Empirical Legal Scholarship: Reestablishing a Dialogue between the Academy and Profession
![handle is hein.journals/wflr30 and id is 359 raw text is: EMPIRICAL LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP:
REESTABLISHING A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE
ACADEMY AND PROFESSION
Craig Allen Nard*
Many contemporary commentators have perceived there to be a gap
between the abstractions of the law school classroom and the exigen-
cies of realistic legal practice. The author argues that law professors
should conduct more empirical research to narrow this gap. Adopting
a pragmatic approach in scholarly legal writing and utilizing more
empirical research will help legal scholars to focus better on the actual
effect which law has on society. Based in part on the results of a tele-
phone survey of law professors, the author concludes that the reason
for the shortage of empirical research is that legal scholars today suf-
fer from a lack of training in how to conduct empirical research. To
remedy this problem, he proposes, among other things, that law
schools should offer more empirical training and be more receptive to
empirically based scholarship.
Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordi-
nary experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant,
more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful?'
John Dewey
Let us not become legal monks.2
Roscoe Pound
How am I doing?3
Ed Koch
* J.S.D. (candidate) and Julius Silver Fellow in Law, Science, and Technology, Colum-
bia University School of Law. I would like to thank Professor Harold Edgar of Columbia
University School of Law and the financial support of the Julius Silver program. I would
also like to thank Professors Curtis Berger and Carol Liebman for their helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this article, which was written for their Seminar on Legal Education at
Columbia Law School.
1. JOHN DEWEY, EXPERIENCE AND NATURE 7 (1929) [hereinafter DEWEY, EXPERIENCE
AND NATURE]. Dewey asserts that this query is a first-rate test of the value of any philoso-
phy which is offered to us.
2. Roscoe Pound, Law in Books and Law in Action, 44 A. L. REv. 12, 36 (1910) [here-
inafter Pound, Law in Books].
3. Former Mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, was well known for parading the streets
of New York City while he was mayor in an attempt to gauge his performance in office. In
effect, Mr. Koch was employing, although informally, his own version of empirical research.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/wflr30&div=25&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Empirical Legal Scholarship: Reestablishing a Dialogue between the Academy and Profession
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