No law school that I know of has become pre-eminent on the strength of teaching, clinics, community service, curricular innovation, specialty programs, etc. Each of these aspects of the law school product is important, to one degree or another, but they have very little impact on the wider reputation of a law school among law professors, judges, and practicing lawyers.I wasn't in the "pre-eminent law school" room, so I lack information on how the Wisconsin Law School faculty actually responded, but, until I hear otherwise, I'm going to guess that Gordon's opinion was damned controversial.
What about "non-traditional" scholarship, which may appear in obscure peer-reviewed journals or specialized monographs. This may be very valuable work to people who work in the specialized field, but the key issue when considering its effect on reputation is whether people outside the field notice. Does it connect with a broad range of legal scholars? If not, I suspect that it will have a negligable effect on the law school's reputation, at least as far as prospective students and many prospective faculty are concerned.
Ours is a law school that prides itself on "non-traditional" scholarship. Hey! Does that include blogging?
Posts
6 comments:
Ours is a law school that prides itself on "non-traditional" scholarship. Hey! Does that include blogging?
That depends -- do you consider yourself to be a "non-traditional" blogger?
Saul: The things you're talking about were the subject in the curriculum discussion, the room I was in. Don't think your views weren't well represented in the discussion.
Ron: If blogging counts as scholarship, it's surely nontraditional. Is there a such thing as a "traditional blogger"?
I'm not sure if it counts as finished product scholarship. However, the give and take of a blog and even just the forum to flesh out one's thoughts and arguments as well as test them against both informed and uninformed opinion is valuable in the scholarship arena.
Many law review articles could do with some testing against real world arguments and concerns, especially with the lack of peer review.
Would you put the blog in your promotion and tenure packet (if you were coming up now) and where would it go?
Ann: Yes, I think that is what I'm wondering aloud: Does blogging have traditions, or even conventions, yet? It may not; it's still new enough. But I wonder if blogs mutate such that some blogs will be called "traditional" in appearance at least, maybe even in content!
Just thinkin'
Ron
Saul: I think Gordon was only referring to the reputation component of the rankings, not to the components that have to do with the credentials of the incoming class. That is, he's saying that things about our teaching methods and so on will not cause the reputation numbers to go up. I think he's most likely to be right with respect to the academic reputation category as opposed to the lawyers and judges category. I assume they make their assessments at least in part by looking at how well our graduates perform. And I should add that I think a big part of Wisconsin's reputation really is about the law and social science and legal history writing that has been done here over a very long period of years. We are, however, quite vulnerable to being severely underrated by the sort of citation counting one sees in, for example, Brian Leiter's approach to ranking the law schools.
So why is raising your rankings that important in the first place? Professors' egos?
I would think that you should first look at the mission statement for the school (you have one don't you?) and go from there. If the primary mission is turning out good Wisconson lawyers, then I would think that concentrating on publishing law review articles would be counter productive. It would reward exactly the wrong type of behavior - writing over teaching.
Post a Comment