Why Law Porn?

Professor Ann Bartow really wants to know why it's called law porn.

"Guess I’m not going to get a serious answer…" she snipes:

Dan Solove posted about “A Law Porn Blog” here at Concurring Opinions. I raised this query: “I’m curious, why is the analogy/metaphor law PORN?” And I’d really like to know why “porn” is the descriptor of choice for fancy brochures that law schools circulate to increase their visibility and supposedly, prestige.

We have a serious answer for Professor Bartow. Not surprisingly, the answer comes from Professor Brian Leiter in a post on Leiter Reports, his old blog, as far back as October 1, 2004. Apparently, this neuphemism has etymological roots not in sexism, but in Sextonism:

"Sextonism," after former NYU Law School Dean John Sexton (now President of NYU), is a disease familiar to law faculty, in which a good school suddenly lapses in to uncontrolled and utterly laughable hyperbole in describing its faculty and accomplishments to its professional peers. The NYU alumni magazine, which was sent to all law faculty nationwide, was so plagued by Sextonism that a Stanford professor [Pamela S. Karlan] memorably dubbed it "law porn."

A year later, this classic post appeared on The Columnist Manifesto. And every year since, law professors have blogged about law porn, much to the chagrin of feminists and curmudgeons alike, as noted by Professor Paul Caron here:

Pam Karlan has graciosuly allowed me to share with TaxProf Blog readers her defense of the term "law porn" in an email exchange last night:

When I started using the term "law porn" to refer to the glossy promotional materials from various law schools (and I don't know whether someone else used it first and I just picked it up or whether I was the originator), I was playing off an existing expression -- "food porn." That phrase referred to a kind of breathless, over-the-top journalism about obscure recipes, usually accompanied by arty photos of food shot with annoying lighting techniques and the like. My guess is that the word "porn" was being used there to refer to the titillating way the articles appealed to the senses. Lots of people had been using that term. I was struck by the resemblances between the law school magazines and the foodie publications. Like the food magazines, the law school magazines were characterized by arty photos that often seemed designed to make the buildings or the faculty look vaguely sexy, using come-hither photos. Like the food magazines, the law school magazines used overblown language littered with adjectives designed to convey a sort of excitement. All you need to do is to look at the cover of the current issue of NYU's magazine, with its "Dworkin on Dworkin" cover, and, at least if you're in the legal academy, you'd see what I mean by law porn.

The entire point of calling the magazines "law porn" was to make fun of them, so the fact that the term seems nonsensical to you suggests its utility. At least within the community to which I was directing my remarks -- namely, friends in my faculty lounge and colleagues at other law schools -- my experience has been that the phrase communicates exactly what I intended: people instantly recognize the phenomenon and share my reaction to it.

Mr. Giacalone refuses to yield:

[S]ince your off-the-cuff phrase is now being repeated in the blawgisphere, I am a bit concerned that it will become imbedded -- along with the confusing "porn" suffix -- in a language that continues to lose its commonality and therefore its ability to communicate outside tiny cliques.