Law Commons^™

Thinking, Big And Small, Stephen B. Burbank

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Reading Kahneman's book and thinking about a tribute to Ed Cooper that has more substance than a bouquet have caused me to reflect on a phenomenon within the world of legal scholarship. I would call it a cognate phenomenon, but that would dishonor the empirical basis of Kahneman's work by suggesting a firmer basis for my reflections than the power of analogical reasoning. The phenomenon is the view that the goal of legal scholarship is or should be big ideas, particularly if they can claim the mantle of theory, rather than small ideas, particularly if they can be tarred with …

What Ed Cooper Has Taught Me About The Realities And Complexities Of Appellate Jurisdiction And Procedure, Catherine T. Struve

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this brief essay, I will describe some of what I have learned from Ed Cooper as a fellow participant in the rulemaking process and as a coauthor of two volumes of his Federal Practice and Procedure treatise. To describe everything that Ed has taught me would require much more than the length of this essay. So instead, I will try to offer some representative examples-or, as Ed might say, some "sketches." Because others will discuss Ed's expert guidance of the Rules Committees' consideration of key issues concerning the Civil Rules, my discussion of Ed's scholarship and reporting work will …

Databases And Dynamism, Michal Shur-Ofry

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Databases are generally perceived in legal scholarship as static warehouses, storing up valuable facts and information. Accordingly, scholarship on copyright protection of databases typically concentrates on the social need to access their content. This Article seeks to shift the focus of the debate, arguing that the copyrightdatabases debate is not merely a static "access to information" story. Instead, it is a dynamic story of relations, hierarchies, and interactions between pieces of information, determined by database creators. It is also a story of patterns, categories, selections, and taxonomies that are often invisible to the naked eye, but that influence our perceptions …

Frank Allen: An Appreciation, Richard Lempert

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Francis Allen was the Dean who hired me. First deans are, in their own way, as memorable as first kisses; they set expectations for all that follows. The expectations that Frank Allen set were high indeed. In this young professor's mind (I was 24 when I received my offer; 25 when I joined the faculty) he embodied what I still regard as the two most important academic virtues: scholarship and decency. These virtues combined to make him, at the time he accepted the Michigan deanship, perhaps the nation's most powerful voice for criminal justice reform and the country's leading scholar …

Introduction: "Plus Ça Change …?", Stephen B. Burbank

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This is a time of self-conscious attention to legal scholarship that, although hardly unprecedented, must seem remarkable to many in the profession. We hear of "malaise" in the academy, of the decline of doctrinal scholarship, and more generally, of the decline of law as an autonomous discipline. For some who believe it, the news may be profoundly disturbing, tolling the thirteenth hour on entire careers. For others, bearing the news-and having it believed-may be essential to launching or sustaining careers.

Most of us, I suspect, are inclined to suspend judgment, inured more than most mortals to the harsh reality that …

Reflections On Fuller And Perdue's The Reliance Interest In Contract Damages: A Positive Economic Framework, Avery Katz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Fuller and Perdue's classic article, The Reliance Interest in Contract Damages, is regarded by many contemporary contracts scholars as the single most influential law review article in the field. For those of us who teach and think about contracts from the perspective of law and economics, the consensus would probably be close to unanimous. The article displays an approach highly congenial to an economic perspective. The connection goes beyond Fuller and Perdue's explicitly functional approach to law (which law and economics shares with other schools of thought descended from the legal realists) and beyond Fuller and Perdue's focus on …

Appellate Justice Bureaucracy And Scholarship, William M. Richman, William L. Reynolds

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Many of the other Articles in this Symposium demonstrate that a single great piece of legal scholarship can have an enormous impact on the development of legal doctrine. This Article differs in two respects. First, it focuses not on a single seminal work, but rather on a developing literature authored by a large group of scholars. Second, it attempts to assess the impact of that literature not on the growth of legal theory, but on the development of a single legal institution-the United States Courts of Appeals.

Derek Bok And The Merger Of Law And Economics, Herbert Hovenkamp

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Both the novelty and the uniqueness of the "law and economics" movement of the last fifteen years have been greatly exaggerated. Law and economics has been with us for at least a half century, in nearly every area of private and public law. The most outspoken protagonists of law and economics admit that economics had a presence in antitrust and regulatory policy long before the work of Ronald Coase, Lester Telser, and others inspired its expanded use in areas of private law, such as tort and contract. But even then, some of those who would make such an admission would …

Public Law Litigation And Legal Scholarship, Richard L. Marcus

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

It is hard to turn around nowadays without hearing about the malaise in legal scholarship. For example, Richard Posner, a former president of the Harvard Law Review, announced in that periodical's centenary issue that the Review "may have reached the peak of its influence-may, indeed, have started its journey down the mountain." If even the august Harvard Law Review is sliding, one does sense an ancien regime aroma of decay. But Posner's main message was that scholarship has become more diverse, and that the hegemony of traditional doctrinal analysis has been broken. More generally, the malaise is attributed to …

Neutral Principles In The 1950'S, Gary Peller

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Essay, I explore the intellectual setting within which Wechsler believed that defending freedom also required defending the legality of racial domination. I argue that the key to understanding this apparent paradox is to grasp the ideological/ cultural complex of the 1950's within which mainstream American intellectuals in law and in other disciplines came to terms with the disintegration of the traditional, "old order" paradigms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by means of an intense and overriding distinction between controversial issues of values and noncontroversial questions of framework and structure within which substantive conflict would take …

Law Review Articles That Backfire, Gerald L. Neuman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Other articles in this Symposium have chronicled the real-world triumphs of legal scholarship. I have sadder tales to tell. I would like to discuss law review articles that have had an apparent influence on the course of legal development, but not in the manner that the author intended.

Many of the readers of this Symposium may have their favorite examples of this phenomenon. Such misfortunes can befall anyone; both of the instances I will describe involve a highly respected constitutional scholar, Professor Henry Paul Monaghan of Columbia Law School. They illustrate two mechanisms by which good scholarship can lead …

The Next Step: Definition, Generalization, And Theory In American Family Law, Carl E. Schneider

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Journal of Law Reform's Symposium on Family Law comes opportunely, in legal scholarship's spring of hope, its winter of despair, at a time when we have everything before us, when we have nothing before us. As is natural in such an epoch, reflection about legal scholarship, about its history, purposes, and methods, has flourished. This Symposium invites us to extend that reflection to family law, and this essay attempts, tentatively and speculatively, to accept the invitation.

A Commentary On American Legal Scholarship Concerning The Admission Of Migrants, James A.R. Nafziger

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The following essay will focus attention on American legal scholarship concerning the admission of migrants. This topic is instructive and practical because of its impact on both municipal and global law. An eminent international jurist observed that greater foresight by scholars twenty-five years ago could have averted many current problems of migration. Today, these problems arise from such sources as the population explosion, periodic droughts, the pull factor of opportunities in advanced economies, and massive political unrest in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, and elsewhere. Migrants are knocking at the gates of sovereignty, even crashing some …