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Full-Text Articles in Legal Education
Citations, Justifications, And The Troubled State Of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn
Citations, Justifications, And The Troubled State Of Legal Scholarship: An Empirical Study, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn
UF Law Faculty Publications
Recent pedagogical, economic and technological changes require law schools to reevaluate their resource allocations. Although typically viewed in terms of curricular changes, it is important also to focus on the very significant investment in legal scholarship and its impact. Typically this has been determined by some version of citation counting with little regard for what it means to be cited. This Article discusses why this is a deeply flawed measure of impact. Much of that discussion is based on an empirical study the authors conducted. The investigation found that citation by other authors is highly influenced by the rank of …
Disciplining Legal Scholarship, Lynn M. Lopucki
Disciplining Legal Scholarship, Lynn M. Lopucki
UF Law Faculty Publications
U.S. law schools are hiring large proportions of J.D.-Ph.D.s in tenure-track faculty positions in an effort to increase the quantity and quality of empirical legal scholarship. That effort is failing. The new recruits bring methods and objectives unsuited to law. They produce lower-than-predicted levels of empiricism because they compete on the basis of methodological sophistication, devote time and resources to disputes over arcane issues in statistics and methodology, prefer to collaborate with other Ph.D.s, and intimidate empiricists whose work does not require high levels of methodological sophistication. In short, Ph.D.s impose the cultures of their disciplines on legal scholarship. Importing …