Religious Law Schools and Their Commitment to Religion

Should religious law schools be religious? Some interesting insights by St. John's Law School prof. Rob Vischer over at Mirror of Justice.

To the extent law schools can help students elevate internal over external motivations, I have no doubt that students would be better off. But I wonder how realistic it is to expect law schools to do so. After all, in an environment where institutional decisions seem driven in significant part by US News rankings, law schools themselves are motivated primarily by extrinsic considerations, most notably reputation. Law schools don't seem concerned as much with helping students "find themselves" as in enabling students to plug into the best (i.e., most prestigious) job possible, whether private practice, government, or public interest. I have no doubt that a student at the top of the class who turns down a federal clerkship or big firm job is perceived as a disappointment to the school, regardless of the compatibility of such career paths with the student's own priorities. A school's reputation is not enhanced by students who take the road less travelled.

The tradeoff of building reputation at the cost of religious identity seems to be empirically supportable. I myself graduated from a law school (Trinity Law School) that is expressly committed to integrating its Christian perspective with the teaching of law. Because of this commitment, the school's reputation in the secular legal community is almost nonexistent. Indeed, if it does have a reputation, it probably isn't very positive to the extent that the school is seen as more of a theological center than a serious law school. Without a reputation, of course, graduates of my law school (including yours truly) have generally been hard pressed to find jobs, thus perpetuating the school's obscurity.

Personally, I'm glad there are some (though very few) religious law schools out there that are committed to helping students elevate their internal motivations (i.e., faith) in addition to trying to expand its external institutional interests. Unfortunately, though, the reality of the legal environment simply won't allow such a formula to work, and so religious schools must sadly choose between maintaining their religious identity or discarding it so as not to be cast into perpetual obscurity.