Yes, I know that I am approaching parody by including my buddy Mark Graber in every post that I have offered this week; but when he writes things like this it is just obvious to me that empirical legal scholars should know about it.
I'm more optimistic than Mark about the state of scholarship in departments of political science. In my judgment, one of the great accomplishments in the field of "Law and Courts" over the past 15-20 years has been an expansion in the range of questions and methods that are taken seriously. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s it was hard to imagine doing any work other than behavioral analysis of judicial decision making. Today, this sort of work is still alive and well, but the field has also become more sophisticated in its treatment of courts -- in part by applying rational choice models and in party by embracing more historical approaches. To put it another way, I think that those in the 1980s and early 1990s who advocated the advantages of "the new institutionalism" had a lasting effect. (I think a "regime politics" or "governing coalitions" framework is also very promising, but that remains to be seen.) I know that there are some (of the sort that Mark alluded to in his post) who are very disappointed that the flagship journals of the American Political Science Association are now publishing more historical pieces by scholars such as Keith Whittington, Paul Frymer, Cornell Clayton, and Mitch Pickerill, and they are grateful that a journal such as the AJPS has the courage and vision to resist the corrupting pressures of Perestroika. But I would hope that most scholars think that the field of Law and Courts has never been more interesting (or more relevant to the discipline as a whole), and that the path to greater progress lies in the direction of even greater diversity rather than enforced conformity to unjustifiably narrow conceptions of social science. I would just urge the ELS movement to learn this lesson more quickly than it was learned in political science. No point repeating our mistakes.
Ethan Leib (Hastings) has posted a lengthy response to Mark Graber's post at PrawfsBlawg. Here is the link:
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2006/06/political_scien.html
Posted by: William Ford | 02 June 2006 at 04:33 PM
I actually agree with Howard more than I disagree (least surprising news of 2006). I am generally pleased with the respect for diversity within the public law field. There will always be those who say "I don't read anything with statistics in it" or "you won't get a job unless you do statistics," but they seem to be diminishing. One sign of this was the remarkable agreement (for the most part) on what I thought were diverse committees over various public law awards this year, and the diverse group of scholars who earned those awards. Kudos to those who served and those who won.
On the other hand, I'm more depressed about the state of departments as young scholar after young scholar complains to me about being isolated, about other faculty refusing to advise public law students who do not do statistics, about articles in Law and Society and journals of that ilk not being considered as worthy more merit raises, etc. Put more broadly, as the field has gotten more interesting, my sense is that jobs have gotten fewer. But this may just be my two cents from a particular perspective, and blogging means never having to footnote!
Posted by: Mark A. Graber | 02 June 2006 at 12:20 PM