Teaching & Learning Resources: Legal Scholarship

This book collects Mark Tushnet's essays on legal scholarship and legal education written between the 1970s and the end of the twentieth century. The essays deal with the development of critical legal studies and its current state, with persistent questions about the intellectual status of legal scholarship, with interdisciplinary legal scholarship (including law and economics), and with selected topics in legal pedagogy. Taken as a whole, the essays provide a good overview of Professor Tushnet's contributions to the intellectual history of legal scholarship and education in the United States.

"This book is indispensable for any beginning legal academic, and a useful guide for even the most experienced researcher. With the rapid proliferation of legal literature, and its increasing globalization, neither memory nor intuition is sufficient to inform legal scholars of the published sources likely to be relevant for their own work. The authors provide a step-by-step solution that is clear, succinct and eminently practical, something that should be read before one embarks on legal research and consulted regularly as one proceeds."--Professor Ed Rubin

Legal scholarship has been torn between, on the one hand, grasping the expanding reality of law and its context, and, on the other, reducing this complex whole to manageable proportions. The purely internal analysis of a legal system, isolated from any societal context, remains an option, and is still seen in the approach of the French academy, but as law aims at ordering society and influencing human behavior, this approach is felt by many scholars to be insufficient. Consequently many attempts have been made to conceive legal research differently. Social scientific and comparative approaches have proven fruitful. However, does the introduction of other approaches leave merely a residue of 'legal doctrine', to which pockets of social sciences can be added, or should legal doctrine be merged with the social sciences? What would such a broad interdisciplinary field look like and what would its methods be? This book is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

Is the death penalty a more effective deterrent than lengthy prison sentences? Does a judge's gender influence their decisions? Do independent judiciaries promote economic freedom? Answering such questions requires empirical evidence, and arguments based on empirical research have become an everyday part of legal practice, scholarship, and teaching. In academia researchers are increasingly turning to sophisticated empirical methods to assess and challenge fundamental assumptions about the law. As empirical methods impact on traditional legal scholarship and practice, new forms of education are needed for today's lawyers.