![handle is hein.journals/germlajo20 and id is 1 raw text is:
German Law Journal (2019), 20, pp. 1 20
doi: 1.101 7/glj.2019.6
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVRSIK1Y PRESS
ci f
Marnix Snel*
(Received 24 July 2017; accepted 12 December 2017)
Keywords: quality standards; research quality; methodology
As legal academics, we constantly engage in the process of evaluating works of legal scholarship. In a
variety of contexts and with different purposes, we either explicitly or unconsciously put quality
labels on the work we come across and produce ourselves. We consider some works to be outstand-
ing, inspiring us to start new research projects, or making us want to cooperate with or hire the
author. We encounter pretty good works which we believe should be published in our journals,
or that we decide to build on when we conduct our own research. And we-all too often, according
to some-encounter works that we instantly dismiss as poor quality, sometimes even making us
seriously doubt the capabilities of those that authorized publication.1 While it makes perfect sense
that we pass such judgments, it does raise the question of how, and especially on what grounds we do
so: What standards do legal academics use for evaluating works of legal scholarship?
Given the long history of legal scholarship, one might expect an answer to that question to be
quite highly developed.2 One is likely to be disappointed, however. Unlike their colleagues oper-
ating in other academic disciplines, legal academics rarely engage, individually or collectively, in a
*Marnix Snel is an associate professor in private law and legal research methods at the University of Curayao, a research
fellow of the Tilburg Institute for Private Law, and a visiting lecturer at Nyenrode Business University. Email: m.v.r.snel@
gmail.com.
'See Lee Epstein & Gary King, The Rules ofInference, 69 U. CHI. L. REv. 1, 18 19 (2002) (There seems to be a long tradition
of legal academics denigrating articles published in their journals. Over the years, they have referred to the content in these
journals as 'junk stream,' 'manure,' '[not] readable by humans,' 'fuzzy wuzzy,' 'junk science,' 'spinach,' 'boring, too long,' rife
with 'assertions unconnected to an empirical basis,' dependent on 'anecdotes,' 'opaque' and an 'open scandal.').
2See Mary I. Coombs, Outsider Scholarship: The Law Review Stories, 63 U. COLO. L. REv. 683, 706 (1992).
© 2019 The Author. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the German Law Journal. This is an Open Access article, distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted
re use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/germlajo20&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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