Legal Profession Commons^™

Creating Space For Silence In Law School Collaborations, A. Rachel Camp

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law school programs are increasingly expanding collaborative experiences for their students. In many clinical programs, collaboration -- through team pairings and group work – has been the norm, and gradually, collaborative work is being developed throughout the doctrinal law school curriculum. This trend fits within a broader societal emphasis on a collaborative model of working and learning. In both professional and educational settings, collaboration is viewed as critical to the success of ideas and products. Learning theory consistently identifies learning as being “inherently social” and best retained when engaged in with others. And, collaboration can substantially benefit the final work …

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” …