Let's start a pool on how long it takes Brian Leiter (the academic thug) to attack former Harvard Law School dean (and soon to be United States Solicitor General) Elena Kagan. I say less than 24 hours. You? We can have a side pool on what he calls her. Will it be "depraved and repellent" (Leiter's description of Chief Justice John Roberts)? Will it be "lunatic" (Leiter's description of Justice Clarence Thomas)? Will it be "war criminal" (Leiter's description of President Bush)? Will he say that she is part of President Obama's "bestiary of madmen [madwomen?]"? Leiter's well-known emotional instability (which includes a startling lack of self-control) has walled him off from all avenues of power and responsibility. He gets no offers to write op-ed columns. He gets no invitations to appear on public-affairs programs. He would never be considered for a position in government. He is doomed to a career in academia, teaching law students about a crazy man (Friedrich Nietzsche) and a discredited positive theory of law (legal realism). People read his blog for the same reason they gawk at accidents.
Addendum: For those of you who don't know who Leiter is, read this. Key paragraphs are as follows (boldface added):
Leiter may have begun as the accidental appraiser, but as the Web made him more famous, he was drawn to its stage, and now he sits in his own spotlight, typing, a lot. He started Leiter Reports, a philosophy blog, in 2003, and he now writes two blogs regularly, Leiter Reports and a blog about law schools, and two more sporadically, on legal philosophy and on Nietzsche.
On Leiter Reports he challenges, in what can be lengthy and minutiae-obsessed posts, those who criticize his rankings, his left-wing politics, or his philosophical naturalism (the belief that everything can be explained by nature without recourse to metaphysics). There's a whole category of posts called "The Less They Know, The Less They Know It," under which one finds headlines like, "Carlin Romano: Total Ignorance of Philosophy Is No Obstacle to Opining About Richard Rorty." (Romano writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Those whom Leiter finds wanting are deemed "morons" or "zombies" or "demonstrably incompetent." Peers then treat him in kind: University of Wisconsin legal blogger Ann Althouse called Brian Leiter a "jackass," to take a famous example. (She also called him a "nerd.")
If you look closely, his thrice-divided personality—scholar, surveyor, blogger—is unified in its argument: philosophy matters. (The reason to be harsh with Carlin Romano is because he gets Rorty wrong. And some idiots give Leo Strauss too much credit.) And academic freedom matters because without it people are encumbered in their search for truth.
But in another sense, the various Leiters seem to be at war. If the stakes are really this high—and they are, because, to take one example from Leiter's blog, philosophy must help us defeat intelligent design—then it's surprising that Leiter would act so low, being the man of higher thinking in the classroom, and a shepherd who helps grad students around the world find the best possible home, but then the troglodyte in cyberspace.
Looked at that way, Leiter's rankings may be more worrisome than he would admit. By increasing competition in the profession, by promoting envy or Schadenfreude, by writing a blog that alternates philosophy with verbal soccer hooliganism, Leiter runs a great risk: He may be demeaning the very profession he rightly wants to democratize.
As we lawyers like to say, res ipsa loquitur.
