"The Legal Workshop" -- A New Online Law Review

The Law Reviews at Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, Northwestern, Stanford, and the University of Chicago have collaborated to create The Legal Workshop. Here is an excerpt from the press release:

TOP LAW REVIEWS STRIKE UNPRECEDENTED DEAL AND COLLABORATE TO LAUNCH WEB MAGAZINE

The Legal Workshop aims to revitalize legal scholarship

STANFORD, Calif., April 21, 2009—A consortium of America’s most influential law reviews today launched The Legal Workshop (www.legalworkshop.org), a free, online magazine featuring articles based on legal scholarship published in the print editions of seven participating law reviews: Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review,Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review.

The Legal Workshop features short, plain-English articles about legal issues and ideas, written by an author whose related, full-length work of scholarship is forthcoming in one of the participating law reviews. But The Legal Workshop does not house a collection of abstracts. Instead, it offers an engaging alternative to traditional academic articles that run 30,000 words with footnotes, enabling scholars to present their well-formulated opinions and their research to a wider audience. In addition to making legal ideas understandable, The Legal Workshop seeks to house the best of legal scholarship in one place—making it easier for readers to find the best writing about all areas of law.

“It’s really the best of both worlds,” said Dahlia Lithwick, the Stanford Law alumnus who covers the Supreme Court for Slatein a highly influential column. “The general public can be better engaged with the latest thinking about the law while knowing that what they’re reading is serious scholarship; not just fad or opinion.”

A quick look at the the first set of pieces will give you a clearer sense of the basic idea.  For example, one of the pieces is Alexander Volokh, Choosing Interpretive Methods: A Positive Theory of Judges and Everyone Else. The version on "The Legal Workshop" is approximately 3,800 words--with 22 footnotes. It includes a link to the full article, which is published in the New York University Law Review. The full version is approximately 37,000 words long, and includes 345 footnotes.  The website allows reader to get both the "Reader's Digest" version and the full version of the article.

I just got the email announcing this a few minutes ago, and it will take some time to assess this idea.  I do have a few quick reactions:

First, the basic idea of creating an outlet for short-form legal scholarship is to be applauded.  Other journals have tried to do this in various ways--the "commentary" was the hard copy version of this & the online companions to various journals (such as the Yale Law Journal's Pocket Part have the same aim.  The first innovation of "The Legal Workshop" is that it transforms long-articles into short-form online pieces.  It seems likely that the short-form versions will reach a wider readership.  Bravo!  I hope this succeeds!

Second, I am a bit skeptical of the ambitious claims in the press release about reaching "the general public."  Consider this sentence, chosen randomly from one of the first batch of pieces:

In the context of systemic risk, however, individual market participants who fully understand that risk will be motivated to protect themselves but not the system as a whole.9 Imposing additional disclosure requirements may even prove counterproductive, causing market participants to change their behavior. For example, traders may become more cautious, demanding that prices move farther before making trades, thereby ultimately reducing market liquidity.

This prose is not aimed at the general public and will be incomprehensible to general readers.  (This is not intended as a criticism of the writing, which does an exemplary job of reaching the general audience of legal academics.)  Of course, there is some legal scholarship that will speak to "the general public," more that can reach a general audience of highly educated members of the public, and even more that could speak to the legal profession.  But most legal scholarship (like most political science scholarship, philosophy scholarship, etc.) is aimed a specialized audience because it builds on a complex set of ideas that cannot be translated into prose accessible to the general public without a serious loss of content. 

Third, I am also skeptical about potential for the format of "The Legal Workshop" to produce pieces that will directly influence practitioners--lawyers and judges, who are most interested in descriptive doctrinal scholarship.  Only one of the articles in the first batch is doctrinal scholarship aimed at practitioners and judges.  The culture of the legal academy deeply disfavors this form of scholarship: the multivolume treatises are still produced, but the authors tend to be very senior, not at top ranked law schools, or practitioners themselves.  (Please do not be offended if you are a treatise writer: I am the author of two treatises and I believe in the value of the form.)  Moreover, the kind of descriptive doctrinal scholarship that is best produced by legal scholars involves the synthesis of large volumes of legal texts (e.g., case crunching, code crunching, and rule crunching).  But synthetic and comprehensive legal scholarship is best suited to the long form.  Indeed, the long form came to dominate legal scholarship for exactly this reason.  Lots of ideas developed by legal scholars can be expressed in short form scholarship (and shorter forms predominate in the adjacent disciplines of philosophy, economics, and political science), but interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship is not aimed directly at legal practitioners (with some exceptions, of course).

I look forward to more from "The Legal Workshop."  Comments are open for this post!

Comments

[Matt]

Hi--I am a student at NYU who worked on the project. I read your comment with interest. I just wanted to point out that while you correctly refer to "The Legal Workshop" at the start of your post, you slip into referring to it as "The Faculty Workshop" which I think is incorrect.

Great blog!

[Matt Lawrence]

I am a student who worked on the project, and I have to say your first-cut comments are very interesting. There is a lot to unpack in all this, but I do have one optimistic thought/comment: The Legal Workshop site is brand new, and the content currently on it was developed before the site was even up and running, largely by authors and editors who had not had the chance to see the site.

So while I think you are right about readability/accessibility of the pieces currently on the site, I am hopeful that as the site develops the pieces grow better tailored to the format (although I think the pieces on the site already do a very good job of boiling down complicated content). And comments from other bloggers and the online community will allow the students running the site continually to tailor it.

One other point--the long form scholarship you describe often leads to lengthy law review articles talking past one another. Asking authors to boil their arguments down into short form, while keep the long form "supported" print content, will let students "categorize" and tag the pieces that get posted--eventually leading to an indexed archive of scholarship. Along with the possibility to submit response pieces to the site, hopefully this will pull back on the tendency of law review articles to resemble ships passing in the night.

[J. Bogart]

Content is everything. The journal has significant possibility for practitioners interested in academic developments. I think there is interest beyond immediate practice guides and treatises, and accessible formats will drive some of that further. SSRN is not well known to lawyers, for example. And keep in mind that a significant part of the audience for Antitrust Journal is practicing lawyers.

[BarristersHandshake]

Color me cynical, but I say enough with the "excitement" about this thing, it's gratuitous self promotion for authors published in the leading law reviews. (no offense to them, if I was published in one of these places I'd draft one of these too).

With that said, for the most part we're getting 2500 word abstracts (up from the 500 word abstracts) but it's still dense legal theory that won't appeal to the masses.

Thus, the only audience left for this are law professors, who don't need short versions of articles to be drawn into scholarship published by Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, New York University, Northwestern, Stanford, Chicago.