EXPRESSING DISSENT ON POLITICALLY CORRECT INITIATIVES CAN EARN YOU SCORN.

think. That is quite a different thing from law schools advocating an ideology and telling students what to believe. Rather than teaching intelligent critical thinking about the politics of law, law schools have themselves become political torchbearers for social justice dogma. The result is as much indoctrination as education.

Kelly and Kerr rightly reject legal formalism — teaching rules without reasoning — which is of little value. But instead of thinking critically and taking nothing for granted, they do what they condemn: they treat certain values as selfevident and pretend that their political interpretation is neutral and true. For example, they insist that it is the responsibility of law schools to implement the recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), itself a political body that produced a political set of recommendations. They take as given that different sentencing considerations should apply to Aboriginal offenders. These are positions borne of political belief. Should law schools obediently endorse them? Or should they facilitate transparent and probing debate from a diversity of legal perspectives on their legitimacy and value? Inside today’s law schools, expressing dissent on politically correct initiatives can earn you scorn and contempt.

While Professor Kelly agrees that law is political, she does not appear to believe in open inquiry on that topic. In March I invited