What Is Legal Brilliance?

Just had dinner with ABS, where we talked about our professors (as usual) and who among them are really brilliant. Had some thoughts there and then some additional thoughts on the way home.

I certainly don't think our contracts professor is brilliant. He repeats on and on about logic and its greatness, and argues very aggressively with anyone who doesn't agree immediately how wonderful logic is. Don't get me wrong. I think logic is great (after all, I did study philosophy in those hazy days when I was an undergrad). But the bottom line is, logic is a tool. It's a procedure. It may affect HOW we think but not WHAT we think about, and at the end of the day you are still left with important questions such as WHICH legal rules to apply and WHY, and WHAT are the useful objectives a legal system should try to achieve. Our contracts class talks almost nothing about that. We don't even talk about the legal rules themselves very much, beyond asking endlessly whether they are logical and whether they've been consistently applied. It's a very impoverished way of thinking.

Although I liked both my crim law professor from last semester, and my property professor from this semester, very much, I don't think they are brilliant either. They are certainly intelligent, but they seem too safely entrenched in the legal profession, and they tackle small, safe legal problems and seem to lack a grander vision. The work they do is useful -- there are certainly a lot of doctrinal wrinkles to iron out in any given field, and these wrinkles don't always present great problems but often medium and small problems. Still, you get the sense when you read their work that they lack a grand, unifiying vision, something like what Coase had when he wrote his article about reciprocal costs and duties; or on a smaller scale, what Weintraub had when he wrote his opinion that argued that assumption of risk is really just another form of contributory negligence and can therefore be analyzed in the same way; something that is transformative for the field and changes (or expands) the way we look at legal problems.

My torts professor is a legal historian and an extremely popular teacher. I am more on the fence about whether he is brilliant. He wrote some extremely influential books that influenced how a generation of legal scholars looked at American legal history, and which generated a lot of debate and criciticms. He certainly had a unifying legal vision. Perhaps he IS brilliant. I didn't get to personally experience his brilliance much since I didn't have time to read his books to judge for myself. Perhaps I will this summer.

But then, I was bothered by this thought: does one need to be kind of iconoclastic to be brilliant? It seems like all the professors that ABS and I agreed are brilliant are kind of that way, like Professor K, who wrote some seminal doctrinal work in his younger days and then wrote a series of critiques about hierarchies in law schools and how law schools are designed to instill that hierarchy in the students; and Professor H, who started out as a law and econ person but who now has become one of its most ardent and persuasive critics. Does this mean a conservative professor, like Professor F, who believes that the basis of law should be morality, cannot really be "briliant", in the sense that he won't really be transforming a field in a new and exciting and unexpected direction?

Anyway, need to think about this some more.