Riesman on: Types of law students, Law schools and sociology

The following observations were made by David Riesman, Henry Ford Professor of Social sciences at Harvard, in the course of a much longer speech which he made at the Harvard Law School Sesquicentennial.

Arousing a good deal of controversy, Riesman said that the Law School tends to attract the "uncommitted student" who sees a degree in law as a good beginning for any one of a wide spectrum of careers. The Law Schools also attract activist students who are apt to place a good deal of pressure on the Administration to liberalize the curriculum.

Born in 1919 in Philadelphia, Pa., Riesman received his A.B. and LL.B. at Harvard in 1931 and 1934 respectively. Lawyer, educator, Social Scientist, Riesman served as Law Clerk to Mr. Justice Brandeis in 1935-36 before he became a professor of Law at the University of Buffalo the following year. Riesman has been at Harvard since 1958.

Always available to undergraduates at Harvard, Riesman is the author of The Lonely Crowd: A Study of Changing American Character and Abundance for What: and Other Essays.

THEY are looking for a career in which they can express themselves, in which options will be left open. Law may then become what Edward Levi has termed it, namely a career for the uncommitted. There was a time, not entirely vanished, when some students of this outlook did graduate work in philosophy as a kind of generalized liberal art, but philosophy has almost everywhere become more specialized, more intramural; such students have sometimes tended to move into anthropology or sociology or political science, and they still do. But these social science fields suffer in many graduate schools from excessive professionalization and the piling up of requirements only obliquely related to what drew the student to the field in the first place. Undergraduates who study at major universities have the opportunity to become disillusioned about the academic life as well as attracted to it.

They may come to regard professors as the new entrepreneurs, operating in the expanding, so-called non-profit scetors of society, using their students as hired hands to extend their colonial reach.

That small number of these seekers who, thanks to the draft and to affluence combined, end up in the major national law schools, provide an interestingly troubled minority, inchoate, restless, and dissatisfied. A law degree will provide at least a moratorum, at best a new sense of purpose. The competitive atmosphere of the first year, at Yale as well as at Harvard, may turn some of these students off. In rejecting the quest for riches and even for economic security, this small strang of students I am describing may underestimate how much money it takes to live in the modest way they would like to, even to keep up their record collections. Such a student, when he emerges with an LL.B., may feel that he has a kind of certificate that commits him to nothing in particular, provides him with a modicum of career insurance, and the far more important commodity of career assurance.

I want to turn now to another minority strand in the student body at the major law schools, namely, those who see the law as a way to serve society and perhaps even to change it. These young people, usually but not invariably from privileged backgrounds, seek careers which will call on their generosity more than their greed, their curiosity more than their memory, their wish to extend themselves rather than their wish for security. They hope that a law degree will open the possibility of an activist career at home or abroad. This is one of the reasons why they come to law schools rather than schools of public administration, which they see as helping one move into the bureaucracy rather than out of it. Some students of this outlook are impelled into psychiatry or clinical psychology, or some other form of helping individuals. But it is my impression that the greater concern now is to work with and to help groups, even if the groups have to be organized in order to be helped.

Of course, such an outlook goes back to the New Deal and earlier, but it gained new impetus during and since the Kennedy years. Paradoxically, perhaps, in view of their desire to work with groups, these students share the individualism, not to say anarchism, of the uncommitted law students, and they are sometimes so violently anti-bureaucratic that they cannot endure even the mild constraints and regulation either of the law school or of a government agency; like many talented students today, they suffer from a claustrophobia which resists all constraint, whether of curriculum or language or manners or the compromises of day-to-day legal practice or political life. Believing that feelings count more than facts, intuition more than ideas, some of these students move into a neighborhood law office or legal defender's office--frequently to discover what Peace Corps Volunteers and VISTA workers also have found, namely, that to help people is not the easiest thing in the world, but one of the most difficult, and that poor people of whatever race are especially suspicious and are often dishonest. Some of these students whose commitment to justice and to social change is not immoderate may conclude that the problems of the rich are after all more interesting as well as more rewarding than those of the poor.

The Enclave

However, it is these service-minded students, along with the intellectual searchers, who put pressure on their law schools to open up the curriculum even more rapidly than their faculties already have done. For these students, law tends to be equated with legalism, and bookishness with dehydration; the slogan about "law in action" may for them signify action more than law.

The service-oriented among these students, and perhaps some of the free-wheeling intellectuals also, might be less dissatisfied if the law schools could do even more than they presently do to offer a degree in applied social science for those who want to understand and to change institutions. The major law schools offer a home to a number of faculty members with a reformist bent, who see the law as perhaps the principal process for channeling and controlling the fierce and explosive energies of our population. Some of these men have worked on the urban frontier, some on the international frontier, some in civil rights and civil liberties, others in labor or conservation.

Law is Legalism

Unfortunately, law schools still offer their curriculum only to those pursuing the LL.B., even though many recognize that law is too important to be left to the legal profession. No law school offers a Ph.D. program in jurisprudence or the role of law; law students are not educated in a context of para-legal persons but in a quite autonomous enclave.

That relative isolation spares the law professor and the law student from the derogation of applied work that is so ubiquitous in the academic departments of the graduate school. The graduate departments tend to define their problems from within, even though they may get their funds from without, and tend to look down upon students with too direct a moral imperative, as well as too roving an intellectual eye. Thus in principle the law schools could become even more than at present locales for training in applied social science. Both the pressure and the possibility to move in this direction will come, I suggest, in part from that small group of student customers who might welcome an opportunity to assimilate and interpret their experience, and to connect it with, rather than divorce it from, the curriculum.

REMEMBER AGAIN: the law school faculty is principally a teaching faculty rather than one where individual researchers have staked out a particular piece of academic turf to cultivate with the aid of graduate assistants, and jealously to ward off invaders. Thus, at last winter's annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, the published Proceedings give the impression of discussions primarily centered about how to teach a particular subject rather than discussions of research strategy, empirical findings or conceptual elaborations. In contrast, at the sociology meetings in San Francisco at the end of August, among 95 organized sessions there was only one small informal luncheon devoted to the teaching of sociology, and another, very sparsely attended, to innovation in higher education generally.

Of course, law professors do not need these annual meetings to inform each other about the research in which they are engaged. When I last counted them a few years ago, there were 150 law reviews, most of them hungry for literate copy; the law professor has no difficulty finding a professional outlet for his work. And if he does want to immerse himself in a particular social science so completely as to develop a new career, the non-hierarchical nature of a law school means that no one will make this difficult for him.

Yet in the main, the ties between the law schools and the other social sciences have remained fragmentary and at times even frivolous--mere snippets thrown into a collection of cases and materials to show that the professor is au courant.

Let me make clear that I regard this state of affairs as at least as much a reflection of the narrowness of professional social scientists as of any resistance on the side of the law schools--and remember again that I am talking about the major law schools and that small group who hope to become major. Last summer the Denver Law School played host to a summer institute at which several dozen law professors sought to familiarize themselves with sociological methods of inquiry transmitted by three sociologists who have had law school connections. Harvard and Rutgers also and no doubt other places have had seminars on law and the behavioral sciences. But sociologists, to take only my own guild, have only rarely tried to learn anything about the law except that those highly visible but peripheral escarpments which attract laymen generally: courtrooms and trials, criminals and the area of insanity, and constitutional litigation, especially in civil rights and civil liberties.

There are studies, to which I have already referred, of the sociology of the profession: who becomes a lawyer, and what sort of lawyer, and what does this reflect in family backing, undergraduate experience, and law school itself. But the main business of the practicing lawyer is not being touched in terms of his interaciton with corporate or governmental clients whom he helps to make decisions which have rather little to do with formal legal matters, and a fair amount to do with the fact that he is a privileged and trusted, quick and resourceful, semi-outsider.

Nor have we learned what lawyers bring to their careers outside the law: as college presidents and government officials, publishers and movie magnates, presidents of big corporations and founding fathers of the Peace Corps. We know not much more than Tocqueville had already noticed about the role of the lawyer in America, or what this presently means for our combativeness and cooperativeness, suspiciousness and trust, dependency and anarchy. What sociologists and political scientists have written about law and social control has seemed to me thin stuff. Yet it should be evident from what I have said that the law does offer to the academic social scientist one avenue for understanding our society and what makes it different from those like Japan, where go-betweens do the work here done by lawyers, or England, where accountants often do it, and what it is that gives the best law-trained men their easy access to people and problems.