LawCulture: What Counts as Legal Scholarship?

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Except for extremely rare cases--where law professors also happen to be "born" scholars, as in the case of Dworkin or Posner--wouldn't you say that law professors (the J.D.'s, I mean) are hired on the basis of their their ability to concoct clever arguments literally or figuratively on their feet?

Assistant law professors with JD's seem to be drawn from the ranks of those who have done well in their coursework at law school, and who have landed prestigious clerkships. Those accomplishments don't really say anything about "scholarly" talents. No doubt these people are brilliant. But the process does not seem designed to reward deep scholarly investigation (of whatever).

Posted by: Cthomas | January 19, 2006 at 07:54 PM

That was the old model, Cthomas. I don't think that is the dominant model any longer. These days, it is virtually impossible to secure a decent tenure-track appointment without a substantial publication record. There remain exceptions from year to year, to be sure. But scholarly credentials matter much more than grades and clerkships.

And I wouldn't be so sure that people who excel at grades and getting good clerkships are "brilliant".

Posted by: Ethan Leib | January 19, 2006 at 09:24 PM

My impression is "a substantial publication record" often translates into a couple of law-review articles written in between clerkships.

If law were like other fields, you might expect that students would face a choice after they got their JD: go on to write a thesis, getting a doctorate, and delving deeply and obsessively into original research and writing. Or, go the professional route and get a clerkship. (Or you might get a clerkship and then go back to write a thesis. But those people would not have a leg up on the "purer" scholars. )

As it is, most law professors seem to want it both ways: They want to be professionals, able to move between the Justice or State Departments and law schools at will. AND they want the respect of people who have devoted their lives to scholarship. I'm not sure you can square that circle.

Posted by: Cthomas | January 20, 2006 at 07:03 AM

Cthomas: There is another route gaining in prominence -- the fellowship. These are proliferating very rapidly (see Paul Caron's list at http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2005/12/job_opportuntie.html ). The principle behind most of them is that the would-be professor works for a year or two on scholarship, in the company of law faculty, and so applies for tenure-track jobs with a more substantial body of scholarly research. While there have always been a few prestigious ones such as Chicago's Bigelow Fellowship, I think the rapid growth in their number means that soon fellows will be flooding the job market. If they have better research to show for it they will have a competitive advantage. That, in turn, will push other aspirants to get fellowships too.

None of this fully responds to Jessica's original questions, though, because it is not clear to me that spending time as a fellow constitutes quite the sort of "methodological" training she is discussing. Because fellows are largely self-directed, they begin their work in a position comparable to that of new junior faculty members anyway; widespread fellowships would not change the adjustment period so much as moving it earlier. That said, a fellowship does give job applicants more opportunity to produce strong writing that can speak for itself about their "scholarly potential."

Posted by: William McGeveran | January 20, 2006 at 07:47 AM

There is implicit in this argument that there is a type of "pure" legal scholarship. But isn't that an appeal to the old doctrinal, black letter work. Surely that doesn't hold up these days. Although my first degree is in law, my PhD is sociology and I classify what I do as sociolegal scholarship. And it is this type of work, the cross-disciplinary encounter that produces the most exciting articles, books, etc. It's contextually nuanced, not bound by false perimeters, and most of all it's adventerous. Law schools need to create a sense of adventure and excitement, if only to prevent books like Douglas Litowitz's "The Destruction of Young Lawyers".

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January 19, 2006

What Counts as Legal Scholarship?

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