Inner Rot

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I read your editorial about the Law School [Dec. 5] with dismay and amusement. Your carefully written editorial neatly side-stepped both the actual and salient realities at the Law School. Perhaps your readers would gain from understanding what these are, in fact.

The group of dissidents at the Law School going under the banner of critical studies are not fundamentally lawyers but social engineers. They seek to dismantle an existing system and replace it with something else.

I happen not to agree with their program or their methods. But candor and honesty do extract some sympathy on my part for their position.

An existing legal or social system does not collapse because of assault upon it by superior logic. Systems collapse through their own inner rot. Corrupt systems do not collapse, only rotten ones do.

For most of its history, the Harvard Law School represented an ideal of legal traditions based on intellect and scholarship. In the past few decades the rampant greediness of its professors has become manifest. The Harvard Law School has been, for quite a while, a place from which forays into television, etc., have been launched by its publicity-crazed faculty.

It was this salient fact of inner rot based on pure egotism and greed which prompted the critical studies group to begin their assault on what the Law School had become. The intellectual issues are now completely obscured in personality and rancor. The root cause was never an ideological one but rather the monetization of the faculty in its drive for money, fame, and notoriety. Let us put things in their proper perspective. Benito Rakower, Ed.D. '67