Rethinking Legal Scholarship A Transatlantic Dialogue

Although American scholars sometimes consider European legal scholarship as old-fashioned and inward-looking and Europeans often perceive American legal scholarship as amateur social science, both traditions share a joint challenge. If legal scholarship becomes too much separated from practice, legal scholars will ultimately make themselves superfluous. If legal scholars, on the other hand, cannot explain to other disciplines what is academic about their research, which methodologies are typical, and what separates proper research from mediocre or poor research, they will probably end up in a similar situation. Therefore we need a debate on what unites legal academics on both sides of the Atlantic. Should legal scholarship aspire to the status of a science and gradually adopt more and more of the methods, (quality) standards, and practices of other (social) sciences? What sort of methods do we need to study law in its social context and how should legal scholarship deal with the challenges posed by globalization?

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction Rob van Gestel, Hans-W. Micklitz and Edward L. Rubin; Part I. Where Is Legal Scholarship Headed in the New Legal World?: 1. Why we do what we do: comparing legal methods in five law schools through survey evidence Mathias M. Siems and Daithí Mac Síthigh; 2. The jurist in a global age Neil Walker; 3. Field, frame and focus: methodological issues in the new legal world Roger Brownsword; 4. Transatlantic publication fashions: in search of quality and methodology in law journal articles Reza Dibadi; Part II. Should Doctrinal Legal Scholarship Be Abandoned?: 5. What is legal doctrine?: on the aims and methods of legal-dogmatic research Jan M. Smits; 6. Making doctrine for European law Nils Jansen; 7. A European advantage in legal scholarship? Hans-W. Micklitz; 8. From coherence to effectiveness: a legal methodology for the modern world Edward L. Rubin; 9. Ranking, peer review, bibliometrics and alternative ways to improve the quality of doctrinal legal scholarship Rob van Gestel; Part III. The Interaction of Legal Scholarship with Other Academic Disciplines: 10. The logic of the law: the analytical foundations of methodology Neil Komesar; 11. The role of empirical legal studies in legal scholarship, legal education and policy making: a US perspective Deborah R. Hensler and Matthew A. Gasperetti; 12. A behavioural law and economics perspective: between methodology and indeology when behavioural sciences meet law Orly Lobel; 12. Freedom and method Paul Kahn; Index.