AN EMPIRICAL EVALUATION OF SPECIALIZED LAW REVIEWS
Tracey E. George and Chris Guthrie
The Harvard Law School has not converted the venerable Harvard Law Review into the Harvard Legal History Review, the Yale Law School has not abandoned its Journal in favor of the Yale Journal on Jurisprudence, and the Columbia Law School has not replaced its Review with the Columbia Review of Commercial Law. Rather than replacing their generalist reviews with specialized reviews, the Harvard, Yale, and Columbia law schools (like most American law schools) have responded to the call for specialization by adding “specialized” or “secondary” reviews to their roster of publications. Currently, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia collectively publish three generalist law reviews as well as twenty-six specialized law reviews, not one of which existed three decades ago.
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RANKING SPECIALIZED LAW REVIEWS: A METHODOLOGICAL CRITIQUE
Gregory Scott Crespi
“Rankings” are all the rage in academia. Academic departments, professional schools, and even entire universities are now mercilessly slotted into rigid pecking orders by ordinalist zealots. Law review rankings have also been circulating for over two decades, and we are now starting to see this ranking mania extend even to specialized law journals, as evidenced by An Empirical Evaluation of Specialized Law Reviews and two articles along similar lines that— yes, I admit it—I recently published myself. Virtually everyone in the academic world criticizes these ranking efforts, but almost everyone also pays more attention to them than they are willing to admit.
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RANKING JOURNALS: SOME THOUGHTS ON THEORY AND METHODOLOGY
Russell Korobkin
RANKING JOURNALS: SOME THOUGHTS ON THEORY AND METHODOLOGY
Tracey E. George and Chris Guthrie
There is no doubt that Americans love rankings—of practically anything. Whether it is the top forty songs of the week, the top twenty college football teams of the season, the twenty-five most intriguing people of the year, the 100 best books of the century, or the 1000 most important people of the millennium, we want to know who is on top and who is not. The reasons for our fascination are probably too varied to even list. To name just a few: our society worships celebrity, so we want to know who deserves our adoration; the human condition prizes relative status even above absolute achievement, and rankings respond to this desire for hierarchy; and, of course, people love gossip.
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EMPIRE OR RESIDUE: COMPETING VISIONS OF THE CONTRACTUAL CANON
Ian Ayres
Is the domain of contract waxing or waning? Lawrence Friedman’s pathbreaking 1965 book, Contract Law in America, characterized contract law as covering a residual category of relatively unimportant transactions. He argued that whenever particular types of transaction became sufficiently salient—such as those concerning employment or insurance—specialized regulation was promulgated that “robbed contract [law] of its subject-matter.” Nine years later, Grant Gilmore expressed this idea similarly in The Death of Contract, where he regarded “the general law of contract as a residual category—what is left over after all the ‘specialized’ bodies of law have been added up.”
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ADAM J. HIRSCH
Adam J. Hirsch
Most testators are bent on providing for their families, and bequests to close relatives dominate the typical estate plan. Nonetheless, some testators harbor the different, or additional, concern of leaving funds for the furtherance of some purpose or cause, in which they feel an interest—be it broadly philanthropic (poverty relief, for example) or narrowly egocentric (say, construction of a monument). Bequests of this sort are often clothed in a trust, setting out some purpose which the trustee is directed to accomplish or promote with the allocated funds. Historically, the common law divided trusts for purposes into three sub-categories: those for charitable purposes, serving the public interest; those for noncharitable purposes, accomplishing merely private ends; and those for purposes deemed by lawmakers to violate public policy.
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BULLETPROOFING THE WORKPLACE: SYMBOL AND SUBSTANCE IN EMPLOYMENT DISCRIMINATION LAW PRACTICE
Susan Bisom-Rapp
Discussions of whether workplace equality has been achieved in American society can be both vexing and painful. While few would dispute that the civil rights revolution has produced significant results, there is considerable and often heated disagreement about the extent to which some employees continue to confront discrimination in employment and what, if anything, the law can and should do about it. Empirical evidence indicates that discrimination in employment, while not as overt as in the past, is nevertheless quite prevalent. Despite these findings, however, much of the popular debate is characterized by anecdote. For every story of an employer that operates like Texaco or Mitsubishi, there is a comparable tale of an employee who has abused the legal system by filing a frivolous discrimination lawsuit.
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THE RIGHT TO CROSS-EXAMINE PHYSICIANS IN SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY CASES
Victor G. Rosenblum
In the 1971 United States Supreme Court decision Richardson v. Perales, Justice Blackmun couched the majority ruling on the right to cross-examine reporting physicians in social security disability claim hearings in an elaborate, complex sentence that perplexes analysts of its blackletter content and spawns conflicting interpretations of its subsequent bearing on cases in which cross-examination is requested.
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LEVELING THE HILL OF SISYPHUS: BECOMING A PROFESSOR OF LEGAL WRITING
Jan M. Levine
I wrote this Article to fill a largely unexplored area in the literature about making one’s career within the law school academy. Lawyers considering their first jobs as a professor of legal writing comprise the primary audience I have in mind for this Article; legal writing professors who are seeking a teaching appointment at another law school, or perhaps even a directorship of a legal writing program, make up the secondary audience.
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WHAT ABOUT OUR FAMILIES? USING THE IMPACT ON DEATH ROW DEFENDANTS’ FAMILY MEMBERS AS A MITIGATING FACTOR IN DEATH PENALTY SENTENCING HEARINGS
Rachel King and Katherine Norgard
These are the voices of people who have, or have had, loved ones on death row in the United States, speaking about their experiences with the criminal justice system. Today the victims of violent crimes receive a great deal of political and media attention. The “victims’ rights movement” has made incredible strides in reshaping the criminal justice laws in most states. Many positive developments have come from the victims’ rights movement. Allowing victims to have input into the process can promote healing and help restore a sense of control over their lives. The extent of victim involvement varies from state to state. Some states allow victims to have input in each phase of the prosecution of a criminal case, from plea bargaining to sentencing.6 Some states, like Colorado, require that the prosecution consult with the victim.
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