Eugene Volokh, Collectivist?:
Over at Law School Innovation, Doug Berman suggests that Eugene's laptop ban reveals he is not a true libertarian:
Although I am disinclined to assert that this alone shows how quickly professorial power can corrupt philosophical commitments, I do find remarkable the dramatic move to collectivism here. Not only is Eugene severely restricting laptop liberty, but he also is mandating that individuals share the fruits of their labor with a student collective all for purported good of the UCLA School of Law.And it's much worse than that. According to my sources, Eugene has structured his class much like a dictatorship. In particular, students cannot determine their own grades. They can't even vote together for their grades, expressing the collective will of the people. Rather, Eugene gives himself the sole and complete discretion to assign grades according to his own personal measurement of achievement. That's right: Self-appointed King Eugene thinks that he knows what is better for his "subjects" more than the people themselves. Sounds like a nanny state to me.
Doesn't it just indicate that he thinks he knows better than them what constitutes good performance? Which is totally reasonable. It's not as reasonable for him to think he knows better than them how they can best prepare for their graded performance.
He also decides what reading the people must do, rather than leaving it up to them to decide what reading is best for them,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm
However, I think it is true that there is tension here between the fundamental principles of libertarianism (Hayekian individual ordering, each knowing their own best interests and abilities) and a professor telling students how to take notes.
I also think that this is a reasonable case to compromise those principles.
Not really. He tells them what reading they should do, but they have to choice to read that material, read other material, or read nothing at all. That choice may reflect on their grades or their class performance, just like a student's choice to bring a laptop to class, but it is still a choice that each student can make for himself. It's not like he holds a mandatory study period in which he patrols the aisles and makes sure that each student's casebook is open to the correct page or series of pages.
[egads... must be a slow summer Friday in academia]
Eugene Poppins? What's your spoonful of sugar, Prof. Volokh?
OrinKerr,
As a lowly undergrad I defer to lawyerly types to comment on whether or not this works in law school, but I frequently ignore assigned readings and replace assigned textbooks with my own choices. I find it’s common for professors to assign worthless doors stops s/he or a senior faculty member co-authored that are of little or no educational value. Unless you’re actually being taught by Greg Mankiw or Oliver Blanchard a course where the professor is the textbook author is usually terrible from a student’s perspective.
The only downside is this costs me more money when I need to read assigned material for assignments (e.g. answer question 1 from chapter 4).
Oh great! There you go, giving him more ideas on how to Krush the ideals of Libertarianism. Better warn all those UCLA 1Ls to transfer to Pepperdine before it's too late!
I will take the pragmatic libertarian (i.e. libertarians with brains) over the fanatical ideologically driven and less intelligent "true believer" any day of the week.
I think the idea that the more pragmatic adherents of a particular ideology are more intelligent is usually true.
Life is usually not so simple.
In the first place, libertarianism fully supports everyone's right to opt into regimes that would be called illiberal if mandated on everyone. This includes religious communes, families, corporations, clubs, or classrooms. As long as no one's holding a (possibly metaphorical) gun to your head to make you attend Eugene's class, who cares (from a libertarian point of view).
[Note 1: I'm ignoring that many states require you to go to law school to become a lawyer. Even if I took that into account, I would be blaming state legislatures, or bar associations, for that requirement, not those schools that crop up to meet that requirement in whatever way they see fit. In any event, no one's requiring a no-laptop policy, so this has limited relevance for Eugene's no-laptop policy.]
[Note 2: I'm also ignoring that UCLA is a government school. Even if I took that into account, it's not clear what that might change... while the government should be more restricted in its offerings than the private sector (e.g. no government-run religious law schools), that still leaves a lot of pedagogical methods fair game. I may believe that government-run schools shouldn't exist, but I don't have a strong belief on what behavioral restrictions they should and shouldn't be able to adopt if they do exist. In any event, the critique of Eugene wasn't contingent on his teaching at UCLA, so assume that he may as well be teaching as USC.]
Moreover, none of this is in conflict with the idea that people know what's best for themselves. In the first place, my view is that libertarianism doesn't rely on people knowing what's best for them -- even if government knew what was best, I would support people's right to make bad decisions for themselves. (Generally, I think relying on the idea that people know what's best for themselves is potentially harmful, in that it exposes you to various behavioral critiques, e.g. "libertarian paternalism." Therefore, I sometimes prefer to grant that people are as stupid and ignorant as you like.)
But even if you don't want to go that far, recall again that attending Eugene's class is voluntary, and people, perhaps knowing what's best for them, can choose whether to accept Eugene's behavioral restrictions (e.g. no talking out of turn, no coming to class naked, no playing solitaire), which Eugene may believe enhance the educational experience. After all, part (not all) of why we go to school rather than studying for ourselves may well stem from our recognition that the professors have some knowledge that we don't about how to make our studying experience more productive.
[Note 3: I'm ignoring that Eugene's class may be mandatory for these students. But it's still voluntary in that they don't need to go to UCLA Law School.]
The moral is that whether something would be un-libertarian if mandated on everyone frequently (perhaps usually?) has NO relation to whether it should be so characterized as part of a private ordering.
[Note 4: Thus, even the examples quoted above -- what if Eugene had hall monitors to make sure everyone actually did the assigned reading out of the assigned books? -- would not be inconsistent with libertarianism, though they would probably be bad policy.]
His paycheck is signed by the governor (or maybe the shadowy regents, but close enough)!
[This thread is rapidly getting waaaaay to esoteric for my pinheaded taste, even on a slow Friday afternoon]
E.g.: assuming that Eugene's class is mandatory for UCLA law students, haven't they likely signed up for the class and UCLA Law School in at least partial reliance on past policies on classroom behavior? Nobody signed up for UCLA Law or Eugene's class expecting to be able to come to class naked, but presumably most people did sign up under the assumption that they'd be able to use their laptops in class.
As a libertarian myself, I have no problem with arguments about consenting adults agreeing to limit their freedoms voluntarily under contracts of various sorts (I've in fact made such arguments many times, myself), but it seems to me that law school is such a major time and monetary investment that a "nobody's holding a gun to your head to take Eugene's class or go to this particular school" argument rings pretty hollow and borders on the disingenuous when used to so casually brush aside legitimate criticisms.
How to construe incomplete contracts is a problem, but not one unique to libertarianism.
There are two points I think are especially pertinent.
First, the trend in law schools is moving increasingly towards laptop bans (or at least wireless bans).
Second, the market in legal education has a significant failing: a small percentage of schools have an effective monopoly on access to elite hiring, whether it be clerkships, firms, or government positions. Even the worst students at Harvard are far better off than the vast majority of their law school peers, simply by virtue of the Harvard credential.
Consider the position of a top student who wishes to become a law professor. While it is possible (in theory) that that student could attend any law school she wished, her odds are dramatically enhanced if she attends 1 of 20 or so schools - and even more dramatically enhanced if she attends 1 of 3 or 4 schools.
[To be clear, this is not a product of elitism on the part of the student - it is a product of elitism on the part of hiring committees at law schools, at firms, and so on.]
It certainly seems like the market that the would-be professor must enter is far from perfectly competitive. So to suggest that no one is "holding a gun to the head" of students really is not an accurate characterization of the situation, is it?
Strictly speaking, this is not correct, unless he is grading in part based on class participation. He is simply suggesting what reading students should do in order to receive a good grade. Lots of assigned reading is worthless (due in large part to poor casebook editing), and lots of unassigned reading (such as law review articles) can be performance-enhancing.
I just made law reviews sound like Viagra. My mother would be so proud.
I just enjoy pointing out Eugene's (and now Sasha's!) commie-pinko tendencies because they can't come around on, say, gun policy. But no laptops is freaking annoying (as is the "trust us, we're professors" line).
[this whole thread is beginning to read like a bad drug trip...]
Eugene's students.
http://volokh.com/posts/1219262733.shtml#417790
Anyway, I think Sasha's point above is technically correct, but misses the point slightly. The question is whether conducting class in this way is consistent with the principles of libertarianism.
Students chose to go to UCLA in a contract, a private transaction in which UCLA's government status is irrelevant. And that contract, I presume, has no implied condition that past practices will continue. The students contracted to be subject to the discretion of the professor. I doubt any added a codicil on laptop usage.
You sure you're not thinking of libertinism?
We used to do it all the time without any input from the professors but maybe students in the hard sciences are more collectively minded.
The libertarian answer is: they are adults. Let them decide how best to learn.
And, i might add, you are going to run into trouble under ADA if you follow this policy.
Trust a law prof to comment where he has not the slightest knowledge of the subject! Obviously that should be Tsar Eugune, or rather, Tsar Evgeny.
:-)
Here's a question to contemplate for long-time participants in this blog... which group of whiners was more annoying, the arch-libertarian crowd upset with the ban on laptops or the religious crowd upset with the use of Tarot cards?
On the partial reliance on past policies, I basically agree with Scott Scheule and Frank Cross: That's a question of incomplete contracts, and doesn't implicate libertarianism as such. Moreover, I'm highly skeptical that this was actually a significant factor in people's choice.
runape: You point out that the market isn't totally competitive because several schools have a de facto monopoly, and the trend in law schools is to move toward such a ban. So the laptop ban might be unlibertarian, if you adopted a view of libertarianism that considered de facto monopolies and actual choice to be relevant. However, my view of libertarianism considers that stuff to be irrelevant: As long as people are free to offer choices, the fact that a particular choice doesn't happen to be offered has no significance. (There's no school teaching U.S. law in Swahili. Sucks if I want to learn U.S. law and I only speak Swahili. Who cares?)
Morever, under my view of libertarianism, the degree of concentration (or "de facto monopoly") is likewise irrelevant. For instance, if Microsoft were the only provider of computer-related stuff out there and chose to offer only crappy stuff at rip-off prices, that would be irrelevant to me -- that's Microsoft's right. (So when I say holding a gun to their head, I mean it metaphorically, but more literally than you mean -- a de facto monopoly is still perfectly consistent with freedom.)
The only thing that would change that conclusion is if there's some compulsion that causes the de facto monopoly. This is why I mentioned the special status of lawyer licensing. But the fault there lies in the California legislature, not in the law schools that crop up to serve the need. As an example, BYU is religious, and that's their right. What if only religious law schools felt like existing, and no one came forth to offer a secular alternative? That's awful if it can be traced to the original government regulation. But regardless, it's wrong to fault BYU for their choice (which would be illiberal if mandated).
Former EV student: Indeed. Not only do I say that the policy is consistent with the principles of libertarianism, but I would go even further and say that there's no tension of any kind with libertarian principles! As I mentioned in my comment, libertarianism necessarily implies the freedom to choose arrangements that would be highly illiberal if mandated on the world as a whole.
A.W.: This idea that it's unlibertarian to impose learning styles on students is, I think, a misunderstanding of libertarianism. The government should, it's true, treat people like adults. But private people have no such duty. They can set up nanny-state-like educational institutions, top-down control-oriented corporations, cult-like religious sects, etc. To allow such things -- and to allow people to choose to participate in such organizations, which would be awful if the government mandated them -- is not only consistent with libertarianism, but required by libertarianism. The idea of respecting people's adult choices is required for government, but only optional for people who aren't pointing guns at anyone.
[and if anybody misses the sarcasm and attempts a straight-faced reply doing something like challenging whether Tsar Evgeny's class meets the interstate commerce requirement of the antitrust laws, whether there's state action immunity since it's a public law school, or worst of all spouting out a Libertarian analysis of the differing validity of price/non-price, coordinated/unilateral, or per se/rule of reason Sherman Act violations, I may have to shot-put my computer at them in frustration. Sasha, this means you!].
I guess. But couldn't you argue that any country's citizenry opted into being citizens of that country. There are alternatives, right? There are places (though few) where there is no government. But why be so extreme? A Swede concerned with high taxes could move to the United States if she doesn't like it. This strikes me as particularly true in the case of immigrants (nothing personal intended). If you choose to immigrate to this country, does that mean that you have opted into the regime and are subject to its whim?
Therefore, a Swede's ability to move to the U.S. is no defense for the government of Sweden. However, a student's signing up for a university is an affirmative consent to any rules the university may have, regardless how silly and extreme, assuming there's nothing requiring the student to do so and there's nothing requiring the university to impose those rules.
An interesting question is to what extent an immigrant consents to the rules of his host country by immigrating -- this would mean that the U.S. can impose more restrictions on me than on someone native-born.
I'd be inclined to say no: Under my particular brand of libertarianism, a government should be judged just the same as any group of private individuals trying to wield force. The government doesn't own the territory of the United States and has no generalized moral right to do things to you just because you're on the territory of the country; all impositions, whether on immigrants or on anyone else, have to be identically justified as necessary to prevent even greater rights violations.