Law Commons^™

Scholarship Advice For New Law Professors In The Electronic Age, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

The article suggests that the legal academy is in a time of transition between promotion and tenure rules based on traditional methods of publication and contemporary electronic and interdisciplinary possibilities for publication. While a number of articles contain recommendations for newer law professors about the process of scholarship, most of those articles are between five and twenty years old and do not address publishing in the age of blogs, expedited reviews, electronic submissions, and open-access databases.

The substance and length of what law professors write, the formats in which they do so, and the fora in which they publish are …

Defining Cutting Edge Scholarship: Feminism And Criteria Of Rationality, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

All too often, attempts to define or evaluate good scholarship develop criteria of meritocracy that reinforce existing hierarchies. Some of the efforts are quantitative. They involve cataloguing articles as measured by overall citation rates, ranking law reviews by citation counts, or classifying articles on a "greatest hits" list. Or they may count citations to construct a list of articles most-often-cited in fancy publications. Other efforts to describe quality scholarship involve the construction of criteria of merit, often for purposes of pronouncing what sorts of scholarship qualify for tenure, and for disqualifying nontraditional ideas and forms of writing as unworthy. The …