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90 Tul. L. Rev. 1 (2015-2016)

handle is hein.journals/tulr90 and id is 21 raw text is: TULANE LAW REVIEW VOL. 90 NOVEMBER 2015 No. 1 Disciplining Legal Scholarship Lynn M. LoPucki* US. law schools am hring large proportions of JD-Ph.Ds in tenui-track faculty positions in an effort to increase the quantity and quality of empincal legal scholarshp. That effort is failing. The new recruits bring methods and objectives unsuited to law They produce lower-than-predicted levels of empiricism because they compete on the basis ofimethodological sophistication, devote time and resources to disputes over arcane issues in statistics and methodology, prefer to collaborate with other Ph.Ds, and intumdate empin'cists whose work does not require high levels of methodological sophistication. In shor4 Ph.Ds impose the cultures of their disciplines on legal scholarship Importing people rather than ideas riom other disciplines threatens the role of legal scholarship as a discipinary meeting ground The risk is that substituting disciplinary scholars for legal scholars will substitute disciplinay scholarship for the interdisciplinary scholarship currentlyprevalentin law. One scenario by which thatmight occuris forPh.D hiring to become ubiquitous, for the disciplines to divide the fields of law among them, and for peer review to eliminate legal scholarship that fails to meet sciplinaryrequirements. My vision is one in which empincism is distinguished from statistics, methodological sophistication is valued only as a means of discover., and all legal scholars feel free to report empirical findings. Two changes are central to achieving that vision. The first--alady implemented in some schools-is to provide empincal legal scholars with assistance from non- tenure-track faculty statisticians. Doing so will relieve the pressure on law faculties to acquire statistical expertise by hirng Ph.Ds in tenure-tackposions. The second is to build a culture in the law schools that values empincal discovery and the advancement of knowledge over methodological sophistication. * © 2015 Lynn M. LoPucki. Security Pacific Bank Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. The author can be contacted at lopucki@law.ucla.edu. I thank Janet Alexander, Daniel Bussel, Joseph Doherty, Frances Foster, Laura Gomez, Daniel Keating, Stewart Macaulay, and Daniel Mandelker for comments on earlier drafts, and Hayk Mamajanyan, Katie Roddy, Robert Smith, and Gautam Vaidyanathan for assistance with research. The data files for the empirical studies discussed in this Article are available at http://lopucki.law.ucla.edu/disciplining.

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