Gini Nelson’s Engaging Conflicts

Welcome! Please give me a little more time to finish the move from my old site with wordpress.com (old address: www.engagingconflicts.wordpress.com). The link there is in the sidebar to the right under Blogroll (Gini’s Old Site)! Mark this location, visit the old for now for archives, and come back soon! This move will be completed shortly. In the meantime, PodCamp allowed me to do my first vBlog (video blog) — posted here at Geoff Sharp’s Mediation vBlog Project. All I can say about PodCamp and the people I met and experiences I had there, is, well, — wikis and podcasts and blogs, oh my!

The series continues with Jurisydynamic’s Jim Chen’s final response to J.B. Ruhl on evaluting legal scholarship.

J.B. asks, “what can law professors supply the world that top-100 law firm associates usually could not?” Reversing the question might generate some really embarrassing answers. The academy as a whole might not want to contemplate the number of law professors, including professors with tenure at very highly regarded law schools, who could not be entrusted to perform tasks asked of associates at top-tier law firms.

. . .

I agree that looking for value, whether defined as value added or value in the aggregate, is the proper pursuit.

Ally 1, Academia 0

. . .

Neither form nor purpose displaces societal impact as the proper gauge of scholarly merit.

Let me sum up. It is possible, at a minimum, to evaluate legal scholarship according to (1) the practical difficulty or intellectual beauty of its methodology, (2) its intended audience, (3) the value added by the scholar relative to the work of a nonscholarly legal professional, or (4) its overall value, either to a specialized field or to society at large. In other words, scholarship can be assessed, like law itself, according to its form, its intended purpose, or its actual effect. Because it’s hard to assess actual effects, lawyers and judges often use form and purpose as shortcuts. Unsurprisingly, legal academics do the same when evaluating their own work. But all parties, I suspect, would do well to pursue direct measures of the only criterion that counts: real-world impact.

Earlier posts in this series are here: post #1, post #2, and post #3.

This continues the series on Jurisdynamic’s discussion of the hierarchy of legal scholarship. For the earlier posts and my discussion of its relevance to dispute resolution, please see the earlier posts, #1 and #2.

In response to Jurisdynamic’s Jim Chen, J.B. Ruhl elaborates on his hierarchy.

the underlying rationale for the hierarchy is not cost of effort; rather it is the value added, using the average associate at a top law firm as the baseline. In other words, what can law professors supply the world that top-100 law firm associates usually could not.
. . .

This is why I put empirical work high on the list. Yes, empirical work is also costly, but it is the type of work that a good scholar, because of the nature of the job and the demands of that kind of work, will be in a better position to provide. One of the comments to my original post suggested that by “empirical work” I mean just compiling numbers. I should clarify that what I mean is (as suggested by another comment) empirical work that tests data against theory, the way real social scientists do it. The reason I put it higher on the list than theory work, therefore, is because it puts the theory to the test. High quality empirical work of this sort is costly, but it is valuable because it illuminates flaws and strengths of the theory work.

To be sure, I recognize that scholarship fitting any particular category will fall on a range of quality, and we might use the categories Jim suggested to differentiate. Excellent doctrinal work is more valuable than half-baked legal theory. I think of my list as defining a typology of legal scholarship based on what law professors can add in terms of value to legal development and understanding. It is, in that sense, only a starting point for evaluation of any particular piece of work. There have already been, in addition to Jim’s suggestions for different sets of criteria, and I am not holding mine out as the only one that has some usefulness by any means.

Please click on the link above to read Mr. Ruhl’s full post.

Happy Thanksgiving! Here are some links to explore, if you like:

Thanksgiving ala Ben and Jerry’s

NASA’s Thanksgiving Skies

Thanksgiving as researched by the staff at Plimoth Plantation of Plymouth, MA

Wikipedia’s take on Thanksgiving, including:

• • 1 Traditional celebration
    • 1.1 United States
    • 1.2 Canada
  • 2 History of Thanksgiving in North America
    • 2.1 Thanksgiving in the United States
      • 2.1.1 Pilgrims
      • 2.1.2 The Revolutionary War to Nationhood
      • 2.1.3 Lincoln and the Civil War
      • 2.1.4 F.D. Roosevelt to present
    • 2.2 Thanksgiving in Canada
  • 3 References
  • 4 See also
  • 5 External links
    • 5.1 Thanksgiving food links

New Zealand attorney mediator Geoff Sharpe has added mBlog Central to his mediation vBlog project (earlier discussed here). As he says:

Read the latest headlines from a selection of the most active and well read mediation blogs… all in one place!

Blog “feeds” are great ways to quickly and easily review the content of blogs — you can read the headlines, and click on them, to be taken directly to the post. Geoff currently has feeds for 11 mediation-related blogs and podcast, including my Engaging Conflicts.

Bravo, Geoff, and thank you!

PodCamp continues. Yesterday’s program is here. I’m also on a panel today, on marketing using the new media, which I believe is one of the three most important professional or business uses of the internet. But I’m especially looking forward to this session, which highlights another important use:

First, my apologies that I did not continue yesterday with #3 of the Dispute Resolution and the Hierarchy of Legal Scholarship series, as I had intended. For some reason, I thought I would do it before I left for Podcamp in San Francisco, where I now am, even though I had to get on the road to the airport by 5 a.m.! Enough said? I’ll restart the series on Monday after Thanksgiving (here are the links to #1, and #2).

Podcamp starts today! There are some 250 registrants, and a full day planned. (And then it continues tomorrow!) If you are in the San Francisco area, and not yet registered, you can still make it!

Sessions:
Sessions spread over two days will focus on planning for content, content creation, content publishing and subscription models, production quality, tools, recording techniques, video composition, editing skills, audio & video post production techniques. Also included are sessions on Monetization of New Media formats, Podcasting and Video Blogging and impact of new media on business, Directly communicating with customers in Web 2.0 world, New Media marketing and public relations. The sessions are held in the format of a conversation with the people in the room participating actively.

There are 6 Main Hall/Track 1 Sessions following the Welcome and Keynote Panel, including Session 4, the panel I’m on discussing legal issues relating to podcasting:

See the earlier post, #1 in this series for J. B. Ruhl’s typology of legal scholarship and my discussion of its relevance to dispute resolution. Jurisdynamic’s Jim Chen responds to J.R. Ruhl and the commentors by noting first that the list’s progression from blog posts to empirical scholarship appears to rest on an evaluation of the difficulty of the type of scholarship.

The problem, of course, is that the difficulty of a scholarly form or methodology has no necessary bearing on its quality. Stated more formally, my objection is this:

Value ≠ Cost

Further:

A proper hierarchy of legal scholarship, therefore, demands attention not merely to its cost (as measured by the effort invested in it) but also to its value. What [a cited legal opinion used to make his point] said … makes sense here: “It is not theory but the impact of [scholarship] which counts.”

How then should we measure scholarly impact or value?

Mr. Chen proposes an alternate hierarchy based, as he puts it, “loosely on the value ascribed to legal scholarship by its potential audiences:

1. Self-referential scholarship
2. Scholarship solely of interest to other law professors
3. Scholarship solely of interest to law review editors
4. Scholarship addressing lawyers, judges, and legislators
5. Scholarship addressing fellow scientists
6. Scholarship that solves a significant social problem

J. B. Ruhl’s response to Mr. Chen will be discussed here, tomorrow, later.

Although I don’t list it over in my “current reading list,” I keep an eye on Jurisdynamics, an interdisciplinary law blog hosted by Jim Chen, a University of Minnesota law professor. He maintains Jurisdynamics Essentials as part of the blog (you will find them in the right hand sidebar to the blog). These are “notable posts” about, e.g., the purpose and structure of the blog, relevant reading lists, and the hierarchies of legal scholarship. (Note: I’ll be revising my blog structure after this model in the near future.)

Part One of Hierarchies of Legal Scholarship is posted by Jurisdynamics contributor J.B. Ruhl, the Matthews & Hawkins Professor of Property at the Florida State University College of Law. I list his hierarchy (1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest) here but you need to read the post for his definitions and reasons. The comments to the post are equally interesting for showing some of the common criticisms of academic theory and research, and legal theory and research in particular. I’ll post throughout this week on the remaining Jurisdynamics Essentials relating to the hierarchy of legal scholarship, as well as on a recent essay published in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities.

The relevance to dispute resolution is this: there’s a strong and growing critique of the quality of the dispute resolution field’s “scholarship” (or relative lack thereof). There are also questions about whether, or how, to “professionalize” the field, which include consideration of the need for continuous improvement in everyday understanding of the intellectual basis of the field, which is “wide, multidisciplinary, and deep,” a conclusion of the Broad Field project, a national project headed by CONVENOR’s Christopher Honeyman and generously funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (Note: Chris Honeyman will be interviewed later this winter in Engaging Conflicts Today about that project and its culmination in the recently published The Negotiator’s Fieldbook.)

For now, J.B. Ruhl’s list:

1 – Publication of what are essentially blog posts with footnotes
2 – Doctrinal review of the state of the law
3 – Doctrinal study of interesting questions of law
4 – Doctrinal synthesis of developments in law
5 – Normative policy analysis of law
6 – Normative policy analysis of law with substantial reform proposals
7 – Legal theory
8 – “Law and” interdisciplinary studies
9 – Empirical study of legal institutions
10 – Empirical study of law’s impact on society

A Thinking Ethics post from Nov. 6:

Web science

MIT and the University of Southampton, UK, are launching the new field of Web Science. The research will guide the future design and use of the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee says the web is full of blogs that are inaccurate, defamatory and have uncheckable information. This new program is aimed at adding intelligence to the web, and will cover things like trust, responsibility, empathy, and privacy. It looks like Web 2.0 will be kinder and gentler. more

The link goes to a New York Times article:

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web.

Further:

Web science represents “a pretty big next step in the evolution of information,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who is a computer scientist. This kind of research, Schmidt added, is “likely to have a lot of influence on the next generation of researchers, scientists and, most importantly, the next generation of entrepreneurs who will build new companies from this.”

Web science is related to another emerging interdisciplinary field called services science. This is the study of how to use computing, collaborative networks and knowledge in disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology to lift productivity and develop new products in the services sector, which represents about three-fourths of the United States economy. Services science research is being supported by technology companies like I.B.M., Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, and by the National Science Foundation.

And:

Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, said Web science was a promising idea. “Computer science is at a turning point, and it has to go beyond algorithms and understand the social dynamics of issues like trust, responsibility, empathy and privacy in this vast networked space,” Shneiderman said. “The technologists and companies that understand those issues will be far more likely to succeed in expanding their markets and enlarging their audiences.”