Why do practicing lawyers hate law professors?

That question has been batted around the internet for a couple of days, and Rick Garnett over at PrawfsBlawg has some thoughts about why the “hate” may be overstated.

My own take is that “hate” is too strong, and that “despise” is probably more accurate.  Practicing lawyers do tend to sneer at our profession, but I don’t think it’s got much to do with (as some have argued) how well we teach our students or how pointless our scholarship is.  University law schools have never been particularly good at training practicing lawyers (hence the traditional big-firm associate training model) and we’ve had wildly impractical scholarship in our field since at least the days of Wesley Hohfeld.

I think what bugs them are three things.  First, we have jobs which are by and large much more fun than those of many practicing lawyers.  They believe they work harder than we do, and they have much elss control over their time.  (Wander around the average law school at 10 p.m. and check to see how many faculty are still there working.)  We get to spend our days thinking and writing about the law and working with bright and motivated young people.  They spend their days drafting documents, arguing on the telephone, dealing with judges, schmoozing clients, and doing all the stuff we disliked in practice.  So there’s an envy factor.

Second, they believe they are much, much better lawyers than we are, and that our ostensible mission is to train lawyers.  Yet in our hiring decisions we discriminate heavily against people who have substantial and high-level legal experience.  I remember a few years ago a study of one elite law faculty suggested that the average new tenure-track hire had about 10 months of actual law practice experience after graduation.  Most schools aren’t quite that bad, but watching hiring decisions over the dozen years I’ve been in the business, I think it’s a pretty small minority of new faculty who have ever practiced law above the level of junior associate.  We’re perfectly happy to hire real lawyers as adjuncts — it’s good to give the students some real-world education — but the adjuncts are well aware that their chances of getting a tenure-track job and being killed by a falling meteorite are approximately equal.

Third, they think that we tend to despise the practice of law, and (by extension) them.  This isn’t true, in my experience, but I can see why they think that way.  Most of us have a great deal of respect for our profession and for practicing lawyers, but there are more than a few folks in the academy who make no secret of the fact that the private practice of law is