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The Contested Value Of Normative Legal Scholarship, Robin West
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” …