Once a week, we share links to recent papers and blog posts discussing scholarship: how it’s created, how it’s disseminated, who uses it, and so on. To suggest something for this feature, send us a note: legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com. Jump to full post
Cardozo Law School, the New York Law School Law Review, and the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School present Visualizing Law in the Digital Age Oct. 19, 2011 (at Cardozo) and Oct. 20 Oct. 21, 2011 (at NYLS) (date corrected Sept. 8, 2011). Panels are:
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On September 1, 2011, the Climenko Fellowship Program will begin accepting applications for the 2012-14 term. Climenko Fellows teach in Harvard Law School’s First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program. The Fellows are aspiring legal academics who receive extensive support and mentoring for their scholarship while teaching legal research and writing. Former Fellows have gone on to tenure-track positions at Arizona State, Boston University, Florida State, Fordham, Georgetown, the University of Minnesota, and Vanderbilt, among other schools. If you are planning a career in legal academia, please consider applying for the fellowship. To apply, send a resume, law school transcript, two or three letters of recommendation, a research agenda and at least one scholarly writing sample to: Susannah Barton Tobin, Director, First-Year Legal Research & Writing Program, Harvard Law School, Griswold 1 North, Cambridge, MA 02138.
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At Concurring Opinions, a guest blogger who just finished his term as articles editor for the University of Chicago Law Review invites readers to ask him the editors’ perspective on the law review submissions process. David Schraub, Ask an Articles Editor!, Concurring Opinions, Aug. 5, 2011. Topics raised so far:
Prof. Schraub will be writing posts in response to these questions next week. mw
The Supreme Court and Legal Scholarship
Petherbridge, Lee and Schwartz, David L., An Empirical Assessment of the Supreme Court’s Use of Legal Scholarship (July 12, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1884462
Derogating legal scholarship has become something of a sport for leading figures in the federal judiciary. Perhaps the chief antagonist in recent years has been none other than the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr. His most recent salvo includes the claim that because law review articles are not of interest to the bench, he has trouble remembering the last law review article he read. This claim, and others by the Chief Justice, may represent the end of an uneasy détente concerning the topic of the utility of legal scholarship to the bench and bar. At a minimum, Justice Roberts’s recent comments represent a vigorous invitation to a discussion, which this article accepts. To that discussion we contribute an empirical study that is based on an original and unprecedented body of data derived from every Supreme Court decision over the last sixty-one years. This article presents several surprising results and makes two major novel contributions. The first is evidence describing the amount and patterns of the Supreme Court’s use of legal scholarship over the last sixty-one years. The second, and perhaps most striking contribution of this article, is empirical evidence on the nature and quality of the Court’s use of scholarship. This article provides the first report, as far as we can determine, of evidence that the Supreme Court not only often uses legal scholarship, it also disproportionately uses scholarship when cases are either more important or more difficult to decide. It thus presents results strongly counterintuitive to claims that scholarship is useless or irrelevant to judges and practitioners. The article also discusses areas for future work.
Kenneth Jost, the Supreme Court editor of CQ Press, blogs: Roberts’ Ill-Informed Attack on Legal Scholarship, Jost on Justice, July 19, 2011.
Jonathan H. Adler writes a post and others comment: Chief Justice Roberts and Current Legal Scholarship, Volokh Conspiracy, July 23, 2011.
Elizabeth Mertz, Frances Tung, Katherine Barnes, Wamucii Njogu, Molly Heiler, Joanne Martin, After Tenure: Post-Tenure Law Professors in the United States (American Bar Foundation 2011)
The After Tenure Study, jointly funded by the ABF and LSAC, is the first in-depth examination of the lives of post-tenure law professors in the United States. It combines a national survey of post-tenure law professors in the U.S. (undertaken in 2005-2006) with a set of follow-up interviews (conducted with a subset of the survey respondents in 2007-2008). A total of 1175 professors responded to the initial survey; their responses provide the basis of this Project Report, which contains descriptive statistics from our first quantitative analyses. Future reports and articles will provide further quantitative and qualitative results.
p. 9.
In addition to their teaching and research duties, tenured law professors also reported devoting time to advancing their careers. Over one-third of our sample “often” attended professional conferences and communicated with colleagues in their field. About 36% of the law professors in our survey reported that they “often” send out reprints, usually to a selected network rather than to a broad mailing list. Some professors said they gave talks at other schools.
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The Faculty Lounge is having a conversation about Establishing A Writing Regimen, July 27, 2011.
Jeff Lipshaw, Law Review Submission for Satisficers: A Summer Placement Narrative, PrawfsBlawg, July 29, 2011.
This is a narrative about submitting and placing a traditional law review article in a general student-edited law review over the summer, a process I just completed this morning. With some hesitance about giving TMI on how the sausage gets made, I post it as a contribution to the available data about the process.
Eugene Volokh and others comment on Humor in Legal Writing, July 21, 2011.
Richard A. Danner, Kiril Kolev & Marguerite I. Most, Print or Perish? Authors’ Attitudes Toward Electronic-Only Publication of Law Journals (July 15, 2011). Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1886445
An increasing number of U.S. law journals post at least current issues in freely accessible PDF and (in some cases) HTML formats on their web sites. Yet, perhaps without exception, the journals that make their articles freely available on their websites also continue to publish print issues in the face of declining subscription numbers, and law libraries’ growing disinterest in collecting and preserving journals in print. As universities reduce staff, freeze open positions, eliminate salary increases, and cut library budgets, why have law schools continued to subsidize print publication of journals that are accessible in electronic formats? Among the reasons suggested for this is the possible impact of electronic-only publishing on a journal’s reputation and ability to attract authors. This paper reports on the results of a survey of law journal authors’ attitudes toward electronic-only law journals.
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 one’s own previously published writing, authorship, and the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement.
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This week’s scholarship about scholarship:
Wolotira, Alena L., From a Trickle to a Flood: A Case Study of the Current Index to Legal Periodicals to Examine the Swell of American Law Journals Published in the Last Fifty Years (June 21, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1869328
Using the lists of journals indexed in the Current Index to Legal Periodicals from the last fifty years, this article analyzes the increase in the number of general law reviews, specialized law journals, student-edited journals, and peer-edited and refereed law journals over the last half-century. Data from the Current Index to Legal Periodicals was combined with further data collected from HeinOnline, American Bar Association statistics, and U.S. News & World Report statistics. Comparison of this data shows not only a massive increase in the number of law journal titles being published, but also suggests a correlation between the number of law journals published by a law school and its student population, length of time that it has been accredited by the American Bar Association, and its U.S. News & World Report ranking.
Levit, Nancy, MacLachlan, Lawrence Duncan and Rostron, Allen K., Submission of Law Student Articles for Publication (July 26, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1656395
Each year law students collectively write a large number of papers that could become law review articles but that are never published. Most law schools require students at some point during their time in law school to research and write an academic paper of publishable quality or seminar paper. Some of these are law review notes and comments that are not selected for publication. Others of these are papers written for specific substantive classes or to fulfill research and writing requirements.
Most of these student papers – even very worthy ones – will never be published or posted online. The publishing route for law students who want to publish in a venue other than their home law journal is not clearly marked. And many law reviews simply will not accept submissions from students outside their own school. Often, the publishing opportunities for non-law review members in their home school’s law review are also not well known.
The purposes of this essay are twofold. First, it offers a number of suggestions for law students (and implicitly for students in other graduate programs) who want to publish their research papers. Second, this essay presents a chart of the policies of 194 law reviews with respect to whether they will publish comments submitted by non-law review members who are students at their home school or notes, comments or articles submitted by law students from other schools.
We hope that this weekly listing of scholarship about scholarship alerts our readers to some interesting new work. It is not meant to be a comprehensive bibliography.
If you would like to recommend some scholarship about scholarship, send a note to legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com.
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After I asked about interest in occasional posts listing recent scholarship about legal scholarship, one reader suggested that we save up citations, posting, say, on the first Friday of each month. That seems like a good idea, but I’m going to experiment with posting weekly instead of monthly. We’ll see how it goes.
If you come across an interesting piece about legal scholarship (publishing patterns, advice for scholars, etc.), please send a note to legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com.
This week’s scholarship about legal scholarship:
Schlag, Pierre, The Faculty Workshop (June 1, 2011). U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-12. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1857525
This essay explores the ubiquitous law school institution, “The Faculty Workshop,” as an entrée into and manifestation of contemporary American legal thought. The Faculty Workshop is examined both as a regulator and expression of legal thought – at once governance system and symptom. We close by discussing “Stage 4.”
Stockmeyer, Norman Otto, Do You SSRN? (March 18, 2011). The Scrivener, p. 4, Winter 2011 (2 pp.). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1727484
Articles published in law reviews and major legal journals are retrievable on line through searchable subscription databases. But articles of general interest in “second tier” legal periodicals would be lost if not for Google-searchable open-access repositories such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).This article describes SSRN’s various archiving and research functions. It explains step-by-step how to abstract and upload working papers and published articles. The primary emphasis is on how legal authors can use SSRN as a digital archive of their publications. “Green publishing” – using SSRN’s abstracting eJournals to disseminate and self-publish articles in electronic form – is also described. A bibliography of source materials is provided.
Ginsburg, Tom and Miles, Thomas J., Empiricism and the Rising Incidence of Coauthorship in Law (February 15, 2011). U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 545. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1762323
The recent growth of empirical scholarship in law, which some have termed “empirical legal studies,” has received much attention. A less noticed implication of this trend is its potential impact on the manner of scholarly production in legal academia. A common prediction is that academic collaboration rises with scholarly specialization. As the complexity of a field grows, more and more diverse types of human capital are needed to make a contribution. This paper presents two tests of whether empiricism has spurred more co-authorship in law. First, the paper shows that the fraction of articles in the top fifteen law reviews that were empirical or co-authored (or both) trended upwards between 2000 and 2010. The increase in empirical articles accounted for a substantial share of the growth in co-authored articles, and the correlation between co-authorship and empiricism persisted after controlling for numerous other influences. Second, the paper examines the articles published since 1989 in two prominent, faculty-edited journals specializing in law & economics: the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization. Co-authored articles were far more common in these journals than in the general-interest, student-edited law reviews – a pattern which itself is consistent with the specialization hypothesis. The share of articles without empirical analysis or formal models in these journals plummeted over this period, while co-authorship rose sharply. These results support the view that specialization, and specifically the growth of empirical scholarship, has contributed to the trend of co-authorship in legal academia.
Cunningham, Lawrence A., Digital Evolution in Law School Course Books: Trade-Offs, Opportunities, and Vigilance (2011). THE DIGITAL PATH OF THE LAW, Edward Rubin, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2011-2012; GWU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 546; GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 546. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1798792
As we all migrate to the digital world, imagine the future of the law school course book by reflecting on its history, purposes, and promulgation over the seven generations since C.C. Langdell initiated our current mode of legal education in 1870. Some see the future of digital course books as a radical shift, akin to the original revolution of Langdell’s Contracts casebook. Others dismiss it as a simple marketing maneuver, the way post-Langdell addition of notes, questions or problems might be regarded. This look back at casebook history suggests that digital course books are more likely to be something in between, an incremental but meaningful evolution.
Schwartz, David L. and Petherbridge, Lee, Legal Scholarship and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: An Empirical Study of a National Circuit (December 14, 2010). Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 2011-07. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1725543
It is conventional wisdom that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a court whose jurisdiction is defined by subject matter rather than by geography, is less likely than other circuit courts of appeals to use legal scholarship in its decision-making. This common belief is regularly used to substantiate a well-worn criticism of the Federal Circuit specifically, and of national courts generally; namely, that they are substantially more insular and somehow less intellectually curious than the regional circuit courts of appeals. We were therefore very surprised to find how little empirical support the conventional wisdom finds in legal literature. A review of the existing literature reveals that relatively little is known about the use of legal scholarship by the Federal Circuit – and by analogy courts whose jurisdiction is defined by subject matter rather than geography – and perhaps even less is known about how the Federal Circuit’s use of legal scholarship compares to that of the regional circuits.The study reported in this Article contributes new and original information and analysis. It empirically compares the Federal Circuit’s use of legal scholarship with that of the regional circuit courts of appeals. Perhaps the most significant finding is that the Federal Circuit’s use of legal scholarship appears quite similar to that of the regional circuits, suggesting that the court is not the outlier that many presume. This finding places the conventional wisdom into serious doubt and has obvious implications for the evaluation of other proposals for subject matter-bounded courts.
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The following items are blog posts rather than more formal scholarship, but I include them because they address important points for scholars: the value of using reference librarians to help with your research and the need to read and think about publication agreements.
Peter Conti-Brown, We Have Winners! – and a Paean to Law Librarians, The Conglomerate, May 26, 2011.
“I cannot restrain myself from praising our extraordinary librarians at Stanford Law School. I have a bucketful of examples of their extraordinary sleuthing (the Martin speech is only the latest), one of which includes going through repeated FOIA requests and appeals, losing each one, and then still securing the key document from an 80 year old researcher who had it in his own files in some barn in Vermont, or something like that. I only know SLS, so if you have other examples of librarian sleuthing that made your research possible, I’d love to hear them, as I think they are the sometimes too-well-kept secret of the academy. After all, an eminent legal authority — I think it was Ronald Coase, but it may have been Moses himself — once said that every great scholar needs a good tailor, a good priest, and a good librarian. I have no experience with the first two, but can vouch emphatically for the third.“
Jeffrey Pomerantz, My Copyfight, PomeRantz, June 14, 2011.
Librarian describes his unsuccessful efforts to get a publisher to alter its standard publication agreemen (it had an 18-month moratorium before the author could post the article). He and his coauthor withdrew the article from publication and posted it themselves.
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This blog focuses on posting upcoming conferences, calls for papers, and current colloquia and in-house workshops.
Readers, do you think it would be a helpful addition to include some citations to recent scholarship about legal scholarship? For example:
Our goal would not be to create comprehensive bibliographies–just to share some items we come across that might interest you. If you’d like to comment on this idea (or anything else related to the blog), please send a note to legalscholarshipblog [at] gmail.com.
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APPEAL and the University of Zululand have announced a conference on Preparing Students for the Practice of Law, which will be held from the evening of December 7 through the afternoon of December 9, 2011, at the Tradewinds Country Inn in Mtunzini, South Africa, located about 90 minutes north of Durban.
The conference will focus on:
- teaching multilingual students
- working with students with an inadequate secondary education
- designing legal writing programs in universities with limited resources
- teaching legal reading
- teaching writing in large classes
- teaching writing in clinical programs
- diagnosing writing problems and commenting on student work
- learning theories
- teaching methods
If you are interested in presenting at the conference, please send a proposal to Laurel Oates, chair of the Program Committee, loates [at] seattleu.edu no later than July 1, 2011. The Program Committee expects to make decisions on proposals and issue invitations by September 1, 2011. Registration materials for the conference will be circulated in September 2011.
For questions regarding the conference, please contact one of the Conference Co-chairs, Janet Dickson, dicksonj [at] seattleu.edu or Olugbenga Oke-Samuel, lawville [at] yahoo.com.
Source: Legal Writing Prof Blog (via Faculty Law Conference Updates). mw
University of San Francisco School of Law will host the 2011 Western Regional Legal Writing Conference: How to Hit the Ground Writing: Meeting the Expectations of the Changing Legal Market in San Francisco, CA Aug. 26-27, 2011. The call for conference proposals deadline is June 6, 2011. Jump to full post
St. John’s School of Law hosts the Second Annual Empire State Legal Writing Conference: Teaching Legal Writing Effectively to Prepare Students for Practice May 12-13, 2011 in New York, NY. sr
John Marshall Law School hosts the 2011 Global Legal Skills Conference May 5-7, 2011.
The Global Skills Conference is a gathering of law professors and international legal experts who discuss cutting-edge issues in international legal education. Specific topics include legal research, creating appropriate materials and assignments for ESL and international students, cross-cultural and intercultural issues, classroom teaching, case method and problem solving, clinical legal education, academic support, international legal exchanges, legal English, legal Spanish, and legal French, as well as other global legal skills.
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University College of London Faculty of Laws hosts Current Legal Issues Colloquium 2011 – Law and Language July 4-5, 2011 in London, England.
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The Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University in Philadelphia will host the third Summer Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching (the “Boulder Conference”) on July 21-23, 2011. The submission deadline is March 18, 2011. Jump to full post
The UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law hosts the 11th Annual Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference March 25-26, 2011. The ALWD Scholars Workshop will be March 27, 2011. The submission deadlines for both events have passed. mw
Several units at the University of Washington (the Department of Communication, the Master of Communication in Digital Media, University Libraries, and the College of the Environment) present SEAchange 2011, From Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon: Telling Tales of Environmental Disaster, Justice, and Recovery, April 2, 2011. William Rodgers (UW Law) will speak. mw
The Board of Directors of the Legal Writing Institute seeks proposals from schools interested in hosting the 2014 LWI Biennial Conference.
[The] 2010 LWI conference was held at a resort in Marco Island, Florida, and the 2012 conference will be held at a resort in Palm Desert, California. Because the evaluations of the 2010 conference were quite positive, the Board is not averse to choosing another hotel or resort location for the 2014 conference. However, the Board would also like to consider options for hosting a conference at a law school in order to minimize costs for our members and maximize the potential profits to fund LWI’s programs. Accordingly, the Board is asking law schools who are interested in hosting the 2014 Biennial Conference to submit a proposal by May 15, 2011.
For more information, contact LWI president kenneth D. Chestek (kchestek [at] iupui.edu) or Board member Alison Julien (alison.julien [at] marquette.edu). mw
This blog features law-related Calls for Papers, Conferences, and Workshops as well as general legal scholarship resources. If you would like to have an event posted, please contact us at legalscholarshipblog|at|gmail.com.
This blog is managed by faculty and staff at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and the Gallagher Law Library of the University of Washington School of Law
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This blog seeks to facilitate the legal academy's development and dissemination of scholarship, and so does not feature events such as Continuing Legal Education programs or regional bar association meetings.
