The Law School Scam is Like a Highway to Dreamland: An annotated fictional tribute to Law Prof. Nancy Leong's scholarshit article: "The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream," 64 Fla L.Rev. 305 (2012).

Nancy Leong, JD 2006, is a Professor of Law at the University of Denver School of Law, where she teaches Criminal Procedure, in spite of having zero background as a criminal law practitioner and near-zero experience in legal practice of any sort. Last year, Leong stunned the criminal bar with her watershed law review article: "The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream," 64 Fla L.Rev. 305 (2012), asserting, in 48 closely reasoned pages, that caselaw analyzing the constitutionality of traffic stops is boring compared to movies and songs that reflect the "American dream" via an open road motif.

http://www.floridalawreview.com/2012/nancy-leong-the-open-road-and-the-traffic-stop-narratives-and-counter-narratives-of-the-american-dream/

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Scene: A dorm room or an off-campus apartment. Snowflake and Lemming, two procrastinating and stoned-out-of-their-minds 1Ls of a particularly stupid and egotistical variety are pondering the boringness of the law and what it all means.

Snowflake: Dude, reading this caselaw is, like, sooooooo boring. [1]

Lemming: Yeah, I would much rather, you know, watch movies. [2]

Snowflake: What kind of movies?

Lemming: I don’t know. Maybe Zombieland. [3]

Snowflake: That is exactly what I am saying. Caselaw is boring. [4] Compared to movies like Zombieland or The Good Girl. [5] You watch those movies, you groove on the transcendent motif of the open road. But you read caselaw and all you get is a bunch of old judges writing mundane stuff about some traffic stop. [6] Road movies are enjoyable, but Fourth Amendment caselaw is dull. Just like how the open road is cool, but traffic stops are a drag. [7]

Lemming: The Good Girl? Dude, that was a chick flick.

Snowflake: I found it very touching. Not just movies. I’d rather listen to songs by musicians such as Jon Bon Jovi, [8] Springsteen, LL Cool J, and Ice Cube. Music makes me dream extravagant dreams. [9] Dreams about the American dream. [10]

Lemming: What we just said, I think it is very insightful.

Snowflake: Yeah. They should pay us to teach law, not charge us to study it. We could, you know, write down what we just said and they could publish it in a law review or something. Our insights. They are scholarly. Doing scholarship is why law professors make all that money. [11] Also, it is what makes them such great teachers. [12] Of course, we would have to make our article sound, you know, professorial or something.

Lemming (giggling): Pompously professorial.

Snowflake: Yeah, we would have to use words like "narrative" and "counternarrative."

Lemming: How many times would we say "narrative"?

Snowflake (thinking grandly, the psychoactive effects of the drug really kicking in): I bet we could use the word "narrative" 164 times in a single 48 page article! [13] And, of course, we couldn’t just say that caselaw is boring, we would have to refer to it as "sterile texts,"" "that dry medium," "banal," "narrow," "mundane," "focused on minutiae," "a rude awakening from the sweet American dream" "no poetry in these narratives," "notable for [its] depressing sameness," "stark," "a dystopian counter-narrative to the joyous parable of the open road," "a sober counter-narrative to the alluring saga of the open road," and "read[s] like the documentation of an audit." [14]

And let’s refer to movies and songs featuring the open road as "iconic cultural texts" and "our most exalted cultural texts" and "fables of freedom" and "joyful liberated narrative[s] and "alluring saga[s]" at the "heart of the American dream," occupying "a revered place in our collective imagination," and conveying "cultural meaning. . .etched into our deepest consciousness"--a "soundtrack for our obsession with the road," "standing for the "possibility of possibility itself." [15] Also our readers will appreciate it if we use Jack Kerouac to ask some ironically rhetorical question-- you know, like, would he have written On the Road if some cop had pulled him over for an obstructed windshield? [16]

Lemming (sadly): You have to use footnotes in academic writing. Footnotes are a drag.

Snowflake: But we could cite ourselves in the footnotes. You know, cite to what we think of the movie Crash or something.

Lemming: I found it didactic and full of itself.

Snowflake: Then we could say that in a footnote! [17]

Lemming: It will be great to be a law professor. All that money. Plenty of free time to get high.

Snowflake: And they would pay us to present our findings to scholarly conferences. Scholarly conferences in posh seaside resorts in Hawaii, Amelia Island, and Hampton Head. [18]

Lemming: That will be sweet. All that talk about a crisis in legal education is baloney. A JD is surely the open road to the American dream. [19]

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footnotes:

[1] Nancy Leong, "The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream," 64 Fla L.Rev. 305, 328 (2012) ("These dry judicial narratives contrast starkly with the joyful, liberated narrative of the open road that we find in our most exalted cultural texts.")

[2] Open Road at 324-325 ("In addition to the sort of cultural texts in which we find the narrative of the open road, another highly influential chronicle of the traffic stop is the judicial opinion—a cultural text antithetical to our literary and cinematic staples. That dry medium has nothing of the poetry or magic of our best novels and our favorite movies. Rather, the sterile chronology of a typical judicial opinion examining a traffic stop represents a rude awakening from the sweet American dream of the open road.")

[3] Open Road at 314-315 ("Zombieland likewise pays a dark homage to the road’s power to forge human relationships. Set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies, the four remaining humans band together and gradually shed their disagreements, united by their road journey as much as by their determination to survive in the face of a common foe.")

[4] Open Road at 328 ("Judicial narratives that begin with a traffic stop are notable for their depressing sameness. There is no poetry in these narratives. They read like the documentation of an audit.")

[5] Open Road at 313 ("Dreams of escape inevitably involve the road—in a literal sense, almost necessarily so. But the road also becomes an inextricable component of the dream itself. In The Good Girl, Jennifer Aniston’s character Justine. . . agonizes over whether to leave her husband. . . Her decision—already weighing on her emotionally—becomes vividly physical as she waits at a traffic light.")

[6] Open Road at 330 ("This clinical evaluation of the content of the traffic stop effectively punctures the uplifting fantasy of the open road. The symbolism of the road as a route to a better life—one free and unencumbered—dissipates in the face of bickering over whether a host of minutiae means that a police officer saw enough or heard enough or knew enough to establish "reasonable suspicion." The American dream has no time for such details; put another way, someone whose fate hangs on those details has no time to chase the American dream.")

[7] Open Road at 334-335 ("The traffic stop, then, disrupts or simply precludes the close interpersonal bonds that the open road facilitates. By interposing the force of the law, the traffic stop tears at the fragile fabric of human relationships and precludes the deep connection so often found in long road journeys.")

[8] Open Road at 317 ("The road leads to the American dream, and it is the American dream. We may choose to reject the mythology, of course, but the cultural meaning remains etched in our deepest consciousness. The most jaded among us still understands exactly what Jon Bon Jovi means when he proclaims, "My heart is like an open highway.")

[9] Open Road at 346 ("Hip-hop texts communicate the imaginative costs imposed by the traffic stop narrative. One such cost is the lowering of standards for what constitutes a good life: those trapped in the traffic stop narrative lose the ability to dream extravagant dreams that transcend the mundane worries of daily existence.")

[10] Open Road at 349 ("Of course, no one—black, white, or otherwise—can ever truly and fully claim the American dream. The infinite potential represented by the open road is truly both infinite and potential. Indeed, part of its appeal is its intractable status as fantasy.")

[11] See Society of Law Teachers 2012-2013 survey of law faculty salaries, http://www.saltlaw.org/userfiles/SALT%20salary%20survey%202013.pdf Note that the salaries listed exclude health care benefits, retirement benefits, dependents’ tuition benefits, domestic partner benefits, travel funding, book allowance, research assistant funding, and summer research and teaching stipends.

[12] See Nancy Leong's comment on this Workplace Prof Blog thread, at Aug 11, 2012 8:14:41 PM: "It seems obvious to me that scholarship contributes in important ways to the quality of teaching. Scholarship requires us to stay current on cutting edge legal issues. It requires us to remain curious, excited about the material that we teach, and intellectually nimble -- and if we ourselves lack these qualities, we stand very little change of inculcating them in our students. . . .Without that broader frame, our students become narrow-minded legal technicians who never pause to think about the normative implications of what they're doing."

[13] Open Road, passim.

[14] Open Road at 307, 324, 325, 328, 329, 341.

[15] Open Road at 307, 312, 317, 328, 341

[16] See Open Road at 331 ("Did Jack Kerouac pause to count how many air fresheners he had? Was he concerned whether his travel plans might appear "consistent" to the reasonable, objective observer? These questions answer themselves.")

[17] Open Road at 133, n123 ("I feel compelled to mention here that I really did not like Crash. I thought it was didactic and full of itself, and obviously Brokeback Mountain (Alberta Film Entertainment et al. 2005) should have won the Academy Award instead...")

[18] Nancy's CV.

[19] Nancy Leong's slop-- or to use her precious language, her "medley" or mélange" (Open Road at 309)-- uses the phrase "American dream" no less than 50 times. George Carlin used it only once, to better effect, in the following quote: "The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."