Law Commons^™

The Book Review Issue: An Owner's Guide, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

Law reviews have short memories. Other institutions count on long-term managers and well-kept files to preserve the experience of the past. But there is no remembrance of things past in an institution whose officers serve - fileless and frantic - for a single year. I want to use the opportunity this volume's editors have kindly given me to contribute to the Michigan Law Review's institutional memory. Editors past, present, and future may be curious about when and why the book review issue was conceived and born. I will briefly tell that story. More significantly, however, I want to relate the …

Breaking Into The Academy: The 1998-2000 Michigan Journal Of Race & Law Guide For Aspiring Law Professors, Gabriel J. Chin, Denise C. Morgan

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

I was not very far into my law school experience when I realized that my professors had the best job in town-it took me quite a bit longer to discover that I, too, could get in on the deal. Do not misunderstand me-being a law professor is not easy. In fact, when done correctly, the job requires a tremendous amount of intellectual energy, emotional commitment, long hours, and hard work. However, if you enjoy writing, research, public speaking, and developing mentoring relationships, being a law professor could be the career for you. This Article, and the listings of helpful organizations …

The Cathedral' At Twenty-Five: Citations And Impressions, James E. Krier, Stewart J. Schwab

Articles

It was twenty-five years ago that Guido Calabresi and Douglas Melamed published their article on property rules, liability rules, and inalienability' Calabresi, then a law professor, later a dean, is now a federal judge. Melamed, formerly a student of Calabresi's, is now a seasoned Washington attorney. Their article-which, thanks to its subtitle, we shall call The Cathedral-has had a remarkable influence on our own thinking, as we tried to show in a recent paper2 This is not the place to rehash what we said then, but a summary might be in order. First, we demonstrated that the conventional wisdom about …

Random Thoughts By A Distant Collaborator, Wayne R. Lafave

Michigan Law Review

A Tribute to Jerry Israel

Tribute To Jerry Israel, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Michigan Law Review

A Tribute to Jerry Israel

A Tribute To Professor Jerold Israel--My Teacher, My Co-Author, My Good Friend, Paul D. Borman

Michigan Law Review

A Tribute to Jerry Israel

A Tribute To Jerry Israel: A Friend With A Messy Office, Debra Ann Livingston

Michigan Law Review

A Tribute to Jerry Israel

Breaking Into The Acadamy: The 1996-97 Michigan Journal Of Race & Law Guide For Aspiring Law Professors, Gabriel J. Chin, Denise C. Morgan

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

I was not very far into my law school experience when I realized that my professors had the best job in town-it took me quite a bit longer to discover that I, too, could get in on the deal. Do not misunderstand me-being a law professor is not easy. In fact, when done correctly, the job requires a tremendous amount of intellectual energy, emotional commitment, long hours, and hard work. However, if you enjoy writing, research, public speaking, and developing mentoring relationships, being a law professor could be the career for you. This Article, and the listings of helpful organizations …

Bouquets For Jerry Israel, Yale Kamisar

Articles

As it turned out, of those asked to write a few words for an issue of the Michigan Law Review honoring Jerry Israel, I was the last to do so. And when I submitted my brief contribution to the Law Review I took the liberty of reading what the four others who paid tribute to Jerry had written. As a result, I feel like the fifth and last speaker at a banquet who listens to others say much of what he had planned to say.

On Becoming A Law Professor, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

Thirty-five years ago, when I first joined a law faculty, only one job description existed for law professors, that for the conventional classroom teacher. In the years since, the opportunities available to lawyers interested in teaching have become a bit more varied. In addition to conventional classroom teachers, a growing number of law teachers are employed by law schools to provide what I shall somewhat misleadingly call clinical instruction.1 Although these comments are addressed mainly to men and women interested in classroom teaching, a few lines about clinical teaching may be in order because the initial question for anyone considering …

The Growth Of Interdisciplinary Research And The Industrial Structure Of The Production Of Legal Ideas: A Reply To Judge Edwards, George L. Priest

Michigan Law Review

This brief response will attempt to repair these various deficiencies, though only in part because of the difficulty of the subject. It will try to explain more fully the rise of interdisciplinary legal research and will sketch the broader structure of the production and dissemination of new ideas about law and the legal system. The relationship between legal education and legal practice implicates an understanding of the "market" for legal ideas. To describe ideas as the subject of a "market," of course, has become conventional. In my view, however, the market metaphor most typically distorts our understanding of the issue, …

Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, And Practice To Life, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

Michigan Law Review

I share Judge Edwards' concern about the health of legal education and about lawyers as a force in society. I differ, however, in defining the sickness and prescribing the cure, at least when it comes to teaching. In my view, we need to integrate, not to dichotomize and polarize further, the practical and the impractical, the doctrinal and the theoretical. His critique, and my intuitive response to it, challenged me to examine and articulate where we disagree, based on what I have learned in my five years in the classroom and what it is I hope to accomplish in my …

Judge Edwards' Indictment Of "Impractical" Scholars: The Need For A Bill Of Particulars, Sanford Levinson

Michigan Law Review

I can summarize my response as follows: Although Judge Edwards' article certainly seems to be leveling a heartfelt indictment, it lacks a sufficiently precise bill of particulars to know exactly whom he has accused of doing what. Nor does one know exactly what penalty Judge Edwards would exact from the miscreants. Unless he supplies such a bill, his indictment should be dismissed, though, presumably, without prejudice to its reinstatement should he wish to do the hard work of supplying evidence for the charges he set out.

Lawyers, Scholars, And The "Middle Ground", Robert W. Gordon

Michigan Law Review

The Judge seems to be arguing that both teachers and firm lawyers have been seduced from their real vocation by the fatal attraction of neighboring cultures: the practitioners by the commercial culture of their business clients, the academics by the disciplinary paradigms and prestige of theory in the rest of the university. The "deserted middle ground" is the ground of professional practice - practical, yet also public-minded. Perhaps without straining his thesis too far we could ascribe to Judge Edwards a "republican" view of the legal profession, in which legal scholars, practitioners, judges, legislators, and administrators - despite their separate …

Wayne R. Lafave: Search And Seizure Commentator At Work And Play, Yale Kamisar, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

Starting in 1969,1 we have had the honor and pleasure of co-authoring a goodly number of casebooks, texts, treatises, pocket parts, and annual supplements (more than twenty) with Wayne LaFave.2 On each occasion we have been impressed by the quality of his mind and the judiciousness of his temperament, and impressed as well (and sometimes amazed) by his speed and efficiency.

Law Teachers' Writing, James Boyd White

Michigan Law Review

Judge Edwards divides scholarship into the theoretical and the practical, and, while conceding the place and value of both, argues that there is today too much of the former, too little of the latter. The result, he says, is an increasing and unfortunate divide between the life of law practice and the writing of law teachers. One can understand his complaint readily enough, especially coming as it does from an overworked judge. I myself have had perceptions and feelings somewhat like those that seem to animate Judge Edwards, though I would express them differently: for me the relevant line is …

Jean-Luc Godard And Critical Legal Studies (Because We Need The Eggs), Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn

Michigan Law Review

The New Wave in filmmaking is now thirty years old. Critical Legal Studies (CLS) has been around in one form or another for approximately a third of that time. We believe that by examining the avant-garde movement in film we may be able to anticipate what is in store for the avant-garde movement in law. Our conclusion is that just as New Wave film methodology has had only a limited impact on the film industry generally, CLS is likely to have a limited - perhaps only stylistic - effect on jurisprudential development.

The reason for the shortfall is that Godard …

William W. Bishop, Jr.: Vita And Bibliography, Michigan Journal Of International Law

Michigan Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Liberal Legal Scholarship, Ronald K.L. Collins, David M. Skover

Michigan Law Review

Earl Warren is dead.

A generation of liberal legal scholars continues, nevertheless, to act as if the man and his Court preside over the present. While this romanticism is understandable, it exacts a high price in a world transformed.

The following commentary is a reconstructive criticism written from the perspective of two liberals concerned about the future of "legal liberalism." We present our views as a commentary to emphasize their preliminary character; they represent our current assessment of where liberals stand and where they might redirect their energies.

The Practice And Discourse Of Legal Scholarship, Edward L. Rubin

Michigan Law Review

This article begins with a discussion of the critique of methodology, a characterization of standard legal scholarship in terms of the critique, and an exploration of the critique's relevance for this form of scholarship. The next section discusses the modes of legal analysis represented by the critical legal studies, law and literature, and law as practical reason movements, which draw from many of the same philosophic sources as the critique. Despite their common origin, these movements do not rely on the critique of methodology itself, and do not focus on standard legal scholarship. The Article then proceeds to offer a …

Introduction: "Plus Ça Change …?", Stephen B. Burbank

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This is a time of self-conscious attention to legal scholarship that, although hardly unprecedented, must seem remarkable to many in the profession. We hear of "malaise" in the academy, of the decline of doctrinal scholarship, and more generally, of the decline of law as an autonomous discipline. For some who believe it, the news may be profoundly disturbing, tolling the thirteenth hour on entire careers. For others, bearing the news-and having it believed-may be essential to launching or sustaining careers.

Most of us, I suspect, are inclined to suspend judgment, inured more than most mortals to the harsh reality that …

Reflections On Fuller And Perdue's The Reliance Interest In Contract Damages: A Positive Economic Framework, Avery Katz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Fuller and Perdue's classic article, The Reliance Interest in Contract Damages, is regarded by many contemporary contracts scholars as the single most influential law review article in the field. For those of us who teach and think about contracts from the perspective of law and economics, the consensus would probably be close to unanimous. The article displays an approach highly congenial to an economic perspective. The connection goes beyond Fuller and Perdue's explicitly functional approach to law (which law and economics shares with other schools of thought descended from the legal realists) and beyond Fuller and Perdue's focus on …

Derek Bok And The Merger Of Law And Economics, Herbert Hovenkamp

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Both the novelty and the uniqueness of the "law and economics" movement of the last fifteen years have been greatly exaggerated. Law and economics has been with us for at least a half century, in nearly every area of private and public law. The most outspoken protagonists of law and economics admit that economics had a presence in antitrust and regulatory policy long before the work of Ronald Coase, Lester Telser, and others inspired its expanded use in areas of private law, such as tort and contract. But even then, some of those who would make such an admission would …

Public Law Litigation And Legal Scholarship, Richard L. Marcus

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

It is hard to turn around nowadays without hearing about the malaise in legal scholarship. For example, Richard Posner, a former president of the Harvard Law Review, announced in that periodical's centenary issue that the Review "may have reached the peak of its influence-may, indeed, have started its journey down the mountain." If even the august Harvard Law Review is sliding, one does sense an ancien regime aroma of decay. But Posner's main message was that scholarship has become more diverse, and that the hegemony of traditional doctrinal analysis has been broken. More generally, the malaise is attributed to …

Neutral Principles In The 1950'S, Gary Peller

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Essay, I explore the intellectual setting within which Wechsler believed that defending freedom also required defending the legality of racial domination. I argue that the key to understanding this apparent paradox is to grasp the ideological/ cultural complex of the 1950's within which mainstream American intellectuals in law and in other disciplines came to terms with the disintegration of the traditional, "old order" paradigms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by means of an intense and overriding distinction between controversial issues of values and noncontroversial questions of framework and structure within which substantive conflict would take …

Appellate Justice Bureaucracy And Scholarship, William M. Richman, William L. Reynolds

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Many of the other Articles in this Symposium demonstrate that a single great piece of legal scholarship can have an enormous impact on the development of legal doctrine. This Article differs in two respects. First, it focuses not on a single seminal work, but rather on a developing literature authored by a large group of scholars. Second, it attempts to assess the impact of that literature not on the growth of legal theory, but on the development of a single legal institution-the United States Courts of Appeals.

Law Review Articles That Backfire, Gerald L. Neuman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Other articles in this Symposium have chronicled the real-world triumphs of legal scholarship. I have sadder tales to tell. I would like to discuss law review articles that have had an apparent influence on the course of legal development, but not in the manner that the author intended.

Many of the readers of this Symposium may have their favorite examples of this phenomenon. Such misfortunes can befall anyone; both of the instances I will describe involve a highly respected constitutional scholar, Professor Henry Paul Monaghan of Columbia Law School. They illustrate two mechanisms by which good scholarship can lead …

Francis A. Allen -- Selected Bibliography, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Selected Bibliography of Francis A. Allen's works.

Francis A. Allen: 'Confront[Ing] The Most Explosive Problems' And 'Plumbing All Issues To Their Full Depth Without Fear Or Prejudice', Yale Kamisar

Articles

Frank Allen began his distinguished teaching career more than thirty-five years ago - at a time when, at more law schools than we like to remember, "the basic criminal law course was routinely assigned to the youngest and most vulnerable member of the faculty or to that colleague suspected of mild brain damage and hence incompetent to deal with courses that really matter."' That those of us who taught criminal law years later were warmly received by our colleagues is in no small measure a tribute to the quality of mind and character and intellectual energy of people like Allen, …

The Next Step: Definition, Generalization, And Theory In American Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Journal of Law Reform's Symposium on Family Law comes opportunely, in legal scholarship's spring of hope, its winter of despair, at a time when we have everything before us, when we have nothing before us. As is natural in such an epoch, reflection about legal scholarship, about its history, purposes, and methods, has flourished. This Symposium invites us to extend that reflection to family law, and this essay attempts, tentatively and speculatively, to accept the invitation.