Siems on a World Without Law Professors

Mathias M. Siems (University of East Anglia, Norwich Law School) has posted A World Without Law Professors on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Inspired by Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us” (2007) I analyse the thought experiment of a world in which law professors suddenly vanished. First, without academic teachers legal training would shift back to the legal professions. Purely professional law schools would provide legal training for future lawyers. This is feasible in both Common Law and Civil Law jurisdictions. These professional law schools can also be involved in a more general provision of legal education. In addition, non-law faculties of universities can take responsibility for teaching on law-related subjects. Secondly, I analyse the impact on legal research. Self-referential research would diminish. Doctrinal research would persist but it would be done by practitioners and the current oversupply would melt down. At universities legal research would continue but it would shift to related fields of social sciences and humanities. Thus, the threshold would be an “academic dinner party test”: legal research would have to show that it is of interest for other academic disciplines. Overall, I would therefore expect some changes; however, legal education and research would not disappear. In some respects, one could even argue that without law professors the quality of both teaching and research may improve. The paper finishes with the implications for the current system.

And from the paper:

Since practitioners can engage in doctrinal legal research (as explained), non-doctrinal original forms of legal research should qualify as deep research. The prime examples are the “legal x” and “law and x” fields, such as, legal philosophy, legal history, legal sociology, law and econom- ics, law and finance, law and religion etc.,76 as well as research on the methods of legal reasoning and deep level comparative law.77

It could be unrealistic to assume that all of these forms of legal research would survive in a world in which all law professors suddenly vanished. However, if we modify the initial scenario a little bit, such a survival would be more likely. So, let us not imagine that all law professors suddenly vanished, but that all law professors would have to ap- ply for positions in other faculties or schools of their universities. The scenario is there- fore an “academic dinner party test”: law professors have to convince academics from other disciplines that their research is worth pursuing. In principle, deep-research legal academics should be able to pass this test. For instance, legal historians would move to history, legal philosophers to philosophy, and law and economics scholars to econom- ics. Deep comparative legal research may emigrate to comparative politics, comparative economics, or development studies. And academics who specialise in legal research methods may be able to convince (other) philosophers of science.

How many law professors would find a new home, would naturally depend on the posts available in other disciplines. Moreover, we can distinguish between countries. In the US, Richard Posner already declared “the decline of law as an autonomous discipline” more than 20 years ago.78 Similarly, Jeffrey Lipshaw writes in a recent paper: “How many legal scholars are still toiling merely in the explication of the self-contained sys- tem? Not many, I think. Skim through SSRN for more than a few minutes. To the con- trary, almost all of us are bringing law and ... insights to this discipline.”79 The UK legal academia is currently in a transitional phase. Although it is still complained that the bias towards text in legal research leads to a dislocation from other social sciences,80 it has also been said that “legal scholarship today is generally more varied, more lively, more sophisticated, and more self-confident” than fifty years ago.81 The German situation can be thought of the opposite to the American one.

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If law professors manage to get positions at other schools or faculties, there are some reasons why this could have a beneficial effect on the quality of their research. Such a development could increase the diversity of legal research. Since other faculties and schools would integrate research on law, the current problem of law schools as “intel- lectual silos” would be overcome.83 The non-law faculties or schools may also have bet- ter training facilities. For instance, it is a major problem for the emerging field of em- pirical legal studies in Europe that law faculties have hardly any existing expertise in quantitative research methods. A relocation of such legal research to schools in other social sciences may solve this problem. Finally, the bond with other disciplines may in- crease the impact of legal research. This can most clearly be seen in the field of com- parative law. Insights from traditional comparative law are typically disregarded by courts and legislators, whereas the new quantitative form of comparative law, initiated by financial economists, has had a profound impact on law makers all around the world.84

Yet, such a re-allocation of legal research would also have its costs. In particular, it could be expected that a dispersion of scholars with interests in legal research into various disciplines would necessarily diminish the engagement between such scholars. This point is, however, not specific about scholars with interests in legal research. Generally, too, research projects may benefit from joined work between, say, historians, sociologists and economists. Such collaboration would then also include legal his- torians, legal sociologists and law & economics scholars.

Horrors!

But recommended!