New law Ph.D. meets national scrutiny

Lauren Edelman and Robert Berring quoted in Yale Daily News, September 13, 2012

“The point that Robert Post makes about the possibility of there being a study of law that is independent of other disciplines, I think, is a hard point to make,” said Lauren Edelman…. “It’s somewhat unclear to me what it means to say that [the new Ph.D.] is wholly about law, given that law itself is a field very much populated by Ph.D.s in other disciplines, and much of the legal scholarship takes into account many of the fundamentals and methods represented.”

Bob Berring, a former interim dean of Berkeley Law, said the brand of legal education taught at Yale is already so academic that many in the profession consider it impractical. “I’ve been to five law schools in my time, and, of course, graduates of Yale dominate the legal academy,” Berring said. “But whenever someone from Yale comes up in conversation, someone always makes the joke, ‘But they didn’t go to law school, they went to Yale.'”