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39 J. Legal Educ. 337 (1989)
Internal Scholarly Jury, The

handle is hein.journals/jled39 and id is 349 raw text is: The Internal Scholarly Jury Julius Getman Law professors today have sharply differing views about the nature and goals of legal scholarship. We disagree about whether the academic or professional aspects of scholarship are more important, whether reform or understanding is our goal, whether appellate opinions, economic theory, philosophical writings, field studies, or doctrinal legal scholarship should shape our definition and analysis of scholarly issues. It is not surprising that recently appointed legal academics express doubts about what is expected of them, and that experienced scholars are confused about how to proceed and sometimes depressed about the continuing vitality of their work. It is therefore important for all of us to have guides for resolving the difficult issues of subject, substance, and style that must be confronted in the course of a scholarly career. One important but rarely discussed technique by which legal scholars shape their work is what may be referred to as the internal scholarly jury. The jury is made up of those people whom we imagine reading our work and whose presumed reactions of pleasure or disappointment shape our decisions about such things as topic, approach, method of analysis, and materials. Although most people who engage in scholarly writing have such an internal jury in mind, there has been little recognition of the jury or discussion of its function. My own experience and discussions with col- leagues suggest several significant aspects of the scholarly jury: (1) juries are not chosen as a conscious technique but rather constitute themselves as an almost inevitable but rarely noticed part of the process of scholarly writing; (2) their makeup changes over time; (3) their scholarly value is determined primarily by their symbolic meaning and the vision of scholar- ship that they convey to the person employing them; (4) the scholarly jury, if it is to be as helpful as possible, should be composed of diverse people. I was fortunate when I began scholarly writing to have as my principal juror Professor Louis Jaffe of Harvard Law School.' I worked one summer as his research assistant, and he agreed to read and criticize the draft of an administrative law article on a topic I had investigated for him, the use of the writ of mandamus in California as an instrument of judicial review. I had no thought when I began the article, and little when I finished, about how the process of judicial review could be improved. I. was interested ulias Getman is Earl E. Sheffield Regents Chair and Associate Dean for Faculty Research, niversity of Texas School of Law. 1. He was amazed and I believe delighted to find out many years later that he had played this role for me.

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