Established professors at the Law School also might choose to leave the School for the same reasons that assistant professors do not want to come. Two years ago, Professor Paul M. Bator left Harvard for the more conservative University of Chicago, and many professors said that others dissatisfied with the situation at Harvard could follow suit.

"I can imagine a dean at another law school perceiving that Harvard might be a reasonable place to fish for a catch from the faculty. People might think that if there is fighting, there may be somebody who wants to leave," said Carrington, who provoked an uproar in 1984 when he wrote that crits were "nihilists" and should not be allowed to teach in law schools.

All of these possibilities are based on the assumption that the perceptions about the political division at Harvard are true. Every outside scholar said that there was a line between healthy debate and destructive fractiousness.

But that line is sometimes difficult to determine as law schools thrive on intellectual differences. "Disagreements over doctrine, arguments over approaches to the law and where we're going, occur and hopefully will occur in any law faculty," Friedenthal said. "A law school should be on the knife edge of debate."

Friedenthal said that a school's environment was affected by "any dispute that raises itself to the level where those involved begin to lose sight of the overall educational value of dissent."

"If people are no longer valued for their merits and if faculty members begin to disparage their colleagues, all the advantages of intellectual debate are gone," Friedenthal said. "Within the confines of respect the debate is fine, but once the issue is who's going to be allowed onto the faculty, you have a serious problem on your hands."

"It's extremely unfortunate if people are making ideology a criterion for the tenure process," Choper said. "There could be more effect on the long term nature of the institution, if quality is submissive to ideology. It could even damage a great law school like Harvard."

But this damaging division does not necessarily grow out of intellectual debate. Friedenthal said that Stanford has a substantial number of professors sympathetic to the tenets of CLS--considered to be the second largest concentration of crits after Harvard--without the debate spilling over into the tenure process.

Once a school crosses the line, however, it is difficult to cross back. "The whole thing's a shame," Williams said. "I am reasonably convinced that most of the faculty that are so divided up there wish that it weren't so polarized. But once a faculty is polarized, it's hard to find a way back to community."

And to those outside the University, Harvard Law School has crossed the line. "It's a joke--that's what people are saying about you here, you know," Macauley said. "It's a fine law school, but it's rather sad. It's both a joke and terribly sad."