Law Commons^™

How To Fix Legal Scholarmush, Adam Kolber

Indiana Law Journal

Legal scholars often fail to distinguish descriptive claims about what the law is from normative claims about what it ought to be. The distinction couldn’t be more important, yet scholars frequently mix it up, leading them to mistake legal authority for moral authority, treat current law as a justification for itself, and generally use rhetorical strategies more appropriate for legal practice than scholarship. As a result, scholars sometimes talk past each other, generating not scholarship but “scholarmush.”

In recent years, legal scholarship has been criticized as too theoretical. When it comes to normative scholarship, however, the criticism is off the …

Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given. We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant …

What We Make Matter, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

The Michigan Law Review's Survey of Books Related to the Law provides an annual opportunity not only to consider a range of legal issues and views, but also to think about the range of ways we argue about and study the law. In this Foreword, I would like to suggest that we think not only about how we choose to argue, but also the potential consequences of those choices. When we study or argue about law and politics, we routinely and sensibly consider the possible unintended impact of particular substantive rules and policies. Here I suggest that we should attend …

Setting The Stage: A Quick Glance Back At The Journal's History, Julia L. Ernst

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This symposium, organized by the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, explored several cutting-edge topics related to its over-arching theme, "Rhetoric & Relevance: An Investigation into the Present and Future of Feminist Legal Theory." When the journal editors invited me to provide a few opening remarks, they informed me that: the goal of this symposium is to have a series of discussions about current happenings in the field of feminist legal scholarship, so that we may start to answer the question, "What's next?" These discussions will take place in the form of panels that focus on particular areas of the …

Is International Law Fair?, Gerry J. Simpson

Michigan Journal of International Law

Review of Fairness in International Law and Institutions by Thomas M. Franck

The Unintended Cultural Consequences Of Public Policy: A Comment On The Symposium, Richard H. Pildes

Michigan Law Review

In this essay, I want to try to build on it in order to suggest forms a genuinely New Public Law scholarship might take. My aim is to embrace much of what New Public Law thought has urged: the marginality of common law doctrine or judicial decisionmaking; the need to attend to profound disaffections with the modem regulatory state; an acceptance of the complex, dynamic relationship of public policy and private understandings; a recognition that public values are constituted not only at the grandest levels of policy formation, but also in the myriad microscopic day-to-day experiences of policy. In my …

The New Public Law Movement: Moderation As A Postmodern Cultural Form, William N. Eskridge Jr., Gary Peller

Michigan Law Review

The past twenty years have witnessed an explosion of public law scholarship, as legal scholars reconceptualized themes of administrative law, legislation, and constitutional law; created almost from scratch whole new areas of public law scholarship, including discrimination, environmental, and consumer protection theory; and enlivened discourse with concepts drawn from microeconomics, public choice theory, civic republicanism, practical philosophy, and hermeneutics. This intellectually intense activity has suggested the possibility that public law discourse has entered a "critical stage" and stimulated the Michigan Law Review to hold a conference in October 1990 on whether there is something that might be called "New Public …

The Concept Of Law And The New Public Law Scholarship, Edward L. Rubin

Michigan Law Review

This article is an attempt to identify the nature of an emerging field of legal scholarship known as "New Public Law." "New," of course, is a dangerous term. Our society's image of itself as forward looking and its tendency to market itself to itself through claims of novelty has spawned a range of phrases from the New Deal to the New Criticism to various new, improved laundry detergents. One does not hear very many positive comments about the "old" these days. The argument that old ways of doing things are better has become an emblem of mistaken thought, and the …