I am particularly grateful for [the] encouragement [of named individuals] since it has become fashionable in some quarters to think that the writing of treatises — not to speak of their revision — is a waste of intellectual capital. Their encouragement made me hold to the sensible view that books, just as much as articles in periodicals, can be a vehicle for expressing original thought and that nothing in heaven or on earth forces an author or reviser of a book to uphold every conceivable orthodoxy.The most probable explanation for the relatively low status of treatises in the law school world during the last two generations is that many American law professors long ago became too lazy to read books. The monograph is much more digestible; a typical specimen can be read (and rejected) in 60 minutes or so.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Platonic Hierarchies of Legal Scholarship
A recent post on a law colleague's blog makes a new (and whimsical?) stab at a establishing -- this is really deja vu redux all over again! -- a new hierarchy of forms of legal scholarship. Although this new ranking of scholarly & intellectual worth is not as odious as a common ranking having some currency in some elevated circles of academia a generation ago -- today's new Platonic ordering does not consign treatises wholly to the dustbin --, this new attempt at a hierarchy is still very a very bad business -- simply for saying and assuming that normative legal scholarship has to be done in this or that way, treatises are necessarily done in some other specific fashion, and so on. To prevent history from repeating itself -- and, more important, to vent my ire (and my spleen) -- I simply must repeat the words I published 24 years ago (and wrote 25 years ago):
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A parallel: accounting may appear as very much about quantitative methods (one popular image of the accounting profession is that of 'bean counting'). But Anthony Hopwood, an accounting scholar, (and possibly others whom I do not know) have shown that it makes good sense to write treatises (and other types of work) in the field of accounting - and these genres are an important part of the accounting scholarship.
Hopwood writes (somewhere, I do not have the source at hand) how he some 20 years ago tried to publish in US accounting journals, but that did not go well, because his writing style did not fit the strongly empiricist-positivist philosophy of the leading accounting journals of the time. Hopwood then decided to start a new journal, Accounting, Organisations and Society in the UK. Today the journal is highly regarded. Hopwood himself is a very powerful writer; he is of the treatise-writer type, I might say. He's a professor at the Said Business School in Oxford, UK, and former dean of that school.
http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/faculty/Hopwood+Anthony/
(It may well be that more empirical work is needed in law today. I cannot judge that.)
Richard Daft, a scholar of organizations, views any good research "a poem".
Richard L. Daft, Learning the Craft of Organizational Research, Academy of Management Review, 1983, Vol 8, No 4, 539-546.
"Poetry means a research design that includes only a few, perhaps two, three, or four variables. But they must hang together in a meaning unit, a coherent framework of sorts, that explains some aspect of organizations. A research poem also must have depths. ...
Most of the significant ideas in our field are poems. Theory X and Theory Y is a poem. So is the notions of differentiation and integration. For me, Perrow's dimensions of task analyzability and variety constitute a poem. ..."
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