Should law schools pour money into hiring scholars with expertise in the humanities and social sciences? Not necessarily, says Brian Tamanaha in an essay at Balkinization.

Tamanaha, who teaches law at St. John’s University, in New York, argues that law schools should think twice before getting on the bandwagon of joint J.D./Ph.D. programs:

Let me just give three reasons why it might be a bad idea for non-elite law schools. First and foremost, as argued above, there is no evidence that it will make their students better lawyers. Second, it costs a lot of money to go interdisciplinary, and (because non-elite schools are tuition driven) this money will come out of the pockets of the students. Third, their education might suffer if their faculties emulate the elite law school trend toward hiring J.D./Ph.D.‘s with little or no practice experience (assuming a person with some experience in the practice of law has a bit more insight to impart to students about how to be good lawyers).

Tamanaha concedes that the new interdisciplinary programs can be intellectually exciting, and he notes that his own academic work “is immersed in the social scientific and theory literature as least as much as the legal literature.”

At Moneylaw, the pseudonymous Belle Lettre, who’s a fan of interdisciplinary and empirical legal studies, says that Tamanaha has a point: “There is no single way into Valhalla, and there’s no best method of legal scholarship. Be wary of any intellectual movement that proclaims as much, whether it’s old school or new school.”

For a short and largely sympathetic look at legal scholarship’s embrace of social science, see this 2007 essay by Richard Posner.

And here’s an earlier round of the legal-interdisciplinarity fight, which was provoked by a 2006 essay by Northwestern University’s Anthony D’Amato.

In 2006, The Chronicle looked at interdisciplinary legal-studies programs for undergraduates, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom meditated on “the I-word.”

(Photo of the University of Michigan Law School by the Flickr user Chris_is_blown. Used under a Creative Commons license.)