Chemerinsky, Erwin, Why Write? (August 19, 2010). Michigan Law Review, Vol. 107, p. 881, 2009; UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2009-9. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1375052
What is the purpose of legal scholarship? The foreword to the University of Michigan Law Review’s book review issue provides an excellent occasion for addressing this question. This in turn requires considering who are the audiences for legal scholarship and what should count as legal scholarship. This essay offers thoughts and suggestions on these important topics.
Newton, Brent Evan, Preaching What They Don’t Practice: Why Law Faculties’ Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy (July 22, 2010). South Carolina Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1706051
In response to decades of complaints that American law schools have failed to prepare students to practice law, several prominent and respected authorities on legal education, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently have proposed significant curricular and pedagogical changes in order to bring American legal education into the twenty-first century. It will not be possible to implement such proposed curricular and pedagogical reforms if law schools continue their trend of primarily hiring and promoting tenure-track faculty members whose chief mission is to produce theoretical, increasingly interdisciplinary scholarship for law reviews rather than prepare students to practice law. Such impractical scholars, because they have little or no experience in the legal profession and further because they have been hired primarily to write law review articles rather than primarily to teach, lack the skill set necessary to teach students how to become competent, ethical practitioners. The recent economic recession, which did not spare the legal profession, has made the complaints about American law schools failure to prepare law students to enter the legal profession even more compelling; law firms no longer can afford to hire entry-level attorneys who lack the basic skills required to practice law effectively. This essay proposes significant changes in both faculty composition and law reviews aimed at enabling law schools to achieve the worthy goals of reformists such as the Carnegie Foundation.
Rosser, Ezra, On Becoming ‘Professor:’ A Semi-Serious Look in the Mirror (June 20, 2009). Florida State University Law Review, Vol. 36, p. 215, 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1423138
Brief parody article about law reviews, socio-economic class, cheese, and the legal professoriate.
Bast, Carol M. and Samuels, Linda B., Plagiarism and Legal Scholarship in the Age of Information Sharing: The Need For Intellectual Honesty (2008). Catholic University Law Review, Vol. 57, p. 777, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1470646
Those engaged in legal scholarship should strive for intellectual honesty and avoid plagiarism, but what exactly is required? This article explores plagiarism from the perspective of professors, judges, and practicing attorneys and discusses topics such as reuse of ones own previously published writing, authorship, and the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement.
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