Slaves of some defunct...law professor?

At the OBCL Alumni Association Meeting, I did a short presentation encouraging OBCL students and alumni to pursue the writing and publishing of legal scholarship. Trying to make the point that scholars and scholarship have an important impact on the world, I quoted Keynes' old line that even those who think of themselves as eminently practical men are actually the slaves of some defunct economist - and, I added, the same applies to law schools and legal scholars. I was pleased to see the same point being made, with the same quote from Keynes, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

The British economist John Maynard Keynes famously observed, 75 years ago, that statesmen who think that they are pursuing policies of their own devise are really showing themselves to be "the slaves of some defunct economist." In America today statesmen are more likely to be the slaves of some defunct legal theorist. Our litigation-prone culture and complex legal structure—not least the matrix of overlapping state and federal powers—regularly translate questions of policy into questions of law. As a result, American law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university.

Read the rest here.