Legal Writing and Research Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Francis A. Allen: 'Confront[Ing] The Most Explosive Problems' And 'Plumbing All Issues To Their Full Depth Without Fear Or Prejudice', Yale Kamisar

Articles

Frank Allen began his distinguished teaching career more than thirty-five years ago - at a time when, at more law schools than we like to remember, "the basic criminal law course was routinely assigned to the youngest and most vulnerable member of the faculty or to that colleague suspected of mild brain damage and hence incompetent to deal with courses that really matter."' That those of us who taught criminal law years later were warmly received by our colleagues is in no small measure a tribute to the quality of mind and character and intellectual energy of people like Allen, …

Francis A. Allen -- Selected Bibliography, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Selected Bibliography of Francis A. Allen's works.

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 …

L. Hart Wright -- Bibliography, Elizabeth Gaspar Brown

Michigan Law Review

A Bibliography of L. Hart Wright

Scholarly Books: What, To Whom And Why, James J. White

Articles

A consideration of the role that the books reviewed in this edition will play in the future of American legal thought has led me to speculate about the transmission of ideas into acts and about the role of books in that transmission. In certain arenas, tracing an idea from its origins to its ultimate application is straightforward. For example, the evolution of Germany's Schlieffen plan for invading France can be traced with little difficulty from the circumstances responsible for its birth, through years of refinement, to its eventual application in World War I. The development and acceptance of a medical …

Truth And Interpretation In Legal History, G. Edward White

Michigan Law Review

The essay consists of four sections. Section I discusses the nature of historical explanation, devoting some attention to the roles of "truth," interpretation, and detachment in historical scholarship. Section II continues that discussion by exploring the meaning and the purpose of what I call "interpretive detachment" in the writing of history. Section III considers the theoretical assumptions of Marxist legal historians from the point of view developed in preceding sections. Section IV, taking into account some issues that remain problematic or troublesome, restates my approach.

In Praise Of Book Reviews, Francis A. Allen

Michigan Law Review

This is the third time in as many years that the Michigan Law Review has presented a substantial canvass of legal and law-relevant literature to its readers. Any institutional practice repeated three times is in a fair way of becoming a tradition, and the tradition of an annual "book-review issue" in this journal seems vigorously alive and well. Accordingly, the present collection of review essays requires no benediction from me. That these remarks are a work of supererogation is even more strongly suggested when one recalls the elegant essay of David Cavers, which helped launch the first collection two years …

Fred E. Inbau: 'The Importance Of Being Guilty', Yale Kamisar

Articles

As fate would have it, Fred Inbau graduated from law school in 1932, the very year that, "for practical purposes the modern law of constitutional criminal procedure [began], with the decision in the great case of Powell v. Alabama."1 In "the 'stone age' of American criminal procedure,"2 Inbau began his long fight to shape or to retain rules that "make sense in the light of a policeman's task,"3 more aware than most that so long as the rules do so, "we will be in a stronger position to insist that [the officer] obey them."4

A Bibliography Of The Published Works Of Lewis M. Simes, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Bibliography of the Published Works of Lewis M. Simes

A Bibliography Of The Published Works Of Paul G. Kauper, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Bibliography of the Published Works of Paul G. Kauper

A Complete Bibliography Of Books, Pamphlets, Major Reports, Speeches, And Memoranda Of E. Blythe Stason, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Complete Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, Major Reports, Speeches, and Memoranda of E. Blythe Stason (Unpublished works can be found in the Michigan Historical Collection, Ann Arbor, Michigan)