Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin has another post on the role of doctrinalism in the legal academy. If you've been following the thread, this one is a must-read. A taste:

To be a professor of law-- as opposed to a professor of philosophy or biology-- is to be perpetually beholden to that professional discourse and practice; it is to be seen by everyone else, if not yourself, as member of a professional cadre. This strains one's claims to be a philosopher, a social scientist, a humanist, or indeed anything else.

Some legal scholars embrace this professional identity willingly. Others are more ambivalent. But all of us recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that in some way we must distance ourselves from simply being case and statute crunchers if we aspire to be intellectually serious and therefore deserve the title of academic or policy expert or social scientist or humanist or philosopher. The latter, we know in our heart of hearts, aren't mindnumbing case crunchers-- they are in pursuit of the true, the good, the just and the beautiful. That's what we are after too, and as Einer tells us, finally, we are just about to get there. Indeed, to quote Karen Carpenter, we've only just begun.