My Sokal-ed life
MILLER, MARK
My Sokal-ed Life By Mark Miller Imagine that you are referred to a doctor who was trained at a top-ranked medical school, one famous for its advanced medical thinking. Many of its faculty members...
...What all of these papers have in common, other than "subversive" intent (to which most of the authors would readily admit), is a desire to break new ground by applying theoretical structure X to problem Y. No juxtaposition is too improbable—in fact, the more improbable the better...
...One or two professors don't even have licenses to practice...
...H "The Joint Rate Return Structure...
...Did the author really need 168 pages and 300-plus footnotes, to prove his point...
...some even argue for overturning the entire system of medicine as currently practiced...
...The Internal Revenue Code is evil because it is founded upon hidden gender-biased assumptions intended to keep women second-class citizens, in "shocking and extreme manners...
...Mark Miller is assistant book editor of the Washington Times and senior articles editor of the Georgetown Law Journal...
...Many of its faculty members subscribe to esoteric theories...
...Not only does this approach keep usefulness and practical reality at arm's length, it is also more formulaic—and therefore less effectively subversive—than its authors suppose...
...In reality, of course, you wouldn't have to...
...These students— many of them younger than Roe v. Wade—decide what subjects and approaches are important enough to warrant space...
...And nowhere is this disconnect more glaring than in the law journals...
...H "Legal Tales from Gilligan's Island...
...Therefore, materialistic culture is European...
...Few of them, though, have ever seen a patient, and many have nothing but contempt for those who have...
...The students publish the papers that seem consistent with what they hear from their professors...
...Materialism is bad...
...Sokal, it will be remembered, is the New York University physicist who planted his elbow firmly in the ribs of the academic establishment when he published "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the peer-reviewed journal Social Text...
...The portrayal of lawyers in the popular culture traces its origin to Gilligan's Island...
...Their enthusiasms tend to become their students' enthusiasms...
...Do we need affirmative action for free speech rights...
...A look at some of the articles that have come in, on law school letterhead, over the transom at the Georgetown Law Journal this year forces one to consider the possibility: H "Disinterring the Good and Bad Immigrant: A Deconstruction of the State Court Interpreter Laws for Non-English Speaking Criminal Defendants...
...It is difficult for students to recognize what arguments are innovative and valuable...
...The competition for the most interesting ones is stiff...
...Postmodernism has made it ridiculously easy to cross the line between academic discourse and utter nonsense, as Alan Sokal's hoax showed earlier this year...
...The students, though, are in a bind...
...What does Native American tribal justice tell us about the imperialist, Eurocentric history of the common-law doctrine of adverse possession...
...We receive lots of papers making arguments similar to this...
...On these journals, second- and third-year students are the sole gatekeepers...
...They're actually racist and therefore operate to the detriment of those defendants...
...Now, it is true that a top-ranked law journal receives something like 2,000 unsolicited articles a year, and many of them are quite interesting, including some that take a theoretical approach...
...In the end, Alan Sokal's hoax could be just what the doctor ordered for the student-edited law journals...
...H "Law as a Eurocentric Exercise...
...The truly subversive effect this kind of writing can have, however, is to lure students away from the hard-headed rationality that used to characterize legal study— and that is certain to be their best friend in legal practice, where most are heading...
...H "The Jurisprudence of Yogi Berra...
...Publish or perish may be the rule throughout acade-mia, but only in the field of law are student-edited journals the primary outlet for academic writing...
...1291, he will have done legal pedagogy a great service...
...Among other outrageous claims, the article argued that gravity—indeed, physical reality itself—was nothing more than a social and linguistic construct, a product of dominant ideologies masquerading as absolute truth...
...After seven months on the front lines at a law journal, I have come to believe that students and their teachers are part of a vicious circle which they do not care to change...
...Court-supplied interpreters for non-English-speaking criminal defendants aren't the generous accommodation to the due process rights of immigrants we all imagine them to be...
...Alan Sokal, eat your heart out...
...Such a radical disconnect between teaching and practice is unthinkable at any reputable school of medicine—yet it is commonplace in the nation's elite schools of law...
...Would you entrust yourself to this guy's care...
...They ordinarily have absolute independence in deciding what articles are published, and they influence the final shape of what is published through extensive editing...
...Professors understand that they need to grab the attention of student editors in order to secure coveted publication slots, so more of the same gets written, and on and on...
...European culture is bad...
...Deans and faculty have no formal role, and they usually apply very little informal pressure...
...European culture is materialistic...
...As a result, given the publication requirements for tenure, students are partly responsible for placing and keeping individuals on faculties...
...Many of the articles even shed light on legal doctrines relevant to lawyers' work in the real world...
...The point is, though, that the narrower and more "doctrinal" the paper—and therefore the more useful to practitioners—the less resonance it is likely to have for student editors, who are relatively inexperienced with real legal problems...
...With that incident in mind, it is sometimes hard for law-journal editors to know anymore whether somebody might be out to put one over on us...
...The teachers pursue their own theoretical interests, which often have little to do with the workaday legal profession...
...And although all understand the scientific method, few are familiar with the tools, techniques, or procedures of the laboratory or operating theater...
...Easier, then, to choose the piece with a fashionable axe to grind...
...If Sokal succeeds in making student editors more cautious about publishing hermeneutic challenges to the socially constructed, gender-biased assumptions of 28 U.S.C...
...The aphorisms of the baseball great "reveal a surprising amount about a variety of aspects of American law...
...The 1960s television show Gilligan's Island contains numerous references to law, most of which remain unrecognized to this day...
...What light can Raskolnikov shed on Title VII...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 14
