Yesterday I had the honor of speaking to our new 1L students on a panel moderated by the Dean about the role of faculty research and scholarship in the law school. My experience has been that many incoming law students are largely unaware of the scholarly role of faculty, and they tend think of the faculty as "super-practitioners," which in most cases bears little resemblance to reality.
One of the topics our the Dean asked us to reflect on was whether scholarship and teaching are "in tension" in legal education, or whether they work together for the benefit of the students. This topic has given rise to a lively debate over decades, and I won't pretend to contribute to it or even rehash it here. There are those who believe that scholarly effort takes time away from teaching, and those who believe that scholarly effort enriches teaching. There are many in the middle, and many who don't think about it.
On the panel, I raised an issue I haven't heard much in law school discussions of this debate. The idea occurred to me as I was speaking in front of a projected image of the covers of many law review issues to which our faculty had contributed. It is that the law students' role in faculty scholarship is much, much different from the undergraduate's role in faculty scholarship. In undergraduate classes, most students learn from textbooks, in classes largely taught by graduate student TAs, and typically do not (and often could not) meaningfully engage with professors' research. In a context like that, I can see an argument that research and teaching do not really complement one another, at least as it relates to undergraduate students.
In the law school setting, however, the situation is very different. Not only are the students involved in faculty scholarship, they are the ones who decide which articles should be published and where they should be published. They are the audience to which we must address our writing if we are to publish in prestigious journals. For a young legal scholar, they hold the keys to our professional advancement in a very significant way. They are the ones who edit the work, and provide comments on it. In some cases, they may have even written large segment of the article (I disapprove of this unless the student is made a coauthor). Thus, in some ways, the law student is at the center of legal scholarship, completely unlike the undergraduate.
Moreover, law review scholarship is accessible to students. Perhaps because law students select the pieces, there is a norm in law review scholarship that articles should provide enough background to be understood by a non-specialist (such as a student). As a result, much of the reasoning in law review articles is similar to that encountered in law school classes. Yes, there are many interdisciplinary articles that often stretch the boundaries of this principle, but they do not compare to the articles published in the other discipline. An article about corporate finance in a law review generally will be comprehensible to a student with the basic coursework. An article in a finance journal generally will not.
These differences lead me to believe that the debate over teaching versus scholarship that rages in the Chronicle of Higher Education and similar places has little to do with the law school enterprise. We should have our own debate on these matters, but with the recognition that students are central to legal scholarship in a way that undergraduates are not.
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