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Legal Scholarship (legal + scholarship)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Law and Criminology100%

Selected Abstracts

Editor's Corner: Considerations in the Rise of Empirical Legal Scholarship

AMERICAN BUSINESS LAW JOURNAL, Issue 3 2010
Daniel R. Cahoy
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

Comparative Sociology of Law: Legal Fields, Legal Scholarships, and Social Sciences in Europe and the United States

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 2 2006
Mauricio García-Villegas
This article attempts to gain a better understanding of the sociology(ies) of law in a comparative perspective through a structural and comparative explanation of the American and the French legal fields. It is argued that comparative sociology of law will not be able to explain the difference among countries, scholars, movements, and schools of thought in short, it will not be able to compare,as long as it avoids the analysis of some social and cultural presuppositions related to the context in which these differences take place. It focuses mainly on two of these presuppositions. First, legal fields, with their history, their internal structure, and their power relations, and second the type of relation between the legal field and the state. The empirical examination provided in this article explicitly seeks to offer insights for the reconstruction of Bourdieu's structural theory of the legal field. [source]

Governing Without Law or Governing Without Government?

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2009
New-ish Governance, the Legitimacy of the EU
The way the EU is governed and the way such governance is perceived contributes centrally to the legitimacy of the European enterprise. This legitimacy underpins both the acceptance and the effects of EU activity. Legitimacy is a product of the way in which decisions are taken, and the nature and quality of such decisions. Pressures created by concerns about both forms of legitimacy affecting EU decision making partially explain the turn in legal scholarship away from the more traditional preoccupation with the analysis of legislative instruments and case-law, towards a more broadly based conception of governance which involves the examination of a more diverse range of processes and instruments. This article offers an analysis of the parameters of newness in governance. The overall argument is that some of the more innovative governance modes are not so new, whilst more recent and celebrated modes, although displaying elements of newness, are, perhaps, not that innovative. The focus of the new governance in the EU is largely on governing without law, rather than the more radical governing without government; hence the suggestion that we are experiencing only ,new-ish governance'. The article asks whether a limited conception of new governance is inevitable given the legitimacy constraints within which the EU operates, or whether the potential for developing a broader conception of governance, through wider participation and involvement of non-governmental governing capacities, might bolster legitimacy through both better processes and better outcomes. [source]

The Statistical Analysis of Judicial Decisions and Legal Rules with Classification Trees

JOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2010
Jonathan P. Kastellec
A key question in the quantitative study of legal rules and judicial decision making is the structure of the relationship between case facts and case outcomes. Legal doctrine and legal rules are general attempts to define this relationship. This article summarizes and utilizes a statistical method relatively unexplored in political science and legal scholarship,classification trees,that offers a flexible way to study legal doctrine. I argue that this method, while not replacing traditional statistical tools for studying judicial decisions, can better capture many aspects of the relationship between case facts and case outcomes. To illustrate the method's advantages, I conduct classification tree analyses of search and seizure cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and confession cases decided by the courts of appeals. These analyses illustrate the ability of classification trees to increase our understanding of legal rules and legal doctrine. [source]

Is legal biography really legal scholarship?

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2010
R Gwynedd Parry
This paper examines the recent resurgence of interest in the legal biography among legal scholars. It argues that the legal biography has traditionally been treated with suspicion within the English law school due to ideological and methodological concerns about the intellectual validity and robustness of the form, and because of reservations about its true disciplinary province. Through a literary survey of legal biography, it claims a tension between intellectual and empirical approaches that parody the tension between the internal and external traditions in legal history. More recent biographies, however, have succeeded in bridging these divides and in demonstrating the potential value of legal biography in deepening our understanding of the human context of legal phenomena. [source]

Casaubon's ghosts: the haunting of legal scholarship

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2001
Allan C Hutchinson
Much academic work continues to operate within the cramping and pervasive spirit of a black-letter mentality that encourages scholars and jurists to maintain legal study as an inward-looking and self-contained discipline. There is still a marked tendency to treat law as somehow a world of its own that is separate from the society within which it operates and purports to serve. This is a disheartening and disabling state of affairs. Accordingly, this article will offer both a critique of the present situation and suggest an alternative way of proceeding. The writer recommends a shift from philosophy to democracy so that legal academics will be less obsessed with abstraction and formalism and more concerned with relevance and practicality. In contrast to the hubristic and occasionally mystical aspirations of mainstream scholars, it presents a more humble depiction of the worth and efficacy of the jurisprudential and scholarly project in which ,usefulness' is given pride of place. Of course, these fundamental charges are not applicable to all legal scholars. Many scholars are engaged in work that not only challenges the prevailing paradigm of legal scholarship, but also explores exciting new directions for legal study. It will be part of the essay to acknowledge those contributions. [source]