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Reflections On The Nature Of Legal Scholarship In The Post-Realist Era, Marin Roger Scordato

Scholarly Articles

This article presents a tightly organized and closely reasoned analysis of legal scholarship in the current post-realist era. Secure and well-defined within the formalist legal world of the nineteenth century, the practice of legal scholarship has been profoundly affected by the realist revolution of the early twentieth century and the instrumentalist view of law that now prevails in the twenty-first century. In response, legal scholars have been forced to dramatically alter the focus, the materials and the basic methods of their study. The practice of legal scholarship is currently occupied in a prolonged struggle to adapt to these changes and …

Empirical Research For Public Policy: With Examples From Family Law, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Perhaps more than in any other field, legal scholarship has aimed directly at influencing public policy. Hence, it is not surprising that empirical scholarship on law related issues often seems to have an agenda that extends beyond the common social science goals of adding to our knowledge base and understanding of human behavior to suggesting to policy makers and practitioners legal and administrative changes that will ameliorate problems they confront and, by the researcher’s lights, make this a better world in which to live.

Wikipedia And The Future Of Legal Education, Beth Simone Noveck

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Six Degrees Of Cass Sunstein, Paul H. Edelman, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means …

Legal Scholarship, Humility, And The Scientific Method, David J. Herring

Articles

This essay responds to the question of What next for law and behavioral biology? by describing an approach to legal scholarship that relies on the scientific method. There are two steps involved in this approach to legal scholarship. First, the legal scholar must become familiar with an area of scientific research that is relevant to the development of law and policy. (This essay uses behavioral biology research as an example.) Second, the legal scholar must seek and form relationships across disciplines, becoming an active member of a scientific research team that conducts studies relevant to particular issues of law and …

Caveat Blogger: Blogging And The Flight From Scholarship, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These comments were delivered to the “Symposium on Bloggership” held at Harvard Law School on April 28, 2006. Professor Randy Barnett discusses the pros and cons of blogging by legal scholars.

What The Internet Age Means For Female Scholars, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is the Internet-driven transformation of legal scholarship good for the girls, or bad for the girls?

Will it remove some of the handicaps that have dogged women's efforts to join the ranks of scholarly "superstars"? Or will it only increase the professional obstacles still faced by women in legal academia? In this short Essay, the author tries to predict some of the promises and perils that the Internet holds for women in the legal academy.

Blogging And The Transformation Of Legal Scholarship, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does blogging have anything to do with legal scholarship? Could blogging transform the legal academy? This paper suggests that these are the wrong questions. Blogs have plenty to do with legal scholarship--that's obvious. But what blogs have to do with legal scholarship isn't driven by anything special about blogs qua weblogs, qua collections of web pages that share the form of a journal or log. The relationship between blogging and the future of legal scholarship is a product of other forces--the emergence of the short form, the obsolesce of exclusive rights, and the trend towards the disintermediation of legal scholarship. …

Philosophy V. Rhetoric In Legal Education: Understanding The Schism Between Doctrinal And Legal Writing Faculty, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The author argues that although legal writing faculty know that what they teach is absolutely essential to their students' success, yet it continues to be grossly, even embarrassingly, undervalued in legal education. Doctrinal legal faculty perpetuate the view that legal education is a philosophical endeavor that focuses on the truth about the nature of law and, in the twenty-first century, on the law's ability to serve justice in a multicultural America. Because of their political power, however, doctrinal faculty are able to preserve the task of truth finding for themselves. Since the nature of truth is independent of its practical …

Redefining Open Access For The Legal Information Market, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

The open access movement in legal scholarship, inasmuch as it is driven within the law library community over concerns about the rising cost of legal information, fails to address - and in fact diverts resources from - the real problem facing law libraries today: the soaring costs of nonscholarly, commercially published, practitioner-oriented legal publications. The current system of legal scholarly publishing - in student-edited journals and without meaningful peer review - does not face the pressures to increase prices common in the science and health disciplines. One solution to this problem is for law schools to redirect some of their …

Why Do Empirical Legal Scholarship?, Theodore Eisenberg

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

People conduct legal scholarship for many different reasons. This Article focuses on the demand for and reaction to scholarship that helps inform litigants, policymakers, and society as a whole about how the legal system works. Law schools do little to train generations of lawyers in how to systematically assess the state of the legal system and the legal system's performance. Schools leave such assessments largely to self-interested advocates and to other disciplines. Self-interested advocates have less interest in objective assessment of the system than in pushing preferred policy agendas. Academic disciplines other than law have a distinct advantage in that …

Why We Write: Reflections On Legal Scholarship, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

My Dinner At Langdell's, Pierre Schlag

Publications

This essay begins on one of those cold wet April Cambridge mornings. It was too wet for fog, but too indifferent for rain. My head ached. My lips were dry and my tongue felt bloated. The fever had surely come back. Worse - the laudanum was wearing off. Tonight would be dinner at Langdell's. It occurred to me that not everyone is invited to Langdell's for dinner - certainly not wayward law professors from the provinces. This was an extraordinary opportunity. Blackstone would be there. Duncan Kennedy perhaps. Certainly the early Llewellyn. I knocked on the door.

Judicial And Law Review Citation Frequencies For Articles Published In Different 'Tiers' Of Law Journals: An Empirical Analysis, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

An empirical study of the judicial and law journal citation frequencies for a large and comprehensive sample of 550 articles that were published from 1996 through 1998 in fifteen selected law journals resulted in several findings. First, these articles averaged only 0.4 judicial citations and 14.5 law journal citations through May 30, 2003. Second, both courts and scholars cite articles that are published in the three most prestigious law journals at much higher rates than they cite articles that appear in either mid-level or lower-tier law journals. Third, courts virtually ignore altogether legal scholarshipthat appears in lower-tier law journals. Finally, …

American Law Schools As A Model For Japanese Legal Education? A Preliminary Question From A Comparative Perspective, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

Law faculties in Japan are asking whether and how they should remake themselves to become law schools. One basic issue has been framed in terms of whether such programs should be professional or general. One Japanese scholar put it pointedly: "[a] major issue of the proposed reform is whether Japan should adopt an American model law school, i.e., professional education at the graduate level, while essentially doing away with the traditional Japanese method of teaching law at university." American law schools are seen as having as their fundamental goal "to provide the training and education required for becoming an effective …

A Reply--The Missing Portion, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

Feminist Legal Scholarship: Charting Topics And Authors, 1978-2002, Laura A. Rosenbury

UF Law Faculty Publications

In their call for papers, the organizers of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law’s Spring 2003 symposium “Why a Feminist Law Journal?” posed several questions, including: "Are feminist law journals a victim of their own success? Have they outlived their usefulness?" and "What is the state of feminist legal scholarship today? What constitutes feminist scholarship?" As a new member of the legal academy, my answers to their questions depend on answers to two more basic questions: What has been published in feminist law journals? And, how do those articles relate to feminist articles published in non-specialty, or flagship, law …

Joining Forces: The Role Of Collaboration In The Development Of Legal Thought, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For every reason to believe that collaboration has been influential... there is a countervailing reason to believe that it has played a minor role in the evolution of legal thought. It may be easy to bring to mind a handful of prominent collaborations, but most law review articles seem to be written by one author (notwithstanding their lengthy acknowledgment footnotes, suggesting that even single-author works are shaped by the insights and input of multiple scholars). And while it is true that legal scholars often collaborate on their practically oriented works, scholarly articles might not be well suited to collaboration.

Endowment Effects Within Corporate Agency Relationships, Jennifer H. Arlen, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Behavioral economics is an increasingly prominent field within corporate law scholarship. A particularly noteworthy behavioral bias is the "endowment effect" – the observed differential between an individual's willingness to pay to obtain an entitlement and her willingness to accept to part with one. Should endowment effects pervade corporate contexts, they would significantly complicate much common wisdom within business law, such as the presumed optimality of ex ante agreements. Existing research, however, does not adequately address the extent to which people manifest endowment effects within agency relationships. This article presents an experimental test for endowment effects for subjects situated in an …

Joining Forces: The Role Of Collaboration In The Development Of Legal Thought, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For every reason to believe that collaboration has been influential... there is a countervailing reason to believe that it has played a minor role in the evolution of legal thought. It may be easy to bring to mind a handful of prominent collaborations, but most law review articles seem to be written by one author (notwithstanding their lengthy acknowledgment footnotes, suggesting that even single-author works are shaped by the insights and input of multiple scholars). And while it is true that legal scholars often collaborate on their practically oriented works, scholarly articles might not be well suited to collaboration.

Critical Approaches To Property Institutions, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …

Book Review: Postmodern Legal Movements: Law And Jurisprudence At Century's End By Gary Minda, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Postmodem Legal Movements does two things. First, the bulk of the book provides an overview of American jurisprudence, from Christopher Columbus Langdell to the present. This overview is necessary because, in order to understand "postmodem forms of jurisprudence, we must first explore what came before postmodernism, that is, modernism" (p. 5). Second, the relatively short latter portion of the book presents an argument about the current state of American legal scholarship and its future. Minda's picture of contemporary legal thought is that of a paradigm shift in the making.

Postmodern Legal Movements will prove useful to those in search of …

Teaching Research To Faculty: Accommodating Cultural And Learning-Style Differences, Jane Thompson

Publications

Ms. Thompson explores the challenge of teaching law school faculty how to research effectively, especially in light of a unique "faculty culture" and differences in individual learning styles.

Manuscript Selection Anti-Manifesto, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Joining a conversation begun by James Lindgren, An Author's Manifesto, 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 527 (1994), Prof. Tobias discusses the process of submission, review, and editorial work on articles published in student-edited law reviews.

An Author's Manifesto (Manifesto) constructively criticizes the amazingly arcane process of law review publication and affords salient suggestions for its improvement. The essay treats two aspects of this process-the selection of manuscripts and the editing of articles which sustain that venerable institution: student-edited law journals. Manifesto regales readers with many terrible tales of travesties which involve article editing but recounts comparatively few sordid stories that …

Beyond The Moot Law Review: A Short Story With A Happy Ending, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

When the author began teaching at the Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1982, it was publishing at great expense a law review that few cited, few professors would write for, and few, if anyone, read. For this reason, he dubbed it a "moot law review" in that students were working hard to produce a publication that mimicked "real" law reviews-that is, law reviews that contribute to intellectual discourse and the body of legal knowledge.

The fact that you are reading this page (and others in this issue) is evidence that the Chicago-Kent Law Review is no longer a moot law …

Legal Classics: After Deconstructing The Legal Canon, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

The debate over the canon has gripped the University in recent years. Defenders of the canon argue that canonical texts embody timeless and universal themes, but critics argue that the process of canonization subordinates certain people and viewpoints within society in order to assert the existence of a univocal tradition. Originating primarily in the field of literary criticism, the canon debate recently has emerged in legal theory.

Professor Francis J. Mootz argues that the issues raised by the canon debate are relevant to legal scholarship, teaching and practice. After reviewing the extensive commentary on the literary canon, Professor Mootz criticizes …

Advocacy And Scholarship, Paul F. Campos

Publications

The apex of American legal thought is embodied in two types of writings: the federal appellate opinion and the law review article. In this Article, the author criticizes the whole enterprise of doctrinal constitutional law scholarship, using a recent U.S. Supreme Court case and a Harvard Law Review article as quintessential examples of the dominant genre. In a rhetorical tour de force, the author argues that most of modern constitutional scholarship is really advocacy in the guise of scholarship. Such an approach to legal scholarship may have some merit as a strategic move towards a political end; however, it has …

The Mind In The Major American Law School, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal …

Law Review Usage And Suggestions For Improvement: A Survey Of Attorneys, Professors, And Judges, Max Stier, Kelly M. Klaus, Dan L. Bagatell, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We do not need to worry about the consumers of law reviews because they really do not exist. A few professors who author texts must read some of the articles, but most volumes are purchased to decorate law school library shelves. The only purchasers of law reviews outside of academe are law firms which gladly pay for the volumes even though no one reads them.

Writing For Judges, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.