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In the forty-eighth episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with David A. Skeel, Jr., the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Skeel opens the conversation by talking about how his interests in bankruptcy law developed and about the theological commitments that are woven into history of bankruptcy law in the United States. Ream and Skeel then talk about Skeel’s formation as a legal scholar, how his education shaped him, and about how his experience as a clerk, an associate in a large firm, and a young law professor at Temple University and then at the University of Pennsylvania all played important roles. Skeel then offers insights concerning how he makes decisions concerning public service and what led him to his service as Chair of the Financial and Management Oversight Board for Puerto Rico. Ream and Skeel then close their conversation with Skeel offering his understanding of the academic vocation and his advice to aspiring attorneys and legal scholars.
- David A. Skeel’s True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (InterVaristy Press, 2014)
- David A. Skeel’s Debt’s Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton University Press, 2001)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is David A. Skeel Jr., S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you for joining us.
David Skeel: Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Todd Ream: So my first question then is, why bankruptcy law? What about the history, development, and practice of bankruptcy law captivates your interests?
David Skeel: Well, I thought everybody wanted to be a bankruptcy law professor. But actually I was not one of those people myself. It’s a little bit of a story why bankruptcy law. So if you’ll indulge me, I’ll tell it and I’ll try not to ramble too much.
When I got to law school, I was a literature major in college. I had no interest in business law in general, much less bankruptcy law. The way I got in is that in my first year of law school, law school is three years long. As you may know, in my first year of law school, I had a bunch of good professors, but I had two really spectacular professors. And at the end of my first year of law school, I resolved to myself that no matter what those two professors taught for my next two years of law school, I was going to take it. I didn’t care if I had no interest in it whatsoever.
And as a result of that, I found myself in the first front row of a bankruptcy class in my second year of law school. It turned out that it was, I think, the first time this particular professor had taught bankruptcy himself. He had started writing in the area and so he taught it in my second year of law school and before the class was half over before the semester was half over, I had fallen in love with bankruptcy.
And as I look back, I think there are two reasons why I found it so interesting. One is that it is far more integral to American history than I had ever imagined. If you were to ask a historian, at least an open minded historian, what were the most important social issues in the 19th century, not just at one time or another, but throughout the entire 19th century, number one, obviously would be slavery.
But there’s a pretty good argument that bankruptcy was number two. Um, it was a hotly contested issue from the very beginning. And throughout the 19th century, Congress would pass federal bankruptcy laws and then they would get repealed, simply because it was so controversial. So if you go back to the founding, think about key founding fathers, they were on both sides of the debate.
So Alexander Hamilton, who everybody knows now, thanks to Lin Manuel Miranda, was one of the big proponents of federal bankruptcy. He thought if you wanted to be a commercial nation, you had to have a modern bankruptcy law. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was a staunch opponent of bankruptcy. His fear was that northeastern creditors would take advantage of one bad crop year when a farmer couldn’t repay its loan, would throw the farmer into bankruptcy and take the farmer’s property. So there was this heated debate through the 19th century and I was just fascinated by the historical side of it.
The other reason I think I fell in love with bankruptcy is it’s about encountering people and institutions at a moment of deep distress. And if the system works well, it can put them in a better place. And that really spoke to me 35 years ago, almost 40 years ago. And it still speaks to me today. So starting with that class in my second year of bankruptcy, I never looked back. I knew from then on, bankruptcy is what I was going to be doing.
Todd Ream: Yeah, it’s also a testament to what the power of captivating teaching and the craft of teaching can offer and create in terms of subjects and how it can bring that to life for students, so thank you.
In what ways then, if any, is the American bankruptcy law system distinct from say the bankruptcy law systems in other North Atlantic nations?
David Skeel: Well, the American bankruptcy system now isn’t quite as different, although it is still different. In its origins, it was radically different from the bankruptcy systems in say Germany or France or really even England. And the two-word explanation of how it was so different, that I would give is fresh start.
American bankruptcy has always been about a fresh start, both for individuals, it’s literally a fresh start. You are able to erase your debts if you’re overwhelmed by debt and start over. And for corporations, we were the country that had the first reorganization framework for big corporations.
So the big difference between U. S. bankruptcy and bankruptcy everywhere else in the world is it’s not about punishing you for failure or shutting you down. It’s about giving you new hope and a fresh start.
Todd Ream: In what ways, if any, was the development, especially of that sort of sense of American bankruptcy law influenced by philosophical and or theological commitments?
David Skeel: Well, in my view, it was deeply influenced by Christianity. It, embarrassingly, in a way, it took me about 15 years of my career before I realized this. Some people realize instantly, that when we talk about a fresh start, the fresh start in American bankruptcy sounds an awful lot like the Gospel, the idea that we’re in a position where we have no hope. There’s no way we can fulfill the obligations that were burdened under the idea of bankruptcy is that a bankruptcy system can give you a fresh start.
The idea of Christianity, obviously, is that in Christ, our sins are forgiven and those sins are often analogized to debts in the New Testament. The debt is paid. Our sins are forgiven because of the work that Jesus did on our behalf. So there’s this remarkable parallel between the way U.S. bankruptcy law works and the Gospel. You know, the idea that we have no hope on our own, but here is something that can give us a fresh start.
Now when I was, it’s actually before I was thinking about this, but when I was working on a book I wrote 20 years ago about the history of bankruptcy, I kind of expected to see evidence of the Christian influence in the legislative debates when, when bankruptcy was being debated. You really don’t see a lot of that in the 19th century, but you see strong, indirect Christian influence on our bankruptcy system.
And one example of this is one of the bankruptcy laws that was passed in the 19th century was passed in 1841. The principal supporters of that legislation were evangelical Christians, so you didn’t see a lot of people saying we should support this kind of bankruptcy because it parallels the Gospel but you did see Christians instinctively being drawn, at least at times to the framework that emerged.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In what ways does the American public’s perception of bankruptcy differ from the actual practice of the legal system?
David Skeel: Well, there are a variety of ways in which perceptions differ from the reality. If we’re talking about personal bankruptcy, individuals filing for bankruptcy, you often see diametrically opposed conceptions of what is going on, what the reality is in different places, both of which are wrong.
So one one view of bankruptcy that you sometimes see is that thousands, maybe even millions of Americans use bankruptcy strategically now as a way to duck their debts and not to pay obligations that they could, so that bankruptcy is really an attractive nuisance, as we would say in one of my areas of law, that it’s, it tempts people to act strategically and to get out from under obligations that they really ought to be paying. There are a few people that do that. There are a few people who use bankruptcy to evade obligations they could genuinely pay. But that’s not the norm. Most people, when they file for bankruptcy, are in deep and genuine financial distress.
On the other side, I think people who are in deep financial distress sometimes assume that nobody ever files for bankruptcy. You know, that nobody is ever in a position where bankruptcy is something that they need to consider. And this is particularly an issue, I think, with Christians and in some contexts, not only Christians, but with many Christians, many Christians rightly are of the view that we should fulfill our promises. And so the idea of bankruptcy is a problematic idea to them.
Some argue and have always argued that it’s never okay to file for bankruptcy. I think that’s mistaken too. I think if you genuinely are unable to pay what you owe, it is perfectly appropriate to file for bankruptcy. We see hints of that throughout the Bible, starting with the Jubilee in the Old Testament where all obligations were forgiven after 50 years, or there also was a requirement that individual debt obligations be forgiven after seven seven years.
And in the New Testament you frequently see Jesus using examples of debt forgiveness in his parables and in his teaching. So you have these two misconceptions on each side. One is that bankruptcy is always being abused. The other is that it’s never okay.
With businesses, I’ll just mention one misperception. Historically, there has often been a misperception in that businesses in important industries can’t file for bankruptcy. If they were to file for bankruptcy, the industry would collapse or there would be no hope.
So, 20, 30 years ago when airlines started filing for bankruptcy, people thought, oh, there’s no way an airline could survive bankruptcy. Just about every major airline did survive bankruptcy and flourished on the other side. In 2009, when Chrysler and General Motors were in financial distress, people said, oh, one of the big three car makers can’t go through bankruptcy. The world would end if that happened. And that turned out not to be the case. So our bankruptcy system has proven remarkably resilient and has handled crises that people never imagined it could handle.
Todd Ream: Thank you, that’s fascinating.
I want to transition now to asking you some details about your work experience and your education. You earned an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and then your years at law school that you mentioned briefly a few minutes ago were spent at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. After clerking for Walter K. Stapleton with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, you served as an associate for the Philadelphia-based firm Duane, Morris, & Heckscher. What experiences, if any, as a clerk did you find most professionally rewarding? And what experiences as a clerk did you find most professionally challenging?
David Skeel: What I found most professionally rewarding and my happy experiences often seem to have dark sides to them too, but the experience I found most rewarding as a clerk was changing my judge’s mind about a case.
So what we did as clerks is I was on a court of appeals. So we were not, we’re not, we’re not overseeing trials. We were dealing with appeals. And so what we would do is we would get the briefs from the two parties. The clerks would study the briefs, would research them, would write a memo for the judge with the cases that we were assigned to, and then if the judge ended up being the judge that was going to write the opinion in the case, we would get to write the first draft of the opinion.
The most exciting experience for me in my year of clerking was involved in a bankruptcy case, as always. I asked my fellow clerks if it was okay if I took the bankruptcy cases that we got. And shockingly, they were happy to let me take all of the bankruptcy cases.
And there was a bankruptcy case that involved a company that did military contracting and it was a very technical issue of bankruptcy law that involved the treatment of contracts and bankruptcy. And the provision is really confusing. And after really wrestling with it, I figured out what I thought the provision was really saying and the way it ought to be applied. And I persuaded my judge that I was right, that was the right position on the issue. And that ended up shaping the opinion that resulted. So that was really exciting. It only happened one time. That was the only time when I could say, I really felt like I changed my judge’s mind.
It also did have a little bit of a dark side. The next year, when I started practicing, I was practicing in the bankruptcy group of a law firm in Philadelphia, 30 miles from where I was clerking in the same circuit as I was clerking in. And one of our first meetings, staff meetings of the bankruptcy group that I was part of, they started talking about this case. And they said, those court of appeal judges are such idiots. They don’t understand bankruptcy law at all. How in the world could they reach the result they reached in this case? Because the result had the effect of making it very difficult for a military contractor to reorganize in bankruptcy.
Needless to say, I did not brag about my role in the opinion and in fact, did not say a word at that meeting or any other meeting that I was at. But I still think the case was correct and it still comes up in my bankruptcy case, my bankruptcy classes and that was for me the most rewarding moment of being a clerk.
The most difficult side of being a clerk for me, really was kind of the amount of leg work that you do and, and just how disciplined you have to be. I’m saying this in kind of vague terms, but my judge was very detail-oriented. He was very careful about everything he did.
His orientation towards the cases was very different than my orientation. My orientation was, at least when I started, I thought you would read the briefs from both sides, and you would rely on the lawyers on either side to present the arguments. And the cases that you should be looking at, you’d maybe research the things that they had provided you, and then you would make the decision.
And it came as a little bit of a jolt to me to realize that my, my judge wasn’t interested in stopping with what the lawyers said. He wanted to actually research the issue fully. If there were arguments the lawyers didn’t think of to look at them. If there are cases lawyers didn’t think to look into them. And so it turned out to be a more complicated job than I imagined. It was not just you read the two briefs and you tell the lawyer you tell the judge what, what you think, but it really was a very educational experience and it was very, very helpful for my thinking as I went along.
Todd Ream: Perhaps part of your previous answer, comes into this, given your experience with Duane, Morris, & Heckscher early on in your career there and that case that you had worked on while you were a clerk, but yeah, what are the what were the most professionally challenging but also rewarding components as a young associate in such a firm?
David Skeel: Well, the most rewarding side was somewhat similar, was opportunities where you really feel like you have a chance to to contribute. I was in a just a great group at Duane Morris, the bankruptcy group was a wonderful group and we were able to do things very early on that in other firms often wasn’t the case. We were given real responsibility.
So the most exciting example for me of that was, I was allowed to write an appellate brief as it turned out in a bankruptcy case, about a bankruptcy issue. Now, it was an issue on which we had little chance of succeeding, which I think is why they gave it to a second-year associate to write. But it was very cool to be writing the brief and for my brief largely to be used, it was edited, but to largely be used in the appeal.
The toughest part of being a lawyer for me was what’s the fire drill nature of, of law practice, which is law firms are not unique in this, but this is very much of the nature of, of legal practice. You never know when you’re going to have to drop everything and some issue is going to come up that you have to meet a very short deadline on. So the Friday afternoon, you might think you’re going to go out to a nice dinner that night and suddenly get something that you’ve got to turn around by Monday morning.
And I found that very difficult. I felt as though I didn’t handle that kind of stress well. I suspect if I had continued in the law practice, I would have become more comfortable with it. But certainly as a young lawyer, it was very difficult. And as it turned out, very different than the kind of stress that you and I have in academia, which is real stress, but it’s a very different kind of stress.
Todd Ream: Thank you. After serving for about eight years on the law faculty at Temple University, you then joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where you serve now, if my math is correct, for 25 years. At what point did you decide that teaching law was the vocational path you would follow?
David Skeel: Well, there was a point when, when I decided that. It was not when I was in law school. When I was in law school, I didn’t think at all about becoming a law professor. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I was a literature major in college. I did occasionally think about becoming a professor, but if I were a professor, it would have been a poetry professor, not a not a law professor.
The way I started thinking about law teaching is I had written a paper in my last year of law school with the same professor, the professor that I took bankruptcy with on a bankruptcy issue. And it had been accepted for publication in a bankruptcy journal. The publication timeline was very long, so it was still being edited when I had started practicing law.
And so I would work all day in the law firm and then I would come home and I’d turn to editing this article that was in the process of being published. It really quickly became apparent to me while I was doing that I couldn’t write and practice law at the same time. I was so exhausted at the end of the day, even though I wasn’t coming home that late. I was coming home at 6:30 most nights, but I was mentally exhausted at the end of the day.
And the idea of turning to write something, was, was kind of more than I could handle. And so it quickly became apparent to me that if I wanted to keep writing, I wasn’t going to be able to be a practicing lawyer as well. Some, some people do both. There are practicing lawyers who write quite prolifically, but it was clear to me I was not going to be one of them.
And so that’s what started me thinking about going into law teaching. I applied for law teaching jobs a couple of a few months later. I applied incredibly unintelligently. One of the questions on the form you fill out is where would you like to go geographically as a law professor? What’s your geographical preference? And if, Todd, if I asked you right now, I know you could give the right answer to that question. The right answer for somebody who’s desperate to get a law teaching job is, I will go anywhere in the world that you want me to go.
But that’s not the answer I gave. The answer I gave was I’d like to stay in the Philadelphia area if possible. So I didn’t get lots of interviews. But I did happen to get one interview in Philadelphia, which was an interview at Temple. And the reason I got that interview is because of the same professor that I had was one of his closest friends in the world, was one of the deans at Templ, so I got the job. I interviewed there.
As I was there for my day long interview, presenting a paper, meeting with people, I knew this was what I was called to do. And if I had not gotten the job, I would have just waited another year, applied again, done it more intelligently. But there, there really was that day at Temple Law School, I just knew this was my calling. And I, I’ve never doubted it, never doubted it since. There’s never been a moment when I wondered if this was what God wants me to be doing.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask one more detail about your experience that I found fascinating. In addition to your efforts as a teacher and a scholar, you presently serve as chair of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. Would you please offer an overview of what those responsibilities entail?
David Skeel: Absolutely. So Puerto Rico, as there’s a lot of people who are listening will know is a territory of the United States. It’s been a territory since 1898. Starting in 2006, Puerto Rico has been in deep financial crisis. And in 2015, the governor of Puerto Rico said, we cannot pay our debts. Our debts are unpayable.
That kicked Congress into action and Congress ended up passing a statute. It’s a statute called PROMESA, which means promise in Spanish. And what that statute does is it creates this oversight board. It’s a seven person oversight board. The seven of us are nominated by the congressional leaders, the Senate majority leader, the House majority leader, the Senate minority leader, the House minority leader, and picked by the president.
And we have two main responsibilities. One is to restore fiscal responsibility, to balance the budgets, and we do that by certifying fiscal plans. And the other is to restructure the debt. So that’s what we’ve been doing for almost the last eight years.
We serve three-year terms. Your term can continue after three years if you’re not replaced. And so I’ve been, I’m in my second term. Actually, my second term has expired and I’ve been on the board almost, almost eight years. I’m now, as you, I think mentioned, I’m now the chair of the board. I will probably not be on the board too much, too much longer. But that’s what we’ve been doing.
The budgets are now balanced. We have restructured Puerto Rico’s debt. There was $70 billion of debt, $55 billion of unfunded pensions and we’ve restructured most of that, and we’re finishing with the last piece of it, which is the electricity company.
So that’s what I’ve been doing in my spare time. It’s an unpaid, pro-bono service opportunity, but it really is a privilege. It’s been an absolute privilege to not just be writing about these issues, not just be teaching about them, but actually be involved in them and trying to do something practically to help.
Todd Ream: How do you decide then which requests for public service such as this one to embrace versus which ones to decline? I would imagine as a law professor they can come with some frequency and you have to make some decisions.
David Skeel: I actually haven’t gotten too many requests for long-term or significant public service. I do get occasional requests, so I get requests to serve on nonprofit boards from time to time. And how I respond to those really has been different at different seasons in my life. So earlier on, I tended to say yes to those kinds of requests. Now I more often say no because, because I have uh, so many, I have other things that seem to me to be a higher priority.
It’s a good question and a difficult challenge because it’s tempting to say yes to everything because lots of the, lots of the things that you get asked to do are kind of exciting, kind of interesting, but anything you do is going to make it less possible for you to do other things and I’ve never been tempted to go into government, for instance, to do that kind of public service because I really love being a teacher and scholar. And so most, most of the requests that I get are much more, much more limited.
The Puerto Rico board was the one really big request that I never for a second really thought I could say no to. I mean, I really, I had kind of the opposite response to it. I thought this was my Esther moment.
So what I mean by Esther, my Esther moment is, there’s a famous passage in the Book of Esther where Esther’s cousin, I’m sure you know it, but I’ll just say it for folks who may not remember it. In the book of Esther, where Esther’s cousin, she’s trying to decide whether to intervene with the king, the king on behalf of the Jews, her people, and her cousin Mordecai says, maybe you were brought to the kingdom for just such a moment as this.
Being invited to do the Puerto Rico work after, at that point, it had been 25 years or so of studying and writing and teaching about bankruptcy, my reaction was, this is God calling me. I still think it was God calling me, but it was a little more complicated than I imagined it would be.
I was not, I was not the knight in shining armor coming in to save the day. It turned out to be much more complicated than that. But it really was the one major public service that fit so closely with what I cared about, what I teach about, what I write about, that I never even considered saying no.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Sounds like fascinating work and also tremendously important work for the people of Puerto Rico and for the government there.
In addition to your writing concerning corporate law and bankruptcy, you’re the author of True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World. Would you offer an overview of the argument that you make in that book and then offer a few comments about what led you to write it?
David Skeel: By way of overview, what I would say is a couple of things. One is, it’s a book of apologetics. It’s a defense of Christianity. The target audience for it is people for whom it would not even occur to them to take Christianity seriously so what it’s meant to do is to persuade people that Christianity is more interesting and relevant than they might have imagined.
And the particular the elevator pitch, as people sometimes say of the book, or the way I would describe the book is, I began with the widespread assumption among secular folks that the the complexity of the modern world is an embarrassment for Christianity, that a 2000 year-old religion can’t possibly have anything interesting or valuable or relevant to say about a world as complex as we now know the world to be.
And the argument that I make in the book is that that actually gets things exactly backwards. If you look at many of the deepest puzzles of our experience, why do we have consciousness? Why do we respond to beauty the way we respond to beauty? Why do we respond to suffering the way we respond to suffering, not just treating it as something that’s natural, but treating it as something that’s somehow wrong? Why do we long for justice and yet are continuously unable to, to achieve it?
I argue that with each of these issues and each of the chapters of the book corresponds to one of these issues, Christianity not only is has interesting things to say, but it has, I would argue, more interesting things to say often than the, the main alternative view of the world that offer in our modern experience, which is what I would call a science without God approach.
I don’t completely reject the findings of, or I don’t reject the findings of science, but I do believe that Christianity has really interesting things to say about these issues. And that’s, that’s what the book is about.
How I got prompted to write it, you know, I could do another whole podcast on that, but the short version of it is, I had a dear friend who was a leading criminal justice scholar named Bill Stuntz who, if he were still alive, you would for sure be reaching out to him to be on one of these podcasts. And Bill and I talked about these issues and we felt like there were some issues that a lot of the apologetics books that are most effective and most successful, don’t really talk about. And they’re the kinds of issues that I was just referring to.
And so we were planning on writing the book together and we, why, when we were planning to, to write the book together, he had, he had cancer and he knew he had cancer. And what he said was, if my diagnosis is good and I have time to live for a few years, this book will be a very high priority. But if not, I have this criminal justice book that I need to finish, and that will be the priority. And unfortunately, the diagnosis did not turn out to be good. And it turned out, he died in 2011.
Last conversation I had with him in person was in his house, a few miles from Cambridge, Massachusetts. And Bill, one of the things he said to me is, and this was just a couple of weeks before he died, he said the one thing I’m really sad that I will not be able to do in my mortal life is write this book we wanted to write. And so from the moment he passed away, I had a burden on my heart to make sure I wrote this book. And it took me a while to figure out what the book was really about but eventually I did and it became True Paradox.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I really appreciate that and the effort that you made and I’m sure he appreciated it too.
Earlier, we talked about the relationship that the study of law, teaching of law, public service, these all sort of share, as part of your vocation. But as a legal scholar, how do you define the academic vocation and perhaps in what ways has it changed or evolved over the course of your career?
David Skeel: Interesting, interesting question as, as they all are. The simple answer that I would give is I see my vocation as a scholar, not just a bankruptcy scholar or a legal scholar, but as a scholar as being engaged in the pursuit of truth. And there was a time when, when a statement like that was a pretty controversial statement in legal circles because the views of what the law is about really didn’t involve justice and didn’t involve truth.
Now, people talk a lot more about justice than they used to 10 years ago, and at least a little bit more about truth. And so I’ve always felt that being a law professor was about the pursuit of truth. The way that my vision of that has changed personally is there’s now for me, a large dimension of pragmatism to it and practicalness to it.
And the particular example that I would give is, early in my career, what I was trying to do as most law professors try to do is be part of the scholarly conversation and to debate the things that people were debating and it didn’t matter how esoteric it was and how far removed from anything in the real world it was. You know, I wanted to be part of that debate and they were interesting debates.
As the years have gone on, I personally have felt drawn more to thinking about and writing about issues that have practical significance, that have real policy implications. And so the writing that I do, I still believe it’s part of the pursuit of truth, but it has a little bit more of a practical and a little bit more of a policy dimension to it now. In part just because of who I am and where I am in my career. It’s a season in my career where I’m not just in my ivory tower anymore. I’m out in the world a little bit more.
Todd Ream: Thank you. And I assume have latitude to write, in more diverse ways or at least in more diverse venues than maybe you had earlier in your career too.
David Skeel: That’s a very good point. Early in my career, I mean, I always was a little diverse with what and where I wrote, but early in my career, my writing, 90 percent of my writing time was going to be spent on law reviews in the same law reviews other people are publishing in, because that’s the way the game works.
And so that is very much true. Later on in your career, after you have tenure, you don’t worry about taking a year to pursue something like True Paradox, which I I think is, has scholarly value, but it’s a very different kind of book than a book I would have written in the first five or ten years of my teaching career.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Think about those the next generation of legal scholars here in what ways, if any, do you think the Church needs to invest in the preparation of that next generation of legal practitioners and legal scholars?
David Skeel: Well, say a couple kind of divergent or different things about that. One of which is that I think the best way to foster legal scholars, as with many areas of academic inquiry, but particularly with law, is to be serious about the Bible.
I remember when I first started teaching, I had a student who was amazingly adroit about reading statutes, reading cases, sort of engaging in the law. And he was gifted in a lot of ways, but it all also did not entirely surprise me when I found out that he had done rabbinical training before he went to law school. Jews obviously focused very intently on Scripture and as evangelicals we do too.
And so I think the best way to prepare somebody for this kind of scholarly inquiry is serious intellectual engagement with the Bible, thinking about what the verses mean avoiding temptations to do things like proof texts, but really to read to read fully, to read to read regularly. So that’s the best thing I think folks can do.
Another somewhat different, although I think they connect up, kind of answer for me is, when I was first starting out my math isn’t as good as yours, so I can’t remember how many, I guess I graduated from college 41 years ago. Lots of evangelicals didn’t get involved in the professions and there was a little bit of a little bit of a hostility. I think this goes back to fundamentalism and mid-century fundamentalism in some respects.
And I remember it was back then a real breath of fresh air to read Francis Schaeffer because he was talking about how important it is that there be Christian lawyers and doctors and professionals, that if, if we don’t get into those disciplines, if Christians don’t get into those disciplines, how are people going to hear about Christ?
And that was really freeing for me. I was a new Christian. I didn’t become a Christian until college and I was kind of afraid that I had to give a lot of things up to be a Christian. And the idea that Christians should be in the professions, should be scholars was very refreshing to me.
I think now that people assume that we should be scholars and we should be lawyers and doctors, but I also think there tends to be a kind of us versus them mentality in a lot of circles, including a lot of the circles that I’m in. And that us versus them mentality often ends up manifesting as an anti-intellectualism.
You know, the kind of thing that Mark Noll talked about a generation ago in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. So we would say that we’re not doing it now, or people like me would say we’re not doing it now but I think that the us versus they mentality tends to foster that. And so one very practical thing I would say is try to avoid that mentality. Try to assume good faith in the people that you’re engaging with.
And to use a term that the sociologist James Davison Hunter coined or used, I think we’re better able to have a faithful presence, to be a faithful presence, when we’re engaging in good faith and assuming that people are engaging with us in, in good faith.
So I think those would be the two things that I would say is if you read the Bible, read it even more than you are and engage in discussion with friends fellow church members about Scripture as we naturally do and the other is try where you can to avoid a we versus them kind of mentality. And I think what comes out of that is things like being a law professor, being a lawyer, will seem much more natural and much less oppositional than I think they often seem right now.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As our time just about comes to a close here, I want to ask you to extend that advice, if you would, to faculty members who may be preparing students and helping them discern a calling to the law. What would you encourage them to think about? What practices would you encourage them to engage their students in? What sort of concerns, priorities, et cetera, would you encourage them to have as they try to serve their students and prepare them for a possible career stewarding the law?
David Skeel: Well, as a faculty member, what can faculty members do? You know, a couple things that I would say is, one is be available for your students. You can’t be a mentor for students if you’re not available to them. And those of us who do a lot of research or scholarly research, I don’t do what a scientist would call real research, but I do what I call research, there is a temptation not to be available to students and not to take an active interest in their lives. So one thing is to just be available to them.
Another thing I would say, which isn’t directly related to your question, but I think is, is important for Christian professors, and that is I think it’s really important to be public about your faith. I think it’s important that people know that you are a Christian. In the current moment, a lot of people are, who are Christians in secular universities, as I am, are tempted to hide their faith because in some circles, being a Christian is a negative rather than a positive, but if students don’t know that there are Christian professors you know, I think there’s a huge loss.
And so just making it known that you’re a Christian, I think can be really encouraging to a young Christian who’s thinking about, do they want to go into law or to another profession. So those are a couple of things that I would say.
From the perspective of, of what kind of advice to give the students there are two things that I would, would mention. One is, I’d be sure to tell them to count the costs. It is very difficult to be a lawyer. It is a very grueling profession in any law firm. Law firms vary. You know, big firm law firms are more intense than smaller, or big city law firms are more intense than small town law firms often, but it is a grueling profession. And so it’s very important that people go into it with their eyes open.
You know, lots of folks who become lawyers will go into other areas. They’ll become government lawyers. They may become public interest lawyers. Most of these are pretty intense as well. But the majority will go into private practice and it is grueling. So that’d be the first thing I would say.
The second thing I would say, which cuts in the, the exact opposite direction is, if you can afford it so law school is expensive, both in terms of time and money. If you get a scholarship or if you can afford law school, law school is never wasted on anyone. Law is so important to the way this country runs, that having been to law school is an enormous benefit, even for people who never practice law.
Just to give a little example from my experience of that, the executive director of the Puerto Rico oversight board we talked about earlier, the executive director is the person who runs our 80 or 90 person staff on a day-to-day basis. He was the New York state budget director and he worked in state government for decades. He went to law school just so that he would understand law and be able to engage with lawyers and understand the way the government works.
So the downside of law is it’s grueling and it’s very important that students be aware of it. The upside is it is really important and for those for whom it really is a calling, it’s a very exciting way to make a living.
Todd Ream: Great advice as we close our conversation today. Thank you.
Our guest has been David A. Skeel Jr., the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
David Skeel: Thanks, Todd. It’s been a pleasure.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
