On May 18, I posted the abstract of a very interesting paper by Victoria Nourse & Gregory Shaffer, Varieties of New Legal Realism: Can a New World Order Prompt a New Legal Theory?.
I recently received some comments on the paper from Elizabeth Mertz (whose work I have long admired). Here are her comments:
I was pleased to see your post on Victoria and Greg's paper, which I also admire. And thanks to Greg for posting a correction regarding the positions Stewart Macaulay and I have taken on some of the issues they discuss. In particular, we would not define new legal realism around a requirement that law professors perform their own
fieldwork or empirical research (as opposed to becoming expert translators). We also would not denigrate largescale quantitative research as in and of itself unworthy of being included in a new legal realist project. (To the contrary - I myself have consistently included quantitative research in my project designs, for example). It's more that we advocate consulting results from studies using multiple methodologies -- including qualitative research as a very important source of empirical information (see our website, newlegalrealism.org, or the guest blog symposium we did on the els blog a few years back -- http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/blog_forum/page/4/).
But I do really appreciate the exciting synthesis Greg and Victoria have put together, challenging all of us working in the area to think about our relationships with one another and with other strands of legal thought. Stewart and I are both great admirers of Victoria and Greg's work.
Beth Mertz
But I do really appreciate the exciting synthesis Greg and Victoria have put together, challenging all of us working in the area to think about our relationships with one another and with other strands of legal thought. Stewart and I are both great admirers of Victoria and Greg's work.
Beth Mertz
Greg Shaffer has also provided some comments on the post, which I will repeat here:
Posted by:
Gregory Shaffer |
May 27, 2009 at 05:14 PM
This is a working draft and Victoria and I welcome comments on it. We are circulating the paper now. Beth Mertz, for example, just clarified to us that, in terms of her perspective on new legal realism, she does not require people to do empirical work (as per the excerpt from our draft in the blog, so we need to rephrase this). Rather she emphasizes the need for those in legal academia to be able to engage critically with empirical work, a point with which I agree. We are presenting the ideas in this paper at the annual Law and Society Association meeting in Denver on Friday, May 29 (12.30) and we will revise and post a new version of it after the meeting.