Spotlight on Missoula, Montana — Home of the State’s Only Law Program (Wait, That Can’t Be Right)

By Michael Kelman Portney

Missoula is one of those towns that feels like it’s always explaining something — in the soft, unhurried tone of someone who just finished their third reading of Wendell Berry and wants you to know they compost. It’s beautiful, liberal, proud of its river, and proud of how often it’s said no to outsiders trying to make it louder, faster, or more like Bozeman.

It’s also home to something else. Something that sounds too improbable to be true in 2025:

Missoula houses the only law school in the state of Montana.
(Wait, that can’t be right.)

And yet it is.

One building. One pipeline. One small, quiet, polite gate into an entire state’s legal class. In a state that prides itself on independence, unpredictability, and hard-headed decentralization, every judge, every bar-certified prosecutor, every public defender and hearing officer most likely passed through the same faculty lounge, the same ethics seminars, the same institutional tone.

Montana, the Monoculture

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being small.
Montana knows that better than any state. That’s its power. But small turns dangerous when it becomes monoculture. When the same few hands train everyone, and those hands are never held accountable by any other hands, what you get isn’t strength. You get stasis.

Imagine if the only medical school in the state taught two surgeries — and everyone in the system quietly agreed to only perform those two.

That’s what happens when legal education is centralized into a single building. When oversight mechanisms, disciplinary bodies, and even appellate courts are populated by people who all attended the same lectures.

Missoula doesn’t just educate Montana’s lawyers.
It educates the people who investigate those lawyers.
And the people who judge those lawyers.
And the people who write the ethics opinions that tell everyone else what’s fair.

When You Leave the State, You Start to See It

I’ve lived in Texas. Houston. Austin. I’ve been in courthouses where the bench looked like the city. Black judges, Latino judges, Federalist Society judges, progressive reformers, Nixon appointees. Some were brilliant. Some were dangerous. But they were different.

Then I moved to Portland — and while Oregon has its own moral blind spots, the expectation is that leadership doesn’t always look like itself. That there should be friction. Skepticism. Conflict.

You get used to that.
You start to think it’s normal for judicial systems to argue with themselves.

And then you look at Montana — where the judges all seem to have read the same textbooks, at the same time, in the same school.

The Tone Becomes the Shield

Missoula doesn’t scream. It doesn’t scramble. It proceduralizes.
Ask hard questions and you’ll get polished sentences. You’ll hear “we’re looking into that,” “we’ve referred that for review,” “we’ve closed the matter internally.”

But what does it mean to “close the matter” when the same culture that created it is the one doing the closing?

When a citizen files a complaint, who handles it? A board of attorneys who passed through the same law school.
When a lawyer violates ethics? An oversight office who shares mentors, classes, and holiday party invites with the people involved.
When a judge crosses a line? A system built on polite, mutual silence.

In this setup, everyone is someone else’s student, and nobody is ever a whistleblower.

The Appearance of Movement

Montana’s judicial system is excellent at appearing busy.
A complaint gets acknowledged. A file gets sealed. A finding gets written.
But the results too often feel inevitable.

The procedures loop. The outcomes blur. The accountability dissolves.

That’s not corruption in the cinematic sense.
It’s the quieter, sturdier kind — the kind built into the structure.
It’s what happens when oversight becomes inheritance.

What Missoula Teaches — and What It Doesn’t

Missoula teaches law.
But it doesn’t teach what to do when the people applying the law are also the ones writing the rules about what happens when it’s broken.

And maybe that’s because it can’t.
How do you teach self-scrutiny in a system where nobody ever leaves the room?

Montana Independence Isn’t What You Think It Is

Montana likes to think it can’t be bought.
That it can’t be pressured.
That it’ll say no to D.C., no to corporate power, no to outsiders telling it how to run its affairs.

And maybe that’s true.

But what if the pressure isn’t coming from outside?
What if it’s already inside the system — protected by familiarity, by institutional friendships, by a shared belief that “we handle things our own way”?

That’s not independence. That’s insulation.

So What Happens Now?

I’m not naming names.
I’m not citing cases.
I’m just pointing out that in a state this large — geographically, historically, spiritually — there should never be just one place where the legal tone is set.

Missoula may be the state’s conscience.
But maybe it needs to hear a voice it didn’t train.

Because independence isn’t about being untouchable.
It’s about being accountable — before someone else forces it.