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Full-Text Articles in Law

Is Law A Discipline? Forays Into Academic Culture, Gene R. Shreve Mar 2020

Is Law A Discipline? Forays Into Academic Culture, Gene R. Shreve

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article explores academic culture. It addresses the reluctance in academic circles to accord law the full stature of a discipline. It forms doubts that have been raised into a series of four criticisms. Each attacks an academic feature of law, inviting the question: Is law different from the rest of the university in a way damaging its stature as an academic discipline? The Article concludes that, upon careful examination of each criticism, none establishes a difference between law and other disciplines capable of damaging law’s stature.


A Quartet Of Essays On Scholarship, David Barnhizer Sep 2015

A Quartet Of Essays On Scholarship, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

Regardless of academic rhetoric, universities are powerful institutional systems that are as doctrinaire and hidebound in their behavior as any other institution whose beneficiaries are seeking to protect vested interests or simply defend that with which they are most familiar and on which their training is based and reputations sustained. This is consistent with Keynes’ conclusion that most university faculty are little more than “academic scribblers” who live their lives content to operate within the safe confines of the ideas and reward system in which they were initially indoctrinated and from which they extract benefits. While the ideal of the …


A Trilogy Of Essays On Scholarship, David Barnhizer Jan 2015

A Trilogy Of Essays On Scholarship, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

At the beginning it is helpful to realize that the five versions of the scholarly ideal produce different forms of intellectual work with distinct goals and motivations. The scholar engaging in such activity can vary dramatically in terms of what the individual is seeking to achieve through his or her research output and actions that might be taken related to the findings reflected in that product. Similarly, there is a diverse set of targets at which the work is directed. These targets include communicating ideas and knowledge to other scholars who are invested in a specific sub-discipline. They also include …


Does Counterfactual History Have Any Lessons For Law Teachers And Lawyers? Does It Have Any Value For You, In Particular, In Your Area Of Research Or Teaching?, Arthur R. Landever Aug 2003

Does Counterfactual History Have Any Lessons For Law Teachers And Lawyers? Does It Have Any Value For You, In Particular, In Your Area Of Research Or Teaching?, Arthur R. Landever

Law Faculty Presentations and Testimony

A counterfactual is speculating on the consequences if particular events had not happened as they did. For example, suppose the British had won the American Revolutionary War. What would have been the British policy in North America? As law teachers, lawyers, and perhaps policy makers, counterfactual history has much value for us. Its value, however, clearly depends upon the care we take in choosing a plausible counterfactual assertion, the degree of its breadth or, alternatively, its limited nature, and how we make use of the counterfactual.


Freedom To Do What? Institutional Neutrality, Academic Freedom And Academic Responsibility, David R. Barnhizer Jan 1993

Freedom To Do What? Institutional Neutrality, Academic Freedom And Academic Responsibility, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Our topic is whether law schools should remain institutionally neutral, presumably concerning the fundamental political and moral issues that besiege our society. The answer depends on several competing considerations, including one's concept of the university as either ivory tower or critical force obligated to serve the society that sustains it. I opt in the direction of the university as social force while also accepting the validity of the passive mode and seeing the dispassionate search for knowledge as a means to serve important human needs. The abstract formulation of the university as institutionally neutral is in many ways illusory because …


The Revolution In American Law Schools, David Barnhizer Jan 1989

The Revolution In American Law Schools, David Barnhizer

Cleveland State Law Review

The majority of this Article has considered some of the changes that have come about in the focus of legal scholarship. Of equal importance are the shifts in curriculum and content that the schools have experienced. In some ways the shifts mirror changes in academic focus but curricular change has by and large altered much of what is actually done in the law schools while seeming, on the surface, to remain largely the same. The curriculum of the Cleveland State University College of Law provides an example of how law schools have responded innovatively to an expanded sense of professional …