Fajans and falk download scholarly writing pdf

Eugene Volokh is a precocious and prolific scholar of constitutional law and related subjects, not a teacher or scholar of legal writing.

In a relatively short time he has been a member of the UCLA faculty only since he has authored or co- authored more than thirty law review articles. Academic Legal Writing is notable both for what it does and for what it does not do. In part, this is no surprise. Academic Legal Writing is not merely or mostly a guidebook for student scholars, or for legal scholars generally.

It is a how-to book for writing and publishing as successfully as Volokh himself has done. Academic Legal Writing is not a book about how to use legal scholarship to become a better lawyer, directed primarily to the occasional law review editor or other student who cares to take the time to produce real scholarship.

It is a book that argues that all law students, and thus all lawyers, should become better scholars. Such a book cannot appear to be about scholarship; in order to be marketable, it must appear to be about writing.

The book thus borrows its overall organizational framework, wisely, from Scholarly Writing for Law Students. First are the basics of identifying a topic and converting that topic into a worthy article, note, or seminar paper. His concept of useful The similarities may simply be due to the nature of the material, since both books essentially follow the scholar from beginning to end of the researching, writing and publishing processes.

Philip C. Volokh follows this section with a brief, discrete section devoted to differences between scholarly works and seminar papers.

Claim: The piece should have a thesis, which might be descriptive, prescriptive, or some combination of both, and in any case should be reducible to a single sentence.

See Carter, supra note 32, at See 35 U. Non-obviousness may be demonstrated by nuance. If the results are unsound or unexpected in any of a number of ways Volokh catalogs the most common problems , the article can be revised accordingly. The balance of the book elaborates this core structure. The scholarly article should be organized in order to frame the problem that it analyzes clearly and quickly, and to review the background of the problem succinctly. He dedicates several sections to both conceptual and practical approaches to Compare Harry T.

This is a step that Delgado and Fajans and Falk mostly omit, possibly because the task of explaining it is at least as difficult as actually engaging in it. Samuelson refers to it briefly. By way of showing how the author should prove the claim, Professor Volokh walks through a lengthy series of hurdles to confront and overcome: proving the claim doctrinally and as a matter of policy; doing so concretely and with examples; and explaining and extending the claim through additional layers of debate and other areas of law and policy.

Volokh never comes right out and says that this is the model that he follows himself, but that point is implicit. They are minor, given the overall strength of the book, but they are worth brief comment.

See Samuelson, supra note 3, at recommending that students connect doctrinal analysis to policy analysis, that students avoid abstraction, and that students engage in balanced analysis.

But there are many other good, even better books out there on how to compose high quality non-fiction, both in the context of legal writing56 and otherwise. The emergence of high quality interdisciplinary work by legal scholars is one of the most remarkable and valuable developments in law schools over the last twenty years,58 and there is every reason to think that law students can appreciate its strengths and weaknesses and produce such scholarship of their own.

Academic Legal Writing talks explicitly and to its credit, at length about the source of one type of interdisciplinary scholarship, work based on statistical and other empirical evidence. Third, and most important though again dictated, perhaps, by considerations of the market for such books—most students produce at most a single scholarly paper over the course of their law school careers , Academic Critical theory of one kind or another has flourished as a source of scholarship notwithstanding the demise of the Critical Legal Studies Movement.

Michael Froomkin, Habermas discourse. The economics literature has had a profound influence on law and legal scholarship. See Richard A. The normative influence of these disciplines is controversial. Murray, Jr. Volokh covers the necessary dynamics of preparing drafts and responding to feedback from professors. His case that student scholarship should focus on authentic scholarly output would be made stronger still by elaborating on scholarly discourse itself.

Teachers of non- scholarly legal writing have begun to incorporate thinking about discourse communities into their work. Volokh covers some of this in sections on identifying a worthy scholarly project, that is, is the topic novel, useful, and sound? The importance of the scholarly community continues even when the writing is complete, as non-student scholars learn quickly. There are drafts to acquire and drafts to circulate, contacts to cultivate, presentations to hear and to give, and perspectives to be shared.

A scholarly work responds to and is a contribution to a dialogue with other scholars. Academic Legal Writing would benefit from more emphasis on the importance of becoming part of that dialogue and on techniques for doing so. See Susan L. John B.

It seems to me that a counterpart argument, for the extension of the scholarly community to include students, could be made from the perspective of the law school and its faculty. If Volokh is implicitly suggesting that law schools and their faculty do more to enable students and lawyers to become good scholars, then it would seem appropriate for schools to provide fora for that scholarship to be heard.

The broader question here is whether a book such as this or, for that matter, the competing volume by Fajans and Falk is necessary at all. Clearly, Volokh thinks so, and I tend to agree. The reasons are worth exploring, however, because they bear on what it is that law schools should be teaching their students.

By extension, the reasons bear on what lawyers should be learning and doing, and ultimately on what it is that should define the legal profession today. Why write? More specifically, why do law students write, and why should they write? Law students are required to write, according to accreditation standards for law schools.

But it is hardly a given At the least, the possibility of their doing so suggests that the philosophical arguments of Part V can be redeemed by changes to academic practice. The recent trend in this area is defined by the MacCrate Report, supra note 2, and its emphasis on practical lawyering skills. Legal scholarship by students, as such, occupies an awkward position in this matrix. None of this is surprising. There are few professional rewards for the law professor who demands that his or her students produce true scholarship rather than mere seminar papers.

There are few reasons for students to demand to learn scholarly skills. Few lawyers have any professional need to produce law review articles. Outside of a handful of elite law schools, few law students intend to become legal professors and therefore need or want to learn the craft of scholarship. My reading of this book, however, is that Volokh has not framed so narrow an argument.

I suspect that he has a different answer for those who ask, why should law students write? Scholarship is too important, in other words, to leave it to scholars themselves. Nowhere does Volokh make this claim directly. It may be a little speculative for me to infer the claim from his text. But why else focus so strongly on the classic characteristics of scholarship as such, rather than only on the analytic training that extended research supplies?

And why else devote so much space to publication and promotion, when, as Fajans and Falk argue, those tasks are effectively secondary to most students, if they consider publication at all?

Members of student-edited law journals are expected to produce notes as a condition of membership, but even journal membership again, outside a handful of elite schools is typically regarded professionally more as part of broader preparation for entry into law practice than as a form of apprentice scholarship.

It is possible that Academic Legal Writing is merely a manual for would-be law professors. There are, however, very few openings for full-time law faculty each year, and tens of thousands of new law graduates. Given those statistics, the length and detail of the book would hardly justify its mission.

It extends to its logical conclusion a debate—what does legal scholarship consist of, and what is the proper role of scholarship within the legal profession? If I am reading more into the text than Volokh intends, then the argument ought to be made nonetheless. The argument, to be clear, is this. Law students, and therefore lawyers, not only can be scholars, but should be scholars.

Academic Legal Writing is a book not for the niche law student, but for all law students, and ultimately, for all lawyers. Implicit in both is the assumption that the practicing bar has little need to be reconciled to that mission, except to the For an elegant recapitulation of the principal themes in the debate, see Deborah L. See David C. See also id. This feedback can also help your school demonstrate compliance with the new ABA Assessment and Learning Outcomes standards. Learn more about the reporting available to you from your Account Manager or view the course set-up instructions to get started.

Students purchasing a used book, or those who are renting their text, can still utilize all CasebookPlus digital resources by buying the digital only option. Table of Contents. The authors have updated the chapter on research, an absolute necessity given ever-expanding sources and techniques in the electronic age.

They have also updated the chapter on publication in response to changes in submission practice. The new edition has separated the chapter on topics and theses into two expanded chapters, adding a new section in the thesis chapter on techniques for finding solutions to troubling legal problems.

Chapter 9 on law review process has new material on writing constructive comments. There is a new appendix with a rubric for editing and evaluating scholarly papers and articles. Finally, the authors have updated their examples throughout, in particular providing new examples of effective student articles on timely topics.

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