Dr. Seuss, the Layer Cake, and Brian Leiter

I’m going to go against my own conclusion for a moment, as I think at least one more thing needs to be said about the on-going self-immolation of Brian Leiter before moving on.

When contemplating the antics of Brian Leiter and others of his ilk, I’m reminded of the pre-Bond Daniel Craig, British-gangster movie, Layer Cake.  The central theme of the movie?  Small-time gangsters are under the mid-level gangsters.  The mid-levels are under the big-time gangsters.  Just when you think you have risen to the “top”…surprise…it’s all just another level of control.  Daniel Craig’s “Mr. X,” thinking he is hot stuff, gets humbled by Michael Gambon’s international crime boss character.  And so on.

The “Leiters” of the world think they have risen high in the layer cake by being better than everyone else.  They don’t come from silver-spooned families, no sir.  They are all self-made strivers.  They “worked hard.”  Were “the best.”  Rose to “the top.”  Are “experts.”  And you should bow and scrape and listen.

But the truth of the matter?  At the end of the day, there is always someone above them, and it irritates like the proverbial pea in the mattress.  Someone with a better background.  Someone with better credentials.  Someone who has more-impressive accolades but who had an “easier time” and “better connections.”

You see, you think you’ve risen high - but you actually haven’t risen much at all in the grand scheme.  Your paymasters are still far above you.  The major players are further above you yet.  You think you are playing the game as an equal, but they just laugh at you from higher on the stack.  Yet, there are those, even higher, laughing at them.

How to respond to this implicit unfairness?  Defend your turf.  Look down on others.  Try to destroy the careers of the “insolent”.  Write more know-it-all papers.  Do more seminars.  Obtain more credentials.  Engage in name-calling.  More puffery!  More cowbell!  In short, more of the very same hamster-wheel behavior you’ve been engaging in your whole life.

The Leiters are the “Yertle the Turtles” of the legal academic world.  Rather than recognizing that “we’re all in this together”, or having compassion and sympathy for those less fortunate (say, struggling lawyers/law grads), the response is “Hah!  This makes me higher on the stack!”  Rather than engaging in productive discourse with those whom one disagrees, it is cheap shots, laughing dismissals and attempts to out the other party while hiding behind tenure (“Hah!  I’m the King, and you’re just a turtle named Mack!”).  When critics such as Professor Campos decide to move on to other endeavors, there is attempted dancing on graves.  (“Look how far I can see!  No one is higher than me!”)

The fact of the matter is that when you base everything on Posnerian measurements of value, 19^th century philosophy, and good old-fashioned middle-class striving, everything becomes a competition.  A battle.  A zero-sum game.  And those higher in the layer cake laugh at you for playing into their hands.

Instead of recognizing this core truth, you become someone who takes offense at perceived slights and satisfaction in the misery of others lower down the stack.  A veritable Ebenezer Scrooge of legal academia.  A class-conscious defender of the status quo, which (you think) enriches you while starving many, many others.  It is no wonder that the Leiters seize upon the “defeat” of Campos, who had the temerity to criticize the system.  Campos’ “95 Theses” were not (could not be) well-received by Leiter’s “Leo X”.  It’s what happens when you challenge a worldview.

The only response to Leiter is to take his actions and comments in the spirit in which they are given - which is to say, dismissed as the petty ravings of a “career-striver”.  In Leiter’s World, the pain of the layer cake flows downhill in gleeful abandon, and the solution is to make sure that others get mired in as much Oobleck as possible – that way, at least you are less-mired than all of “them”.  A world where you are a self-righteous, reputation-smearing participant in the problem, not the solution.

Best to give Leiter a wide berth and not engage him, as he bases his worth on controversy and status and “argument”.  We have to expect these responses from the anti-scam establishment, as the very nature of the scam movement hits too close to home.  Nothing productive comes from engaging the Leiters, as they have already overplayed their hand.  The best way to respond is to give no forum.  To ignore.  When you’ve based everything in your career on “listen to me, look at me, I’m the expert, I’m the best,” being slowly relegated to the dust bin is death by a thousand cuts.  If anything productive is to ultimately happen, it will be through engagement of the likes of Campos, as it is only those who are even open to constructive criticism in the first place.  People who, I believe, recognize how the layer cake works and their position within it.

In closing, one expects a certain amount of poor social behavior from five-year-olds.  Not so much from a grown man, who presumably has had ample opportunity to mature.    The fact that academia gives the Leiters of the world individual purchase and free-reign is yet another indictment against the law school scam and its so-called “value”.