Is interdisciplinarity a bad thing?

Brooksie, over at the phenomenal, not to mention prolific, the brooks blog, has turned me on to a most interesting article making the case against interdisciplinarity (in Law).

Anthony D'Amato's article, entitled 'The Interdisciplinary Turn in Legal Education' is available for download here. The article abstract states:

The nature of law and legal practice is changing with the addition of interdisciplinary scholars to law-school faculties and interdisciplinary studies to the law curriculum. However, the accessibility of non-law disciplinarians in the rest of the university raises the question of the cost-effectiveness and opportunity costs of importing them directly into the law school. This Article criticizes the interdisciplinary turn on three grounds. First is the unlikelihood that the joint-degreed persons who join the law faculty will happen to be the ones that their colleagues will end up collaborating with. Second is the even greater unlikelihood that any given discipline can communicate usefully with another discipline. Third is the opportunity-cost factor: that the new interdisciplinary courses will crowd out an essential part of the legal discipline, namely, an understanding of the foundations and dialectical evolution of its forms of language.

It is a fascinating article, not only because it is enjoyable even for those of us who generally don't read the law literature, but because of the broader issues about education that it raises. The issue of interdisciplinarity goes beyond legal studies (the merger mania at UK universities is one manifestation thereof) and this is precisely the kind of questions we should ask ourselves, and also which the many funding bodies who increasingly emphasise interdisciplinarity in funding requirements should think twice about.

technorati tags: Anthony D'Amato, Law, legal studies, interdisciplinary, interdisciplinarity, brooks blog