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39 J. Legal Educ. 313 (1989)
One Judge's View of Academic Law Review Writing

handle is hein.journals/jled39 and id is 325 raw text is: One Judge's View of Academic Law
Review Writing
Judith S. Kaye
Last year I was invited to join in a full-day conference on contract theory
at New York University Law School, principally with contract law teachers
from around the country. My friend Stewart Pollock, a distinguished
member of the New Jersey Supreme Court, was the only other judge
participating. I remember how startled I was to receive the invitation-it
was so different from the more usual bar invitations I receive. In the midst
of a docket crammed with pressing civil and criminal cases, I was offered
the opportunity to carve out a whole Saturday to consider a body of
developing legal theory, with people I generally encounter only in gradu-
ation processions and card catalogs. The invitation was irresistible.
Although it was a thoroughly successful conference,' there was a
persistent undercurrent that frankly surprised me. Concern was several
times voiced ihat academic writing was having little influence on the
development of the law, that the professors seemed to be writing for each
other. One of the conference papers measured the impact of law and
economics theory by compiling the number of times law review articles on
the subject had been cited in opinions, and then grading the degree of
actual reliance placed on each cited article.2 Finally, during a question
period, a professor addressed the following remarks to me:
Several of the speakers today have pointed to the distressingly low impact that
they perceive of legal academic writing on what practicing lawyers do or what
judges do. I was wondering if there was some-way we might improve the effect of
our output into which so much effort goes.3
It is an excellent question for academics to put to judges, and to practition-
ers, who represent not only their empirical data but also a substantial
portion of their readership. I did not know anyone was interested in my
Judith S. Kaye is a Judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York. This article is an
outgrowth of remarks delivered at a conference on Contracts sponsored by the Association of
American Law Schools, at Cornell Law School, June 3-8, 1989. The author is grateful for the
enthusiastic research assistance of her law clerk Henry Greenberg.
1. The day's proceedings are printed in 1988 Ann. Surv. Am. L. 1, 1-272.
2. Jeffrey L. Harrison, Trends and Traces: A Preliminary Evaluation of Economic Analysis
in Contract Law, 1988 Ann. Surv. Am. L., supra note 1, at 73 & app. Many cited articles
were found to be of no actual importance to the decision, which says something about
opinions that cite a lot of law review articles. Although the idea of measuring impact by
counting citations struck me as odd-I read a great many more law review articles than
I cite in my opinions-I have since learned that this is an established method for
determining the impact of articles, known as citation analysis. Fred R. Shapiro, The
Most Cited Law Review Articles, 73 Calif. L. Rev. 1540 (1985).
3. Supra note 1, at 270 (Hilary Josephs was the questioner).

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