On the Need for a Legal Reader's Digest
As I near the midway point of a 200-page law review article (actually, I think it's the manuscript for a book, but that distinction's not especially relevant for purposes of this post) a thought occurs to me: wouldn't it be a good idea to publish a legal-scholarship version of Reader's Digest, in which we published recent (or, I suppose, classic) and important pieces of legal scholarship for consumption by the general public? We could distill the argument into 10-20 pages, strip out the citations, and phrase everything in ordinary English. That way, ordinary citizens (or, for that matter, lawyers short on time) could keep abreast of the latest theoretical developments and empirical studies in the field without having to dedicate hundreds of pages mostly filled with endless infras and supras that no one but the initial crew of earnest student-editors will ever bother to check.
This idea occurs to me after reading a single footnote, a reference to Jerry Mashaw's Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law. According to Adrian Vermeule, the author of the piece I'm reading, Mashaw says,
The background value here, I guess, is that the purpose of scholarship is the generation and dissemination of knowledge and understanding. At present, the world of legal scholarship is pretty good at the generation part (how much of what's generated is hokum I won't - because I can't - say) but pretty lousy at the dissemination part. The volume of what's generated is simply too large, both in terms of the number of articles and their length, for even those who dedicate their lives to legal scholarship, let alone the general public or even the community of practicing lawyers, to read more than a small fraction of what's produced. And the general public doesn't read any of it, and so gets its legal theory primarily from politicians - to whom we all seem to be ambulance-chasing trial lawyers or "judicial activists" of one or another political stripe - or daytime TV court shows. If they could read what was coming out of the legal academy, expressed concisely and in plain (or plainish) English, they might come to an understanding of what the profession's all about. They might not agree with what's being said (indeed, they probably wouldn't) but at least they'd understand what they're disagreeing with. A legal Reader's Digest would thus have salutary effects both within the profession and in the profession's relationship to the outside world.
What's not to love?
[Self-referential, postmodern moment: this is the kind of Laputan about-the-profession post regarding which Will links to me with some insightful (and doubtless devastating) comment, which prompts other law student bloggers to link here with passionate claims that I'm a loon who's set to ruin everything, which in turn causes me to lose the next several days furiously updating as I try to respond to everything that's been said. I guess what I'm saying is: if I look unfocused in BizOrgs tomorrow morning, I am.]
UPDATE: Or not.
This idea occurs to me after reading a single footnote, a reference to Jerry Mashaw's Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law. According to Adrian Vermeule, the author of the piece I'm reading, Mashaw says,
[McNollgast's approach] is enormously information demanding. If McNollgast mean [sic] to suggest that legislative history is reliable only when it can be deployed in this sophisticated fashion (using Bayesian decision theory in the bargain), they may have offered judges and administrators a tool that they cannot use.Now, you may not find that idea interesting, but I found it fascinating, and would like to learn more. Except. I'm not going to read an entire book about it. I simply don't have the time. (And yet, I have the time to blog. What a world.) But if there were a condensed version of it (an extended abstract, if you will) I could easily see myself making the time (half an hour, tops) to read that. And if I still wanted to learn more, or to find references I could follow to other sources, I'd get the whole book.
The background value here, I guess, is that the purpose of scholarship is the generation and dissemination of knowledge and understanding. At present, the world of legal scholarship is pretty good at the generation part (how much of what's generated is hokum I won't - because I can't - say) but pretty lousy at the dissemination part. The volume of what's generated is simply too large, both in terms of the number of articles and their length, for even those who dedicate their lives to legal scholarship, let alone the general public or even the community of practicing lawyers, to read more than a small fraction of what's produced. And the general public doesn't read any of it, and so gets its legal theory primarily from politicians - to whom we all seem to be ambulance-chasing trial lawyers or "judicial activists" of one or another political stripe - or daytime TV court shows. If they could read what was coming out of the legal academy, expressed concisely and in plain (or plainish) English, they might come to an understanding of what the profession's all about. They might not agree with what's being said (indeed, they probably wouldn't) but at least they'd understand what they're disagreeing with. A legal Reader's Digest would thus have salutary effects both within the profession and in the profession's relationship to the outside world.
What's not to love?
[Self-referential, postmodern moment: this is the kind of Laputan about-the-profession post regarding which Will links to me with some insightful (and doubtless devastating) comment, which prompts other law student bloggers to link here with passionate claims that I'm a loon who's set to ruin everything, which in turn causes me to lose the next several days furiously updating as I try to respond to everything that's been said. I guess what I'm saying is: if I look unfocused in BizOrgs tomorrow morning, I am.]
UPDATE: Or not.
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