The Faculty Lounge

In Defense of Law School Publicity

It's common practice around the legal blogosphere to make fun of literature that law schools send around to promote their students, faculty, and alumni.   I actually enjoy reading the literature--it gives me a sense of what other people are doing; every once in a while I get some ideas from it.  And I think these publications can be helpful for getting the law schools' communities excited about what's happening as well.

But it's the University of Akron's most recent, impressive list of faculty publications that's warming my heart right now.  It cites my study in the University of Colorado Law Review last year on law review citations' emerging importance for law school rankings.  How's that for combining two things that legal academics care about?!  I highlighted the schools whose law reviews have been improving a bunch of late--including the University of Akron Law Review.  My hypothesis in the piece was that law reviews are an indicator of what's happening at a school and so good reviews are reflective of an intellectual ferment.   And law reviews that are improving maybe give us a particular idea of the schools on the move.

As long as I'm talking about Akron, I want to mention their fabulous conference on the new women's legal history.  Might even help us address the gender imbalance in legal history.

Now, this is the kind of promotional material I really like!   And I'm not just saying this because they cited me (though I'm certainly highlighting Akron because they cited me!)--I've been defending the promotional literature for a long time.

Alfred Brophy

Scholars Ponder The Process of Writin' and Citin'

Howard Wasserman over at Prawfs has a great conversation going on about this narrow but absolutely critical scholarship question:  how do you write?  Do you draft the piece freestyle, straight from your head, lightly cited?  Or do you write 'n cite - sketching out the text and inserting footnotes all at the same time?

This is a question that I've never actually discussed with other profs, but one that always vexes me when I'm at the drafting stage.  In my own experience, I tend to do a sloppy mix of both.  I surround myself with all the source material as if I'm going to write 'n cite, but end up doing most of the drafting without inserting footnotes.  The reams of paper function as my security blanket, confirming that a) I'm not making it all up and b) at some point I'll be able to prove that I'm not making it all up.

Whatever your preference, I think you do yourself a real favor by making a strategic decision on this early on.  That way, you can structure your production process around the inevitable need to finish with a fully cited work.  For example, I do extensive outlining before I write.  In fact, part of my ritual is to make a trip to the office supply store to purchase an 11x17 sketch pad, on which I create this outline.  I like lots of room to insert new points.  I note sources on this outline - often without page cites.  I can then refer back to the outline when I later need to generate footnotes. But I also agree with Hillel Levin that, sometimes, you need to switch approaches simply to break writing blocks. 

There is one risk to drafting from your head, footnoting later: you must make sure you actually cite all the ideas (and particularly language) you've borrowed from others.  It's possible that this approach does slightly increase  the risk of inadvertant plagarism. 

For new scholars, the important take-away from this dialogue is that there are different ways to crack the nut.  If one method isn't working, turn the ship and head in another direction.  The crucial thing is produce a first draft; the rest is editing.  And who ever heard of editor's block?

(Image?  C'mon!  That's a Citation, of course!)

Law Rewiews' Prestige and Citations: A Misunderstood Relation?

Well, we're getting ever closer to the release of the 2009 US News law school rankings.  I've never been big on office pools, but maybe we ought to think about making some predictions on who's going to go up and who's going to go down.  Never can tell what kind of giggles thefacultylounge can gin up.  Actually, I now see via the magic of google that at least one of the student discussion boards is already on this case.

What I want to talk about, however, is a ranking of a different sort.  I'm interested in taking a long-term view of law review rankings.  I've talked some back at propertyprof about the relationship between law review citations and law school rankings.  Now I have a short paper up on ssrn, which (thanks to some terrific research assistance from Joseph Sherman) looks at the citations to articles that appeared about fifteen years ago in about a dozen leading law journals.  It looks at some of the very most prestigious journals (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago) as well as some of the other elite (Vanderbilt) and some of the other terrific journals (Indiana, Wisconsin, Hastings--hi Calvin!).  The idea was to see how individual articles fared.  It took its methodology from Andrew Oswald's article, which Danny Sokol put me onto, on citations to articles in prestigious economics journals.

Harvard Arts and Sciences Faculty Set to Vote on Open-Access Plan

This morning's New York Times brings news central to thefacultylounge.org's discussions--a plan to have the library (run by one of our heroes, Robert Darnton) distribute faculty scholarship free on the web.  Faculty will retain the copyright and can publish elsewhere--and they can also opt out of the plan if they'd like.  Will be interesting to see where this all goes.

Here's a short excerpt from the article:

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

Will the rest of the academy follow Harvard's lead?  Time will tell.

I've got to leave the lounge and catch up on some work.  On one of my next visits, I want to talk some more about some other Harvard related news, including the magazine 02138.

Al Brophy