Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

The Truth Of The Matter: Why The Social Contract Dictates Legal Scholar's Sincerity, Candor, & Thoroughness, Nicola A. Boothe-Perry

Journal Publications

Legal scholars have filled books, treatises, magazines, journals and law reviews with various writings ranging from highly intricate and complex theses to oversimplified and homogenous explanations. In all its forms, legal scholarship has been both touted and taunted by external and internal critics throughout the years. Some suggest that legal scholarship should holistically "frame recommendations to responsible decision makers," and more specifically "help the reader understand law." Others suggest that it should be used to bring "restraint, proportion, perspective and atmosphere" into the legal landscape and society at large. Whatever its stated purpose and whether it be doctrinal, descriptive or …

Debate, Christopher Serkin, Richard Primus, Kevin M. Stack, Nelson Tebbe

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In 1890, Louis Brandeis wrote The Right to Privacy. Within a matter of years, the courts began adopting his theory, creating a newly articulated legal right. This article likely represented the high-water mark of legal academia in terms of real world impact. In recent years, the academy has lost much of its relevance. Chief Justice Roberts ridiculed academic work, suggesting that legal scholarship has become esoteric and irrelevant.

This should not be the case. The quality of legal scholars is higher than it has ever been—young scholars now often enter the academy with doctoral degrees in related fields. Likewise, technology …

Fostering Student Authorship, Amy R. Mashburn, Sharon E. Rush

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

99 Problems And The Bitchin' Is One: A Pragmatist's Guide To Student-Edited Law Reviews, Joëlle Anne Moreno

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Long Live The Student-Edited Law Review, Mary Garvey Algero

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Online Law Review Supplements For Junior And Senior Faculty, Steven W. Bender

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Legal Scholarship Worth Its Cost?, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Law Review Platforms, Andrea Charlow

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

“Law &” Meets “Law As”, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Prof. Berger reviews The Handbook of Law and Society, edited by Austin Sarat and Patrick Ewick.

Virtual Liquid Networks And Other Guiding Principles For Optimizing Future Student-Edited Law Review Platforms, Donald J. Kochan

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Paperless Chase, Steven J. Mulroy

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Future Of Law Reviews: Online-Only Journals, Katharine T. Schaffzin

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

A New Model Of Sovereignty In The Contemporary Era Of Integrated Global Commerce, Kevin Sobel-Read

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Existing legal scholarship does not offer an effective or comprehensive definition of sovereignty. Sovereignty, however, matters. Indeed, many have lived and died for it; the term likewise appears with remarkable frequency in both academic and popular discourse. But, sovereignty is not what it used to be. The evolution of globalization generally, and transformations in global commerce specifically, have sutured together the peoples of the world-conventional nation-states and Indigenous groups alike--permanently altering the sovereignty of each. These developments make it that much more imperative to incorporate a functional definition of sovereignty into legal scholarship. But, given the complexities of sovereignty, the …

The Beginnings Of The Journal Of Food Law & Policy, Michael T. Roberts

Journal of Food Law & Policy

In the first sentence of the introduction to the inaugural edition of the Journal for Food Law & Policy, Margie Alsbrook, the founding Editor-in-Chief, and I, the founding faculty advisor, stated: "It is with great pride and pleasure that we present the inaugural issue of the Journal for Food Law & Policy." In celebration of the Journal's tenth anniversary, I am inclined to echo the same sentiment, but with the added proviso: "surprised!" I confess being gravely concerned ten years ago over the Journal's survivability. Food law and policy was then barely in its formative stage. The nascent, social food …

Supporting And Promoting Scholarly Life In Turbulent Times, A. Benjamin Spencer

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disciplining Legal Scholarship, Lynn M. Lopucki

UF Law Faculty Publications

U.S. law schools are hiring large proportions of J.D.-Ph.D.s in tenure-track faculty positions in an effort to increase the quantity and quality of empirical legal scholarship. That effort is failing. The new recruits bring methods and objectives unsuited to law. They produce lower-than-predicted levels of empiricism because they compete on the basis of methodological sophistication, devote time and resources to disputes over arcane issues in statistics and methodology, prefer to collaborate with other Ph.D.s, and intimidate empiricists whose work does not require high levels of methodological sophistication. In short, Ph.D.s impose the cultures of their disciplines on legal scholarship. Importing …

Scholarship Against Desire, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

This article uses my own experience navigating the law review placement process to reflect on the dynamics that shape intellectual life at American law schools. My recent work focuses on the legal relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive. At its heart, it is about the law’s role in shaping the precursor to pregnancy—heterosexual sex. When I began researching this topic what I was most curious about was how law and culture might conspire to foster connections that are more loving and less violent, more authentic and less alienated. Pursuing this topic—which would entail exploring big existential questions to which I …

Intentionalism Justice Scalia Could Love, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

There is something useful, indeed beautiful, about a work that carefully and eloquently explores a new idea or reexamines an old one. The Nature of Legislative Intent is therefore useful and beautiful, and it offers much of philosophical value for textualist and non-textualist alike. but it offers little of practical consequence and is therefore unlikely to advance the ball outside of the hall of academia, not simply because of the failure of judges to take legal scholarship seriously (which is there loss, as well as sosciety's), but because on its own terms it cannot.

Law School Culture And The Lost Art Of Collaboration: Why Don't Law Professors Play Well With Others, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

I have an Erdős number. Specifically, I have an Erdős number of 5. For the uninitiated, the concept of an “Erdős number” was created by mathematicians to describe how many “degrees of separation” an author of an article is from the great mathematician Paul Erdős. If you coauthored a paper with Erdős, you have an Erdős number of 1. If you coauthor a paper with someone with an Erdős number of 1, you have earned an Erdős number of 2. Coauthoring a paper with someone with an Erdős number of 2 gives you an Erdős number of 3, and so …

Trends In Environmental Law Scholarship 2008-2013, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Linda K. Breggin, David L. Stabb, Emma T. Doineau

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

As part of the article selection process each year, Vanderbilt University Law School students assemble and review the environmental law articles published during the previous academic year. In this Article, we draw on the results of the ELPAR article selection process to report on trends in environmental legal scholarship for academic years 2008-2013.

Specifically, this Article reports on the number of environmental law articles published in general law reviews and environmental law journals. We find that although the total varied somewhat from year to year, more than 400 environmental law articles were published each year during the 2008-2013 period. Additionally, …

On Legal Scholarship, Danielle K. Citron, Robin West

Shorter Faculty Works

Academic critics contend that legal scholarship is overly argumentative or too “normative,” simply stating what the law should be, as well as what the law is. It isn’t about pure scholarship’s pursuit of knowledge within the discipline of a recognized academic field. Critics from the bar and the judiciary proffer the opposite complaint: legal scholarship is too academic and not professional enough, enamored with fads, unmoored from any discipline and of little use to the practicing lawyer or sitting judge. Law schools’ legions of cost-conscious critics complain that paying high salaries to professors with low course loads drives up tuitions. …

The Future Of Scholarship In Law Schools, Fabio Arcila Jr.

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Gregory Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. More recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. When the procedures used in laboratory experiments are altered to rule out alternative explanations, the “endowment effect” disappears. This and other recent evidence suggest that mere ownership does not …

Libraries Can Help: Institutional Repositories, Yolanda P. Jones

Journal Publications

Law libraries can assist law journals beyond citation help, Westlaw and Lexis training, and gathering resources; law libraries can help with resource discovery and publication-process analysis. Specifically, libraries can guide law journals in implementing, maintaining, and expanding publication technologies through institutional repositories to stay current in this digital age.

Cognitive Conflicts And The Making Of International Law: From Empirical Concord To Conceptual Discord In Legal Scholarship, Jean D'Aspremont

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The international legal scholarship, in its quest for a paradigm able to apprehend international norm-generating processes qualifying as lawmaking, has been oscillating between static approaches and dynamic approaches. The former are based on the author of the norm (subjecthood) or its formal origin (pedigree) whilst the latter (e.g., participation) try to capture and explain the intricate and multidimensional fluxes between the authors of the norms and the norms themselves (impact or dynamic pedigree). International legal scholars have thus been resorting to various and diverging paradigms to make sense of international lawmaking. All of these approaches will be described in further …

Self-Congratulation And Scholarship, Paul Campos

Publications

Professor Jay Silver’s criticism of the reform proposals put forward in Brian Tamanaha’s book Failing Law Schools displays some characteristic weaknesses of American legal academic culture. These weaknesses include a tendency to make bold assertions about the value of legal scholarship and the effectiveness of law school pedagogy, while at the same time providing no support for these assertions beyond a willingness to repeat self-congratulatory platitudes about who professors are and what we do. The high costs for our students of the current scholarly expectations at American law schools are clear. What is not clear is whether those costs are …

Compelling Orthodoxy: Myth And Mystique In The Marketing Of Legal Education, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

This article seeks to demonstrate the negative effects of law schools’ preoccupations with enhancing their image and marketing strategy, especially as they are reflected in both scholarship and academic freedom.

Clarion Call Or Sturm Und Drang: A Response To Pierre Schlag's Lecture On The State Of Legal Scholarship, David R. Cleveland

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Is Legal Scholarship Out Of Touch? An Empirical Analysis Of The Use Of Scholarship In Business Law Cases, Michelle M. Harner, Jason A. Cantone

Faculty Scholarship

Commentators have observed two apparent trends in the use of legal scholarship by the judiciary. First, judges now cite law review articles in their opinions with less frequency. Second, despite this general decline in the invocation of legal scholarship, judges now cite articles in specialty journals with more frequency.

Some commentators attribute the apparent decline in the courts’ use of legal scholarship to the increasingly theoretical and impractical nature of that scholarship. A few studies even suggest that the increasing use of specialty journals by the courts reflects the gap between the content of legal scholarship in general law reviews …

Jupiter As Everyman: Michael Reisman And The Scholar As Teacher, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These are Chief Judge Baker’s remarks reflecting on the scholarship of Professor Michael Reisman in the field of national security law. Chief Judge Baker comments that Professor Reisman is a prolific writer and Scholar-Teacher dedicated to the study of force, minimization of suffering, and the advancement of human dignity and the law. He discusses how Professor Reisman’s work is distinctive in that it identifies and incorporates the critical influence of process, both formal and informal, in decisionmaking, which sometimes overshadows substance.