September 13, 2006

"Is that a prediction, or a statement of the status quo?"

I like that zinger from Andy, commenting on a post at Prawfsblawg, which quoted David Luban saying maybe "a few years down the road":
... the question whether hiring committees should count blogging as legal scholarship might transmute into the question whether hiring committees should count law review articles as legal scholarship. If the best students and many scholars perceive the action shifting to cyberspace, law reviews will become less important repositories of at least one variety of scholarly ambition. Law reviews will concentrate on interdisciplinary, fancy-theoretical scholarship relatively disconnected from the flow of real-time political and legal events.
Luban seems to think lawprofs aren't much good at fancy theory anyway. (Is it just me, or did the expression "fancy theory" go out of style maybe like... five years ago?) I hear some professorial chortling as he repeats the quips that "there are no geniuses in law" and that lawprofs "make better kibbitzers than theoreticians." Does this poke at a sore spot or does it seem to whisper liberation?

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