program, and use data to make decisions. But an organized faction of more senior faculty opposed them at every turn, they say. The situation devolved to a point where an independent consultant hired by the university concluded that the atmosphere around the law school was “toxic.” McGreal was pushed out of the dean's office, their article asserts. Mirkay left for a new job at the Hawaii and Strand was moved out of the law school. In short, the so-called reformers lost.

I caught up with Mirkay and Strand last week to get a better sense of why they wrote article. They've already paid a professional price for what turned out their Battle of Waterloo and I wanted to know the reasoning behind airing the dirty laundry in a formal way. (The local press has already reported on the results of the university's investigation, so the law school brouhaha was not entirely under the radar.)

They told me that they wrote the article to better understand and process what had actually happened at Creighton, and pinpoint why their efforts failed. In doing that, they came away with a better sense of the larger challenges reformers face within the academy. And they've heard from plenty other law professors who have faced similar barriers when advocating for change, they said, leading them to conclude that resistance to reform is a universal problem.

“That's one of the reasons we thought the article should be written,” Mirkay told me. “There are so many people who shared our experience—maybe to a different degree—but this is something everyone talks about. But they don't really discuss it in the form of the written word. The article became bigger than us.”

(A spokeswoman for Creighton did not respond to a request for comment on Mirkay and Strand's article.)

So what are those systemic barriers to change within the legal academy, as identified by Strand and Mirkay? Here are the biggies:

➤➤The American Bar Association. Mirkay and Strand aren't the first to point the finger at the ABA's monopoly over law school accreditation, but they conclude it standards are stifling innovation.

➤➤The cozy relationship between law schools and central administrations. Law schools, until recently, have been reliable money generators for universities, thus university presidents and the like are wont to fall back on tradition, take a hands-off management approach, and try hard not to rile up entrenched—potentially litigious—law professors. 

➤➤Tenure. “Academic tenure, intended to protect and encourage open discourse, has the additional effect of protecting entrenched faculty and perpetuating institutional inertia,” Strand and Mirkay wrote. University leadership can use tenure as an excuse to ignore bullying among faculty, they argue.

➤➤Academic freedom. Along the same vein as tenure, professors use the preservation of academic freedom to dismiss unprofessional behavior, and challenge efforts to monitor academic quality.

“The casualties of law schools hanging on to the familiar are the students—the very people an educational institution exists to serve,” the article reads. “Is it ethical for law schools to mindlessly continue to train students for a profession that is shifting under everyone's feet?”

My thoughts: I recommend taking a look at the full article. It's a quick and easy read, and I think it raises some important questions that legal academics should consider. Of course, I'm sure we'd get a completely different take had it been penned by one of faculty members on the other side of the Creighton debate. But I too have been underwhelmed by many of the supposedly “innovative” developments at law schools. There is most certainly room to go further.

A Law Professor Pays it Forward

Here's cool development out of the University of Chicago Law School. Superstar law professor and philosopher Martha Nussbaum was awarded the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture. The award is given each fall to someone whose ideas “shape the world,” and comes with a $1 million prize. Not too shabby!

Now comes word that Nussbaum is using the prize money to support roundtable discussions at the law school on “challenging” and “polarizing” issues. Those roundtables will now be known as the Martha C. Nussbaum Student Roundtables.

The idea behind the roundtables is to get around the political polarization of the student body and how students of different political persuasions often don't interact, Nussbaum said in an article on the school's website.

“Because polarization affects class selection, it is difficult to address the problem even in a class designed to do just that,” she said. “But a noontime roundtable represents a small investment of time, and can entice students with divergent viewpoints to come together in the presence of two contrasting faculty members to confront a political or social issue.”

Here's the format: Two law professors pick a hot-button topic. (Previous topics include immigration, bail reform and government regulation of the Internet.) Students are invited to discuss the topic over lunch, with the professors guiding the conversation. They're limited to a dozen students, and seats have been a hot commodity thus far. Nussbaum herself has led several roundtables focused on the #MeToo movement and religious exemptions. She's planning another one on transgender bathroom issues.

“I was both impressed and moved by the seriousness, civility and acuteness of the students, their capacity to listen, and their willingness to seek consensus,” Nussbaum said. “So I decided to use my gift to underwrite that program going forward.”

A Code-Cracker Joins the Law Faculty

There's a headline I never expected to write. I mean, interdisciplinary hires are all the rage at law schools, but cryptology seems like a stretch. Yet here we are.

Georgetown University Law Center this month announced its hiring of Matt Blaze, who had been a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania since 2004. Blaze has a joint appointment at the law school and Georgetown's computer science department.

Here's what makes the hire particularly notable: Georgetown says Blaze is the first computer scientist without a law degree to teach in a tenured or tenure-track position at a U.S. law school. Georgetown Law has a strong law and technology focus, and Blaze will teach courses on surveillance technology and electronic voting technology.

“Technology affects all aspects of legal practice today, and students will benefit from his expertise,” Georgetown law dean William Treanor said of Blaze. “Lawyers need to be conversant with technology, whether through coding, creating apps for legal nonprofits, addressing the problems caused by cybercrime, solving issues relating to consumer privacy or understanding a software patent.”

Blaze is also a one of the world's leading cryptographers, per Georgetown. (I'll save you the time it takes to Google cryptography, which means code cracking.) Alas, I never got Blaze on the phone to discuss his move to Georgetown, but based on this article alone, he seems like a pretty interesting guy. Kudos to Georgetown for thinking outside the box on this one. Maybe they've cracked the code of legal education's future. (Sorry).

Extra Credit Reading

The American Bar Association's House of Delegates once again voted down a proposal to strengthen the bar pass standard for law schools.

Law graduates who registered for the February bar exam in DC are in limbo, awaiting word on whether the test will take place as planned amid the government shutdown.

Proskauer and Skadden are launching new initiatives to recruit women and minority law students, in hopes of improving diversity in their lawyer ranks.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]