Making the implicit quality standards and performance expectations for traditional legal scholarship explicit

Marnix Snel

doi:10.1017/glj.2019.6

Abstract

AbstractScholars in search of quality standards for traditional legal scholarship could well end up disappointed. By answering the question concerning what standards legal academics use for evaluating such works—through reviewing the international literature on evaluative standards and interviews with forty law professors—this Article aims at filling this gap. This Article recommends that traditional legal scholarship is judged by using the following criteria: (1) the conceptual design—a clearly formulated research question that is both original and significant and the adequacy of the methods proposed to answer that question; (2) the composition of a particular line of reasoning—does the researcher adhere to principles of accountability, accuracy, balance, and credibility?; and (3) the overall characteristics of a work of scholarship—the readability and persuasiveness of the whole and the extent to which the researcher managed to identify and clarify the presuppositions that may have potentially affected her inquiry.

Highlights

Scholars in search of quality standards for traditional legal scholarship could well end up disappointed
By answering the question concerning what standards legal academics use for evaluating such works— through reviewing the international literature on evaluative standards and interviews with forty law professors—this Article aims at filling this gap
This Article recommends that traditional legal scholarship is judged by using the following criteria: (1) the conceptual design—a clearly formulated research question that is both original and significant and the adequacy of the methods proposed to answer that question; (2) the composition of a particular line of reasoning—does the researcher adhere to principles of accountability, accuracy, balance, and credibility?; and (3) the overall characteristics of a work of scholarship—the readability and persuasiveness of the whole and the extent to which the researcher managed to identify and clarify the presuppositions that may have potentially affected her inquiry

Summary

Introduction

Scholars in search of quality standards for traditional legal scholarship could well end up disappointed. Any proposition of such a set is necessarily open-ended, assailable, non-absolute, and no more than “a snapshot in time of a set of emergent ideas.” That, has not withheld scholars operating in other disciplines from having a vibrant debate about their quality standards, and it does not keep me from trying to breathe life into a debate about criteria for considering traditional legal scholarship What it does mean, though, is that the reader is encouraged to consider the insights presented in this Article critically, to treat the proposed performance expectations with a healthy form of suspicion, and to actively engage in a further debate about the rules of the game we all like to play. The need for explicating standards or performance expectations Prior to presenting what I found, let me first express why it is that I—and I am not alone here12— think our discipline should be involved in a more conscious dialogue about its quality standards, and, as our community has operated for so long without any, why would be a good time to begin doing so

Objectives

Methods