Wednesday, August 24, 2022

What Do Law Professors Believe about Law and the Legal Academy? An Empirical Inquiry

Author Rebecca Woolf talks about death, grief — and relief

"There are no death bloggers": An erstwhile mommy blogger reckons with widowhood


Artist Celebrates the Perfection of Nature Through Meticulous Geometric Drawings My Modern Met 


“FACT-CHECKERS” ARE JUST PROPAGANDISTS:  Fact Checking the Fact Checkers: AP’s Hit Piece on ‘2000 Mules’ is Full of Holes.


Sick days double the normal winter rate in July, ABS data shows Guardian



The Atlantic: The Aspen Time – How a Soviet-born developer and a West Virginia billionaire destroyed a 141-year-old Colorado newspaper


   Partition literature 

       At The Wire they have a useful list of books, in The Pain of Partition, as Seen in the Literature of Many Languages


Martínez, Eric and Tobia, Kevin, What Do Law Professors Believe about Law and the Legal Academy? An Empirical Inquiry (August 5, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4182521 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4182521 

“Legal theorists seek to persuade other jurists of certain theories: Textualism or purposivism; formalism or realism; natural law theory or positivism; prison reform or abolition; universal or particular human rights? Despite voluminous literature about these debates, tremendous uncertainty remains about which views experts endorse. This Article presents the first-ever empirical study of American law professors about legal theory questions. A novel dataset of over six hundred law professors reveals expert consensus and dissensus about dozens of longstanding legal theory debates.

 Law professors also debate questions about the nature of the legal academy. Descriptively, which subjects (e.g. constitutional law) and methods (e.g. law & economics) are most central within the legal academy today? And prescriptively, should today’s legal academy prioritize additional areas (e.g. legislation) or methods (e.g. critical race theory)? There is great interest in these questions but no empirical dataset of experts’ views; this results in uncertainty about which views experts endorse. This Article’s empirical study also clarifies these questions, documenting law professors’ evaluation of over one-hundred areas of law. The legal theory and legal academy findings support implications for legal scholarship, education, and practice.

 Clearly, debates about law and the legal academy’s evolution should not be settled by a survey. Nevertheless, insofar as law professors are experts about these issues, it is instructive to discover and carefully examine what views those experts hold, so as to help determine which views are most likely to be true and how the legal academy ought to develop.”




       International Booker Prize judges 

       They've announced the judges for the 2023 International Booker Prize, the leading English-language prize for a work of fiction in translation by a living author (and translator); see also the official press release (warning ! dreaded pdf format !)
       The judges are:

       The prize is now also open for submissions. 
       The longlist will be announced next March. 



       American war on books ? 

       At Salon Amanda Marcotte sums up the current sad state of affairs, in Republican war on books: They don't just want to control your body — next up, your mind
       Not exactly a new story in the US, but still worth noting