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36 Queen's L.J. 393 (2010-2011)
Law Review: Scholarship and Pedagogy in Canadian Law Journals

handle is hein.journals/queen36 and id is 397 raw text is: Law Review: Scholarship and Pedagogy in Canadian Law Journals Neil Craik, Philip Bryden & Katie Ireton* Significant changes have taken place in Canadian legal publishing since the Law and Learning report was published in 1983. The authors set out to update the research on law journals that accompanied Law and Learning, and to assess the extent to which Canadian legal publishing has responded to its primary recommendations. They engage in a detailed study of 17 law school-based Canadian generalist law reviews (CGLRs) from both common and civil law faculties. Profiles ofauthor, subject matter and methodology reveal diferences in the type of scholarship published by individual law journals, and show a correlation between the methodology employed in an article and the type of author writing it. A survey of Canadian law school deans was done to determine institutional attitudes towards CGLRs, and to identify perceptions about diferences in quality among those journals. A citation analysis shows that the best-ranked CGLRs have a high level offaculty involvement. The authors go on to consider the scholarly and pedagogical roles of Canadian law journals. Two concerns raised by Law and Learning remain pertinent-the lack offocus and differentiation among journals and the difficulty of identifying high-quality scholarship in an increasing volume of material. In the case of student-edited law journals, these concerns are aggravated by the editors' inexperience and their limited ability to evaluate the quality of legal scholarship and to determine editorial goals. Most law journal editing courses lack clearly articulated academic goals, and it is not clear how well students learn to evaluate the quality of legal scholarship. The authors question the relevance of generalist law journals in an era of specialization and identify several disadvantages they experience relative to their specialist counterparts. However, insofar as CGLRs serve as a venue for new or innovative scholarship that transcends legal categories or challenges prevailing views, they can play an important role in Canadian legal scholarship. The authors conclude that attempts to evaluate the influence and merit of law * Neil Craik is an Associate Professor at the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, University of Waterloo. Philip Bryden is the Wilbur Fee Bowker Professor and Dean, Faculty of Law, University of Alberta. Katie Ireton, LLB, Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick. An early version of this paper was presented at the 2008 Canadian Association of Law Teachers Conference in Montreal. A revised version was presented at the Second National Law Journal Conference held at Queen's Law School in 2010. The authors are grateful to the participants at both conferences, and to the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on the paper. N. Craik, P. Bryden & K. Ireton 393

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