As my loyal reader(s) know, Professor Brian Leiter took to his blog yesterday to take issue with two posts I wrote about the Whittier Law School closure (you can read my posts here and here). In the two short paragraphs about me, he called me "ignorant," "egregious," "presumptuous," "blowhard," "guilty," "bloviating," and "audacious."
He took to his blog again today under the caption of an "UPDATE" to attack me further. Note that the "update" does not contain any new information, just additional quotations of mine from the posts he criticized yesterday.
In his post, Professor Leiter criticized me for "scolding" the Whittier faculty in their time of "misery." However, as I explained in detail yesterday, I was not scolding the faculty at Whittier. In fact, I was scolding other law schools for causing the calamity that befell Whittier, and lamenting the fact that a 50-year-old Southern California institution in legal education had been destroyed. Without repeating all the detail, I said very plainly that the "the culprits are not even at Whittier specifically," which should pretty much resolve the issue. In case it doesn't, the entire logic of my argument was that other law schools' loosened admission policies had taken away the viable applicant pool that Whittier would have otherwise had.
I informed Professor Leiter yesterday that he had misrepresented what I said, a fact which is obvious to everyone who reads the blog posts and has average reading comprehension skills. But instead of simply admitting he read the pieces too quickly and apologizing, he doubled down with more criticism of me today. Of course one could disagree with the reasons I gave for what befell Whittier or my proposed solutions to the problem. Those are controversial. But Professor Leiter's claim that I laid the blame with the Whittier faculty is clearly false.
So the question is, why is Brian Leiter so interested in what I write? And why is he unable to acknowledge when he's obviously made a mistake?
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