Notes: The goal of this class is to understand what makes legal scholarship distinctive from other forms of scholarship, especially in technical fields like computer science.
Questions:
What types of scholarship that Minow and Tobin describe strike you as the most interesting and important?
Where does Lessig’s The Law of the Horse fit in Minow and Tobin’s taxonomy?
What struck you as most novel or unusual about Lessig’s article as a piece of scholarship, compared with other work you have read? Do the readings for today explain why it had those features?
Is the law-review submission system as described by Galle functional or dysfunctional?
Think of a research idea. Would it work as a law-review article? Would it work as an article in a different field? How much do the genre expectations of various academic publication formats drive the substantive content of research?
Additional Resources:
Paul Ohm, Computer Programming and the Law: A New Research Agenda, 54 Villanova Law Review 117 (2009). An influential argument for the connection between law and computer science. Ohm argues that software is relevant to legal scholarship in general, not just to Internet law in particular.
James Grimmelmann, Programming Languages and Law: A Research Agenda, CS&Law (2022). I have been involved with the ProLaLa research community, and this was my attempt to describe what legal scholarship and programming-language theory can teach each other.