Law Commons^™

The Contested Value Of Normative Legal Scholarship, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal scholarship, under attack from critics both inside and outside the legal academy, is on the horns of a “normativity” dilemma. To some critics, legal scholarship isn’t scholarship, because it’s too normative; while to others, it may be scholarship, but it’s not legal because it’s not normative enough.

In this article, I address one side of this issue, what I call the anti-normativity complaint: to wit, that legal scholarship is somehow not “true scholarship” because so much of it is overtly normative. Legal scholarship, according to this strand of criticism, isn’t true scholarship because of the dominance of “ought” …

Protecting The Watchdog: Using The Freedom Of Information Act To Preference The Press, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The fourth estate is undergoing dramatic changes. Many newspaper reporters, already surrounded by a growing number of empty desks, are shifting their focus away from costly investigative reporting and towards amassing Twitter followers and writing the perfect “share line.” Newspapers’ budgets can no longer robustly support accountability journalism and pitching fights against the government. And so, while this busier and noisier media environment may have a desirable democratizing effect—more of us are able to participate in analyzing, debating, and perhaps even making the news—it has not succeeded in filling a role that print journalists have traditionally played well—keeping watch on …

Inmate Legal Information Requests Analysis: Empirical Data To Inform Library Purchases In Correctional Institutions, Kimberli Kelmor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The introduction of legal content to Google Scholar made United States case law and law journal articles accessible to an unprecedented extent. With case law freely available and accurate bibliographic information for articles, could Google Scholar be accurate and complete enough for correctional institutions to forgo purchasing either print publications or fee-based services for these materials? This article empirically assesses whether Google Scholar can reliably answer the questions of inmates in a correctional facility, the Baltimore City Detention Center. As a comparison, the same questions are tested in Westlaw Correctional, a subscription database marketed to correctional institutions.