Law Commons^™

Status And Tenure For Academic Law Librarians: A Survey, Robert H. Hu, Sharon Blackburn, Masako Patrum, Sharon K. Scott

Robert Hu

The debate surrounding the issue of faculty and academic status for librarians has captured the attention of contributors to library literature for many years. This ongoing concern eventually led to collective action: in 1959, a report of the University Libraries Section of the Academic Status Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) “strongly recommended” professional librarians be granted academic status and privileges. Opinion pieces have since abounded, with some convinced that the perceived benefits attached to “faculty status” are the due of the librarian, while others are just as strongly convinced that “status” too often comes with …

Notes From The Border: Writing Across The Administrative Law/Financial Regulation Divide, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

A central feature – if not the central feature – of legal scholarship today is analysis across divides.

It is surprising, then, how little has been written across the divide that separates administrative law and financial regulation. That is perhaps especially so, given the modest nature of the relevant divide: one that is intra- rather than interdisciplinary, one that operates within rather than across geographic boundaries, and one that involves no temporal dimension but operates entirely within current-day law.

For all the proximity in their interests, targets of study, and even analytical tools, however, scholars of administrative law and of …

Encouraging Engaged Scholarship: Perspectives From An Associate Dean For Research, Sonia K. Katyal

Sonia Katyal

No abstract provided.

Why Write?, Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky

This wonderful collection of reviews of leading recent books about law provides the occasion to ask a basic question: why should law professors write? There are many things that law professors could do with the time they spend writing books and law review articles. More time and attention could be paid to students and to instructional materials. More professors could do pro bono legal work of all sorts. In fact, if law professors wrote much less, teaching loads could increase, faculties could decrease in size, and tuition could decrease substantially. The answer to the question "why write" is neither intuitive …

Measuring Scholarly Impact: A Guide For Law School Administrators And Legal Scholars, Gary M. Lucas Jr

Gary M. Lucas Jr.

The author intends for this Essay to serve as a guide for law deans and legal scholars interested in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. In addition, university administrators should find it helpful for comparing the impact of their own law faculty’s scholarship with the scholarship of law faculties at other universities. The primary obstacle to such comparisons is a dearth of publicly available information. To that end, the Essay recommends that each law school create a Google Scholar profile for its faculty and explains the procedures for doing so. By acting on this recommendation, administrators would dramatically improve our …

Towards Engaged Scholarship, John R. Nolon, Michelle Bryan Mudd, Michael Burger, Kim Diana Connolly, Nestor Davidson, Matthew Festa, Jill I. Gross, Lisa Heinzerling, Keith Hirokawa, Tim Iglesias, Patrick C. Mcginley, Sean Nolon, Uma Outka, Jessica Owley, Kalyani Robbins, Jonathan Rosenbloom, Christopher Serkin

Christopher Serkin

The presenting question for the 2012 Symposium was how can engaged scholarship enhance teaching to prepare students for the legal profession and help to solve the critical problems of the day.12 The event employed a format designed to discover new ways of thinking about engaged scholarship. Each participant was asked to draft and submit in advance brief reflections on this question. At the Symposium, each professor attended seven breakout sessions held throughout the day. At each of these sessions, one participant presented to a small group of professors for ten minutes on her reflections, pinpointing issues, challenges, and themes involved …

A Quartet Of Essays On Scholarship, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

Regardless of academic rhetoric, universities are powerful institutional systems that are as doctrinaire and hidebound in their behavior as any other institution whose beneficiaries are seeking to protect vested interests or simply defend that with which they are most familiar and on which their training is based and reputations sustained. This is consistent with Keynes’ conclusion that most university faculty are little more than “academic scribblers” who live their lives content to operate within the safe confines of the ideas and reward system in which they were initially indoctrinated and from which they extract benefits. While the ideal of the …

The Cathedral' At Twenty-Five: Citations And Impressions, James Krier, Stewart Schwab

Stewart J Schwab

It was twenty-five years ago that Guido Calabresi and Douglas Melamed published their article on property rules, liability rules, and inalienability' Calabresi, then a law professor, later a dean, is now a federal judge. Melamed, formerly a student of Calabresi's, is now a seasoned Washington attorney. Their article-which, thanks to its subtitle, we shall call The Cathedral-has had a remarkable influence on our own thinking, as we tried to show in a recent paper2 This is not the place to rehash what we said then, but a summary might be in order. First, we demonstrated that the conventional wisdom about …

A Trilogy Of Essays On Scholarship, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

At the beginning it is helpful to realize that the five versions of the scholarly ideal produce different forms of intellectual work with distinct goals and motivations. The scholar engaging in such activity can vary dramatically in terms of what the individual is seeking to achieve through his or her research output and actions that might be taken related to the findings reflected in that product. Similarly, there is a diverse set of targets at which the work is directed. These targets include communicating ideas and knowledge to other scholars who are invested in a specific sub-discipline. They also include …

Post-Tenure Scholarship And Its Implications, Jeffrey L. Harrison

Jeffrey L Harrison

Periodically in the popular press and even in academic circles, the question arises of whether professors should be granted lifetime employment contracts based on a sample of four to six years of a probationary period. Further clouding the issue of how easily tenure should be granted is the question of what determines tenure. Is it a reward for past efforts or based on a forecast of future productivity? These concepts may seem like the same thing but they are not. Accordingly, the huge commitment of resources that occurs when tenure is granted paired with the Author's observations of pre-tenure scholars …

The Influence Of Law And Economics Scholarship On Contract Law: Impressions Twenty-Five Years Later, Jeffrey L. Harrison

Jeffrey L Harrison

This is an update of a work done in conjunction with a contract law conference 25 years ago. My specific assignment was to assess the impact of law and economics scholarship on contract law. I responded by conducting an empirical study of judicial citations to selected law and economics works in order to ascertain the extent to which judges seemed to be relying on the teachings of law and economics. In effect, the effort was part of a general question that concerns all law professors: Does scholarship matter? I have repeated the study with respect to the scholarship sample selected …

The Discursive Failure In Comparative Tax Law, Omri Marian

Omri Y Marian

Tax comparatists tend to bemoan the grim status of their chosen field. Complaints are aimed both at the scarcity of decent comparative legal tax scholarship, and at the lack of a theoretical foundation for the study of comparative tax law. The purpose of this Article is to portray a more sanguine, yet critical, view of this field. Sanguine, since a sympathetic reading of contemporary comparative tax scholarship demonstrates that there is more than enough such scholarship to generate a lively debate on comparative tax works and their methodologies. Critical, since all of these works fail to produce even the faintest …

A Vast Image Out Of Spiritus Mundi: The Existential Crisis Of Law Schools (Book Review), Jeremiah A. Ho

Jeremiah A. Ho

Review of Teaching Law: Justice, Politics, and the Demands of Professionalism. By Robin L. West. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2014. Pp. 246. Cloth, $90; paper, $32.99.

Feminist Lawyers And Political Change In Modern France, 1900-1940, Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

"Feminist Lawyers And Political Change In Modern France, 1900-1940." In Eva Schandevyl Ed., Women In Law And Law-Making In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Century Europe, Chapter 2. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014: 45-73., Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

The Short Paper, Scott Dodson

Scott Dodson

Short papers have been relegated to secondary status primarily because of their length. But many scholarly papers of under 10,000 words have had monumental impact in legal thought. I argue for a reassessment of the short paper's value and offer some prescriptions for assimilating more openness to the short paper going forward.

Time For Every Purpose Under The Heaven: Service – The National Bar Association Model, Beverly Mcqueary Smith

Beverly McQueary Smith

No abstract provided.

Popular Legal Journalism In The Writings Of Maria Vérone, Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

Driving Pedestrian Traffic To Law Journals, Michael N. Widener

Michael N. Widener

Today’s technology permits students, academics in non-law fields and lay persons to be exposed to the political views, theories and philosophies of legal scholars. Law journals and their supporting institutions should provide background and context to this scholarly output by summarizing the published works and linking them, using devices like QR codes, to readily understood, simply-expressed background materials. This effort will make the published scholarship accessible – at an education-appropriate level – to the inquiring reader.

Feminist Movements In Europe, Sara Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

New Professional Opportunities For Women: Nursing, Teaching, Clerical, Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

The Moral Of The Story: The Power Of Narrative To Inspire And Sustain Scholarship, Amy Vorenberg

Amy Vorenberg

Abstract The Moral of the Story: The Power of Narrative to Inspire and Sustain Scholarship Professor Amy Vorenberg This essay describes the power of story as a tool to inspire scholarship. We think of stories as a means to bring life to legal cases in a way that grounds them and makes them visceral and comprehensible. We use storytelling to teach our students – showing how the emotive power of a story can persuade. However, stories can also serve a different function. In my search for a way to inspire my own writing, I discovered that a good story could …

The Illusion Of Creative Scholarship In American Universities And Law Schools, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

The aim of this brief essay is to explore several of the dominant forms of scholarship in the university and in law schools. This is done by examining what are described as five sometimes incompatible ideals, those of development and pursuit of original knowledge for its own sake, preservation, refinement and transmission of the best forms of knowledge, objective social critique, individual activism and collective activism. Tenure track positions in American universities and in law schools particularly are comfortable sinecures. In far too many instances these privileged and lifetime positions serve mainly the personal interests and agendas of the purported …

'France' In An Encyclopedia Of Infanticide. Ed. Brigitte Bechtold And Donna Cooper Graves. Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. 105-107., Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

The Past, Presence, And Future Of Legal Writing Scholarship: Rhetoric, Voice, And Community, Linda L. Berger

Linda L. Berger

This Article welcomes a new generation of legal writing scholars. In the first generation, legal writing professors debated whether they should be engaged in legal scholarship at all. In the second generation, assuming that they should be engaged in scholarship, legal writing professors discerned and defined different genres of and topics for the scholarship in which some or all of us were or should be engaged. In this Article, we map the contours of a third generation of legal writing scholarship—one that integrates the elements of our professional lives and engages more effectively with our professional communities. The core of …

"Ph.D. Lite": A New Approach To Teaching Scholarly Legal Writing, Jacqueline Lipton

Jacqueline D Lipton

Most American law schools require the satisfaction of an upper level writing requirement, usually in the form of a seminar paper, or “Note”, for graduation. The problem for many students is that the J.D. is not generally geared towards learning scholarly writing. In recent years, the author has experimented with reformulating a seminar class as a “writing workshop” in order to focus on the scholarly writing process. In so doing, she has drawn from experiences supervising legal research degrees in other countries where research-based LL.M. degrees and Ph.D. degrees in law are the norm. This essay details her approach – …

'No Right To Judge': Feminism And The Judiciary In Third Republic France, Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

Emancipation Through Secularization: French Feminist Views Of Muslim Women’S Condition In Interwar Algeria, Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

Cet article examine la condition des musulmanes algériennes telle que vue par des féministes françaises entre les deux guerres mondiales. Une série de colloques nationaux et internationaux dans la région méditerranéenne analysa les limitations imposées sur les filles et les femmes musulmanes par la tradition patriarcale et s'adressa au gouvernement pour demander des réformes. Cet article démontre que ces féministes françaises approuvaient la « mission civilisatrice » de la France et conseillaient des mesures visant la modernisation, « le progrès » et la laïcité en Algérie. Alors que ces féministes orientalistes critiquaient le Code Civil de 1804 comme une source …

Taking The Road Less Traveled: Why Practical Scholarship Makes Sense For The Legal Writing Professor, Mitchell J. Nathanson

Mitchell J Nathanson

This article examines the issue of scholarship as it pertains to the legal writing professor. While the old adage that you should “write what you know” applies universally – to fiction as well as non-fiction and to scholarship written by the legal writing professor as much as it does to the doctrinal professor, the question this article attempts to answer is this: given that legal writing is a “skills” rather than “substantive” course, just what is it that legal writing professors, at least as compared to their doctrinal counterparts, know? Through the analysis of an original professional background survey of …

‘For The Family, France, And Humanity’: Authority And Maternity In The Tribunaux Pour Enfants, Sara L. Kimble

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.