I would love to see Columbia poach all three. Let's hope Dean Schizer can bring them all in as a part of his major faculty hiring initiative.

I went to middle school and high school with Leiter, and his blog personality is no surprise at all. Want his yearbook picture?

Yes.

Boy oh boy, is this post asking for trouble! There's nothing that drives Leiter up the wall more than a post like this. Within a week, expect to see a long post claiming that this site is quasi-fascist or something.

It's probably just a coincidence that Professor Leiter holds the Joseph D. Jamail* Centennial Chair. Probably.

* See also Paramount Communications Inc. v. QVC Network Inc., 637 A.2d 34, 54 (Del. 1994) (discussing Jamail's legendarily abrasive style of advocacy).

Every time a post goes up about Brian Leiter, a bunch of anonymous commenters jump in to trash him. The VC had a post up yesterday just pointing out an article BL wrote, and the post seems to have been taken down within hours... JDM, I don't see anything objectionable about the post, and it certainly doesn't read like an invitation to trash BL.

He knows his stuff, his politics are to the left of everyone I've ever met, and he doesn't pull any punches when he disagrees with other people. Somehow, a lot of people who disagree with his politics seem to think that valuing candor over civility is a horrible crime.

Anonymous,

Is candor calling other law professors dumb? And generally making all sorts of disparaging personal attacks? Me thinks not.

Anon,

So was Leiter picked on mercilessly in middle school and high school? He has the attitude of someone who was...

"Humble" law student,

If he thinks that the other professor actually is dumb, and has evidence of that, sure.

BL explains this "disparaging personal attacks" canard in the first post to which the blog links:

One of the curious discoveries I've made in the blogosphere is that if you call people on their ignorance, bad arguments, and mistakes . . . they object, "Oh, that's a personal attack." If the person is ignorant and mistaken, and there is evidence to that effect, then I suppose it is personal, but certainly not in any sense suggested by the connotations of the phrase "personal attack": it isn't about anyone's physical appearance, or sexual preferences, or taste in clothes, or family. It's about their public ideas and arguments, in some cases public ideas and arguments in professional journals. What I increasingly think frightens some of those on the right who populate the blogosphere--and which explains the viciousness and genuinely personal nature of their attacks on me--is that it is not my custom to give their nonsense the kid's glove treatment to which the generally right-wing public culture has accustomed them.

Bringing up Leiter's grade-school career is a "personal attack." Tearing a law professor a new one over an argument the professor made is not.

Sure, Leiter.

I hate to add to this, because doing so will just feed BL's ego. However, he makes plenty of disparaging personal attacks. See his article in which he lists the 100 most-cited scholars. If you read the footnotes carefully, you'll see that he says something along the lines of "I wouldn't want most of these people on the faculty at Texas." (Yes, I paraphrased). Does anyone think that he actually read all, or any, of the articles of those that he rejected as unsuitable for Texas?

I didn't know if defending him would stem the piling on or encourage it further... last comment from me on this post.

Humbleprof, your guess is as good as mine. I'm guessing that he actually did read the articles these people wrote.

Leiter -- I mean "anonymous" -- the post would be viewed as objectionable by Leiter, because it points out how nasty Leiter is online. Although, now that I put it that way, maybe Leiter would view this as a compliment.

As for your claim that Leiter "knows his stuff" -- No. He certainly knows his stuff as to philosophy, but he hardly ever posts about that, now does he? What he usually posts about is current events, where he doesn't seem to know any more than the latest article that he's read on Zmag or Counterpunch or some other left-wing rag. And even when you'd expect him to have his research well in command, he sometimes makes indefensible statements without knowing his stuff. See the comment thread here for the most recent example (scroll down): http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2006/09/why_this_blog_s.html or

While anyone who quotes Schopenhauer certainly earns a bonus point in my book, there's another quote it seems you would do well to remember:

"We should be much less likely to lose our temper over an insult--which in the strict sense of the word, means we have not been treated with respect--if on the one hand, we had not such an exaggerated estimate of our value and dignity--that is to say, if we were not so immensely proud of ourselves; and on the other hand, if we had arrived at any clear notion of the judgement which, in his heart, one man generally passes upon another."
--Arthur Schopenhauer, "The Wisdom of Life."

Put another way, if you insist on mud wrestling with pigs, don't be surprised when you end up filthy and find the pigs are having a blast at your expense.

Besides, don't you trust that "serious legal scholars" will have enough sense to see when you're being slandered by blog dimwits without your having to go out of your way to refute every single retarded point and make a bunch of gratuitious personal attacks in return? Anyone worth his or her intellectual salt can spot an imbecile in a New York minute. Flapping your gums and foaming at the mouth about them only makes you look like the sucker.

A person only gets so many hours in the day, and when you see an otherwise brilliant mind spending so much time agonizing over the best way to refute mediocre comments that totally don't matter in the overall scheme of things... well, it's just sad.

Now, if you seemed like you were having any fun in your pigwrestling pursuits, it would be different. As it is, you just come across as insecure. If you were really confident in yourself and your ideas, you wouldn't care so much about your reputation and could give the whole damn world the finger and laugh while you were doing it.

As Voltaire said, we're all going to leave this world as foolish and wicked as we found it. Morons will be morons, there's nothing you or I or anyone else can do about it. One man's moron is another man's genius... so the only sensible course of action is to lighten up about the whole thing and have a little fun while you can!

Hope that helps. LOL

So why are you running a picture of Jared the Subway guy in a note about Brian Leiter?

Sure, Jared!