Any free society needs the rule of law, the adversary system, and a culture of free speech and inquiry in law, but this is particularly true of the United States. Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed of the American republic that almost all political issues there became legal issues, and that remains the case today. It’s the law that preserves the U.S. Constitution’s balance of powers, preventing tyranny.

When English departments, say, are consumed by the politics of identity, they marginalize mostly themselves. The classes they teach no longer provide students with analytic skills, and the books they assign no longer stir student souls. By contrast, law schools remain important to society, whatever their quality, because lawyers remain essential to a modern market democracy. At their best, law schools facilitate responsible advocacy and inculcate a respect in future lawyers that law isn’t simply politics by another name, but instead the basis of a rule-based order needed for human flourishing. If law schools lose sight of this, society suffers. …

If law schools continue to be a redoubt of left orthodoxy hostile to dissent, they will send out generations of law students who regard much of the law that maintains our constitutional order as an alien virus that must be ejected from the body politic.