Olasolo, Urueña, and Arévalo-Ramírez on Techniques for Conducting International Law Research from Critical Approaches @mario_uruena @Juris_urosario @WalterArevaloR1

Hector Olasolo, Universidad del Rosario; Iberoamerican Institute of The Hague (IIH); The Hague University of Applied Sciences, International Law, Mario Urueña, Universidad del Rosario, and Walter Arévalo-Ramírez, Universidad del Rosario have published Techniques for Conducting International Law Research from Critical Approaches in volume 32 of Díkaion (2023). Here is the abstract.

This article aims to construct a state-of-the-art resource regarding the theoretical foundations and methodological options for any researcher interested in working with critical international law perspectives. The four views chosen for this exercise (TWAIL, CILS, feminist theories, and social idealism) will be dissected regarding their theoretical foundations and relevant research methods and techniques. It establishes the framing of critical research in international law through monodisciplinary, multidisciplinarity, and inter-disciplinarity, depending upon the interaction between legal-international concepts and methods.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Chapman on Slave Cases and Ingrained Racism in Legal Information Infrastructures @UMDLawLibrary @UMDLaw

Jennifer Elisa Chapman, University of Maryland School of Law, University of Maryland Thurgood Marshall Law Library, has published Slave Cases and Ingrained Racism in Legal Information Infrastructures in Antiracist Library and Information Science: Racial Justice and Community (K. Black and B. Mehra, eds., Emerald Publishing, 2023) (Advances in Librarianship; 52).

Present-day courts, practitioners, and scholars continue to cite to and rely upon cases involving slavery and enslaved persons to construe, interpret, and apply common-law principles of property, contract, family, tort, and other areas of the law. Often a case’s connections to slavery are not acknowledged in citations. This erasing of context causes institutional harms by both embedding slave-based legal analysis in American legal structures and condoning the detrimental impacts of slavery in society. The deleterious effects of slavery persist through citations to cases involving enslaved persons to support such prosaic present-day issues as warranties on window glass. Slavery may no longer be legal, but its long shadow persists in citations and, thereby, is embedded in the information systems informing the legal profession. The information infrastructures that categorize case law and inform legal research ingrain racism in the American legal system by perpetuating and masking case law connections to slavery and enslaved persons. The legal profession has recently been criticized for the continued citation to cases that state good law or persuasive authority but are rooted in the institution of slavery. This chapter builds on this important research and contributes a necessary element to the discussion – namely how legal information infrastructures contribute to continuing citation to slave cases and how the library and information science (LIS) field can help institute change and promote racial justice.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Workshop On Making Sociolegal Research Visible and Tangible @ThomGiddens @aperrykessaris @KentLawSchool @IALS_law

News about a workshop taking place at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, March 9, 2018, organized by Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Professor of Law, Kent Law School, and Diamond Ashiagor, Professor of Law, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

Workshop: Making Sociolegal Research Visible and Tangible

We invite you to attend a workshop devoted to reframing your current sociolegal research project using design-based strategies, and in so doing to improve your abilities to explain (ask: how?), to generate (ask: why?) and to speculate (ask: what if?) in relation to it.
In this one day hands-on workshop you will make three types of models (modular, found and bespoke) about your own research project; and experience the risks and rewards—in terms of communication, agility and openness—of making your research visible and tangible in an communal setting.

More here.

Via Thom Giddens, St. Mary's, London

Stern on The Literary Analysis of Law @ArsScripta @OxUniPress

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is publishing Literary Analysis of Law in The Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research (Markus D. Dubber and Christopher Tomlins, eds., Oxford, --). Here is the abstract.

Legal historians often turn to literary examples to show how doctrines, practices, or institutions were perceived at a certain a time. Imaginative works sometimes serve as representative illustrations of legal phenomena, sometimes as alternatives to dominant legal ideas or assumptions (voicing dissent or presenting figures and perspectives that escape the law’s comprehension), sometimes as evidence for the dissemination of legal thought or folk wisdom about the law, and sometimes as a kind of parallel formation that uses, or reflects on, legal methods and modes of explanation, even if the work does not expressly address legal issues. This chapter focuses primarily on the last two approaches, by way of two case studies. The first case study uses text-mining to show how earlier versions of the Miranda warning appeared in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, and to ask what we may infer about how these writers understood the warning's purpose and effect. In the second case study, I consider how Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) reflects on contemporaneous obscenity law. The aim in this section is to show how literary interpretation can inform legal historical inquiry by taking us beyond what the text depicts, focusing attention instead on how the text operates. This kind of inquiry can bring out connections between law and literature that we would miss, if we attended only to what the text explicitly says or describes. The chapter ends with a short bibliography of recent scholarship on law and literature that focuses specifically on the historical dimensions of the inquiry.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Sloan and Starger @ColinStarger on Metaphor and Legal Research

Amy E. Sloan and Colin P. Starger, both of the University of Baltimore School of Law, are publishing New Wine in Old Wineskins: Metaphor and Legal Research in the 2016 Notre Dame Law Review Online. Here is the abstract.

We construct our conceptual world using metaphors. Yet sometimes our concepts are flawed and our metaphors do damage. This Article examines a set of metaphors currently doing damage in law – those for legal research. It shows that while technology has radically altered the material world of legal research, our dominant metaphors have remained static, and thus, become outmoded. Conceptualizing today’s reality using old metaphors fails; it is like pouring new wine in old wineskins. To address this problem, this Article first surfaces unwarranted assumptions buried in the metaphors we use when talking about research and then proposes new metaphors to better serve theory and practice. It concludes by examining how this investigation into “finding law” implicates primary jurisprudential concepts of law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.  

Hutchinson on Using Interdisciplinary Methods In Law Reform

Terry Christine M. Hutchinson, Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Law, is publishing The Doctrinal Method: Incorporating Interdisciplinary Methods in Reforming the Law in volume 8 of the Erasmus Law Review (2015). Here is the abstract.

The doctrinal methodology is in a period of change and transition. Realising that the scope of the doctrinal method is too constricting, academic lawyers are becoming eclectic in their use of research method. In this transitional time, legal scholars are increasingly infusing evidence (and methods) from other disciplines into their reasoning to bolster their reform recommendations. This article considers three examples of the interplay of the discipline of law with other disciplines in the pursuit of law reform. Firstly the article reviews studies on the extent of methodologies and reformist frameworks in PhD research in Australia. Secondly it analyses a ‘snapshot’ of recently published Australian journal articles on criminal law reform. Thirdly, it focuses on the law reform commissions, those independent government committees that play such an important role in law reform in common law jurisdictions. This examination demonstrates that while the doctrinal core of legal scholarship remains intact, legal scholars are endeavouring to accommodate statistics, comparative perspectives, social science evidence and methods, and theoretical analysis, within the legal research framework, in order to provide additional ballast to the recommendations for reform.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Fred Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami On the Origins of the Bluebook

Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Law School, and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, Yale Law School, are publishing The Secret History of the Bluebook in volume 100 of the Minnesota Law Review (2016). Here is the abstract.

The Bluebook, or Uniform System of Citation as it was formerly titled, has long been a significant component of American legal culture. The standard account of the origins of the Bluebook, deriving directly from statements made by longtime Harvard Law School Dean and later Solicitor General of the United States Erwin N. Griswold, maintains that the citation manual originated at the Harvard Law Review in the 1920s and was created or adapted by Dean Griswold himself. This account is wildly erroneous, as proven by intensive research we conducted in the archives of Harvard and Yale. In fact, the Bluebook grew out of precursor manuals at Yale Law School, apparently inspired by a legal scholar even more important than Griswold, namely Karl N. Llewellyn. The "uniform citations" movement that began at Yale was actually at first opposed by Harvard. In his most extreme misstatement, Griswold asserted that a collaborative decision was made in the 1920s by Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review to share the revenues from publishing the Bluebook (eventually amounting to millions of dollars) among the four journals. There is indeed now four-way revenue-sharing, but it did not commence until the 1970s, and then only after a revolt of the three "junior partners" against Harvard Law Review's complete monopolization of Bluebook income for half a century, a revolt initiated by Joan Wexler of the Yale Law Journal. Some readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale. Our response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

More on this article here from the New York Times.

Measuring Publications in Top Law Journals

Reza Dibadj, University of San Francisco School of Law, is publishing Fashions and Methodology in Rethinking Legal Scholarship: A Transatlantic Interchange (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

I attempt in this chapter to build on prior empirical work where I compared who and what was being published in top law reviews in three different jurisdictions: the United States, Britain, and France. Part I begins by discussing the key empirical findings of a research project that analyzed a sample of legal publications in the United States, Britain, and France. As discussed, the work proceeded in two phases: first, identifying what “top” journal and “elite” law school might be in each jurisdiction; second, analyzing each article according to author characteristics, legal method employed, and subject matter. Part II then draws implications from this preliminary work, attempting to relate the empirical results to the academic legal culture in each jurisdiction. Put simply, can one try to find meaning in these results? After having surveyed what is being published in “top” law journals across three different jurisdictions, as well as trying to explore links between these results and legal culture, Part III tries to draw some implications. At least two important points emerge. First, that as legal academics we need to pay more attention to quality and how to measure it. Yet existing quality metrics — journal rankings, peer review, bibliometric citations, and the like — are by themselves at best incomplete and at worst misleading. As such, I argue that quality cannot be understood without the threshold concept of methodology. Entering the dangerous territory of linking methodology with quality becomes all but inevitable if we hope to begin improving the state of legal research. Ironically, what is deeply missing in this literature is a focus on methodology. While it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to generalize across jurisdictions there remains a central question of what Americans may learn from Europeans when it comes to legal research and vice-versa? Methodology can begin to provide a framework to address this question.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Legal Research and Doctrinal Analysis In a Legal Studies Program

Vincent Kazmierski, Carleton University Department of Law, has published How Much 'Law' in Legal Studies? Approaches to Teaching Legal Research and Doctrinal Analysis in a Legal Studies Program at 29 Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société (2013). Here is the abstract.

This article addresses the teaching of legal research methods and doctrinal analysis within a legal studies program. I argue that learning about legal research and doctrinal analysis is an important element of legal education outside professional law schools. I start by considering the ongoing debate concerning the role of legal education both inside and outside professional law schools. I then describe the way in which the research methods courses offered by the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University attempt to reconcile the tension between “law” and legal studies. In particular, I focus on how the second-year research methods course introduces students to “traditional” legal research and doctrinal analysis within a legal studies context by deploying a number of pedagogical strategies. In so doing, the course provides students with an important foundation that allows them to embrace the multiple roles of legal education outside professional law schools.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Internet as a Catalyst For Change In the Search for Legal Information

Amy E. Sloan, University of Baltimore School of Law, has published The 95 Theses: Legal Research in the Internet Age at 20 Legal Writing Journal 45 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Martin Luther is largely credited with starting the Protestant Reformation in 1517 with The 95 Theses, his work challenging the Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences. The Reformation had many causes, but the invention of the printing press was a primary catalyst for change. The printing press made the Bible and other forms of religious literature available to a much wider audience than had previously had access to this information. Legal research does not rise to the level of a religious experience. With apologies to Luther, however, I offer the following thesis about legal research today: The availability of legal information on the Internet has led to the law’s equivalent of the Protestant Reformation. As legal information has become available to more people, legal research and the roles of lawyers have been transforming as well.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Legal Archives, Scholarship and Legal Thinking: The Case of Law and the Humanities

Katherine Biber and Trish Luker, both of the University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law, have published Evidence and the Archive: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Emotion in volume 40 Australian Feminist Law Journal (2014). Here is the abstract.

This essay engages with contemporary uses and considerations of the archive in interdisciplinary law and humanities scholarship, introducing the contributions the authors have selected to include in a special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal. Thinking of legal archives as both material and conceptual, it raises questions about researchers’ ethical, aesthetic and emotional relations with their sources. The authors identify some of the ways the archive is conceived in contemporary humanities scholarship and draw connections with material and conceptual approaches to law’s archive. In some contributions, legal sources are treated as a literal archive, raising questions about access, use and interpretation of archival materials. Other contributions engage with contemporary theoretical approaches to thinking archivally, involving processes of questioning, abstracting, and counter-archival imaginings.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.