A look back at the "intellectual critique" of law schools.

Summary Let us begin by saying that we share the guiding idea stated in the article by Messrs. Beaud and Libchaber: the central question is that of the freedom of the university, a victim of both an overwhelming state supervision and an obvious lack of financial means. The university is dying from a lack of freedom, and conquering it involves at least as much access to financial resources as the restoration of forms of collective virtue, through the encouragement of good practices. To this observation, we would readily add that this conquest is inseparable from a vigorous intellectual and institutional renewal, from a profound transformation of the dominant conception of what legal thought and the ways of teaching it should be. It is on this point that we differ. The result, for example, is that we find it difficult to see the CNU or the agrégation as institutions that are favorable to the academic freedom that we are calling for. Above all, the result is that, contrary to what they write, we do not think that "The difficulty in considering criticism of Sciences Po is that it is powerless to formulate grievances that are useful for the renewal of the university. Nor do we believe that being professors at Sciences Po places us in the extra-university system, making us deserters ("Defection is running away from the university!"). Sciences Po is a hybrid institution, both public and private, with a public service vocation, which holds from its past the status of a grande école and from its present that of a selective, fee-paying university (more precisely, of a "grand établissement" within the meaning of article L. 717-1 of the Education Code), as they exist everywhere in the world. Its status gives its law school the possibility of enjoying greater autonomy than the law faculties. This makes it less of an "unfair competitor" (its small size would make such competition derisory anyway) than a laboratory where other ways of doing and teaching law can be experimented with, with its necessary share of trial and error, mistakes and successes. In this sense, the experimentation that goes on there is not too far away to offer any lessons to law schools. On the contrary, and as the article suggests very well, it presents other ways of doing the same job, a little more freely perhaps, a little more joyfully too ("It's that we are doing the same job, but in such different conditions! If we had their means, and their freedom, we would be very happy"). The "intellectual critique" that the Law School project brings to the dominant (but not hegemonic, by any means!) model in law schools seems to us to deserve to be taken seriously, because it is at the heart of the project of conquering this academic and political freedom that we all wish for. [First paragraph of the article].