My post this morning was designed to consider the challenges posed by increasing interdisciplinary scholarship in law schools aside from the traditional critique that legal scholarship is no longer useful for judges and practitioners. The rise in the emphasis by law schools on interdisciplinarity has thankfully been accompanied by an increase in resources available for the interdisciplinary scholar.
One valuable resource is this blog and others like it. ELS, for example, brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines, including political science and the law. As someone who has this site bookmarked and reads it relatively often, I find papers posted here that would otherwise not cross my radar screen.
Another is SSRN, which as you know serves as a repository for papers from a variety of disciplines. In an effort to promote greater awareness of scholarship in the areas of political science and the law, Tim Johnson (University of Minnesota Political Science Department) and I have started an SSRN e-journal on "Politics and the Law," which is now on the Legal Scholarship Network and will be cross-listed on the Political Science Network once it is created. If you have interest in the intersection between politics and the law, I encourage you to subscribe to this newly-created journal. Similarly, other disciplines, such as legal history, have created e-journals for much the same purpose. The Experimental and Empirical Studies e-journal is likewise excellent for empirical scholarship.
Finally, as I mentioned this morning, conferences promoting interdisciplinary scholarship are becoming more widespread. A great example is the Empirical Legal Studies Conference, which features papers by scholars from a variety of disciplines. Although I had a conflict with the conference last year, it is my hope to at least attend the conference this fall and possibly even submit a paper for consideration. The line-up of presenters last year was most impressive, and I expect that it will be equally, if not more, remarkable this fall.
I am sure that a number of other resources exist that I am unintentionally omitting, and would welcome other suggestions in the comments to this post. In a post tomorrow, I hope to continue the discussion by considering the relationship between interdisciplinary scholarship and co-authorship, and whether interdisciplinary scholars may be at a disadvantage due to law schools' traditional discounting of co-authored works.
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