There’s been a lot of discussion about what legal scholarship is or should be here lately, but one thing that strikes me (and it has been said before) is the legal academy’s strange notion of originality. Other fields do a much better job in recognizing that the production of
knowledge is not about novelty, but building on old theories, looking at the same evidence in a new way, or harmonizing different schools of thought with new analysis. The idea of preemption, which is really acutely problematic with law students, is one symptom of this.
Just a fairly random Wednesday thought.
I’ll add as an addendum, that I suspect some of this is driven by the law review format, which requires laying down the scope of the piece for generalists before anything else. Who wants to write 75 pages retesting or building on an older theory? That’s a lot of labor for that.
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