Love in the Time of Scholara, featuring Seton Hall Law Prof. Paula Franzese's latest law review article.

Are you looking for love in all the wrong places? Perhaps you would feel differently if you attended Seton Hall School of Love, I mean School of Law, a second-tier bower of bliss located in lovely Newark, New Jersey, which features such earthly and spiritual delights as a credential allegedly worth a million dollars, human rights law plus tourist fun in Zanzibar, and the nurturance of multiple empathetic pathways to meaning. To wit: Simkovic, safari, and social justice.

Love, it is true, can quickly seize the gentle heart. And not only erotic love (eros) or sacrificial love (agape), but also the intense emotional bond that blossoms between an incoming law student and his or her own self-destructive illusions (atë). This form of love is most passionately celebrated in the moral and intellectual honeymoon that is as Seton Hall Law Prof. Paula Franzese’s first year Property course, specifically via an inspirational event she stages called Loving the Law Day. See Paula Franzese, Law Teaching for the Conceptual Age, 44 Seton Hall L.Rev 967 (2014).

"We provide pathways to meaning when we communicate to our students by words and actions the importance of heeding the call to service and when we help them to find ways to promote the common good. Time and again I remind my classes that the surest way out of our own pain is to help others find ways out of theirs.  Particularly now, when so many are denied access to the law. . . there has never been a more important time for us, the lawyers, to enter the fray. 

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At bottom, the ability to derive meaning from our experiences as lawyers depends in significant measure on whether or not we are willing to believe that our profession is good and noble. I believe that it is, and I communicate that faith unabashedly. I ask my students to consider acting and speaking as if they love the law, and then to watch as their experiences begin to match their level of rhetoric. Teaching with meaning can transmute “the dull details into romance.” To that end, every February, right around Valentine's Day, my first year class celebrates Loving the Law. . . . In anticipation of the day, the group puts together a book of images, quotes, case law excerpts and literary references that hold particular meaning for them, as well as a video montage of inspiring law-related clips from celebrated speeches, oral arguments, films and documentaries that represent the best that lawyers can be. Each student is invited to bring in a guest(s) who has made a difference in that student's life (whether a parent, spouse, partner, dear friend, or mentor) to join us for the celebration, during which we hear from practitioners, judges, policy-makers, upper-class students and faculty on why they have chosen to love the law and how they treat it as if they love it.  The most satisfying part of the experience comes when each class member introduces his or her guest, indicating why that person matters so much. As lawyers, that is part of what I ask my students to do: to remember to see what needs to be seen and to remain anchored in gratitude for the people on whose shoulders they stand. 

History teaches that the principal cause of human suffering is forgetfulness. I want my students to remember where they come from and to call to mind the struggles and sacrifices made by those who came before them, in generations past and in more recent memory. They have been called to this craft to vindicate the hopes and dreams of those ancestors. They are here to use the formidable instrument of the law to be givers of hope and a voice for those who have yet to find their own. As lawyers, they will close the gap between what is and what ought to be."

          Franzese, at 1008, 1011-1012.

"Playin' a fool's game, hopin' to win/ And tellin' those sweet lies. . ." I wish I could be more tolerant of this well-intentioned nonsense, but how can its effect be anything other than to reinforce the hype that lured many naïve kids into six-figure indebtedness in the first place, and all for a chance to compete for scraps in a swamped and disillusioning profession?  

It may be unkind to say, but it does not surprise me that Professor Franzese (from what I could tell) has rather limited experience as a practitioner. Her faculty web page does not include a CV, but according to information on wikipedia and in a biographical squib, she was born in 1960 and became a law professor in 1986, at age 26. That is a very early start to an academic career, and a long time to remain within its well-compensated bubble. 

Contra Franzese, this is a profession for realists and cynics, not gushy idealists seeking to "vindicate the hopes and dreams of [their] ancestors"or be "givers of hope." Our fiduciary duty is to our clients rather than the common good. Moreover, practicing lawyers operate within a very tight set of formal and informal professional requirements and procedural constraints. As well, the truly voiceless usually cannot afford legal services, and private sector lawyers need to attract paying clients so that they can try to pay off their huge student loans, the ones that allow Seton Hall Law to set its tuition at $50,000 a year, thus making Franzese and her tenured colleagues rich. With only the rarest of exceptions, then, the relief that a lawyer obtains for a client, if any, comes from invoking law as is, not law as ought.

I won’t even address the struggles and constraints imposed upon the very substantial number of lawyers who are unable to carve out a place in the profession. (Due to law schools having graduated way too many lawyers for decades, thus making Franzese and her tenured colleagues rich).

Just about everybody in the profession understands these very basic points except self-deluded or scamming law professors. Who, with their six-figure salaries, light workloads, and classroom bully pulpits, can preach to their naive students about the noble goodness achieved through heroic struggle and sacrifice. They can preach love too, though none has yet offered to accept his or her salary in sonnets and red, red roses. Say what you will about Bernie Madoff, but he never pretended to be Victor Frankl or Martin Luther King. Some scam-loving law professors, on the other hand, seem to have a rather inflated sense of themselves as bringers of liberation and enlightenment.