Teles (2010) quotes Douglas Baird, a Stanford Law student in the 70s and later dean of the University of Chicago Law School:

In the early seventies, people like Posner would come in and spend six weeks studying family law, and they’d write a couple of articles explaining why everything everyone was saying in family law was 100 percent wrong [because they’d ignored economics]. ¹ And then the replies would be, “No, we were only 80 percent wrong.” And Posner never got things exactly right, but he always turned everything upside down, and people talked about law differently… By the time I came along, and I wasn’t trained as economist, it was clear that… doing great work was easy… I used to say that this was just like knocking over Coke bottles with a baseball bat… You could just go in and write something revolutionary and go in tomorrow and write another article. I remember writing articles where the time between getting the idea and getting it accepted from a major law review was four days. I’m not Richard Posner, and few of us are. I got out of law school, and I was interested in bankruptcy law, which was inhabited by intellectual midgets… It was a complete intellectual wasteland. I got tenure by saying, “Jeez, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.” You got tenure for that! The reality is that there was just an open field begging for people to do great work.

 

Footnotes:

1. At least, I think “because they’d ignored economics” is the intended implication, from the context in Teles (2010).[↩]