Communicating across the divide

I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the "great divide" between legal academics and political scientists.  Even today, with many avenues for communication between these fields -- like this very blog -- there is less than one might expect.  Certainly, there are many in both fields who read and talk across the divide, and I'd expect that many readers of this blog are among those.  But there remains the puzzle of why this is the exception and not the rule.

One possible reason has to do with substantial differences in the norms of scholarship in the different fields.  Articles in the social sciences in general tend to be much shorter than law review articles, and more narrowly focused.  They are also more likely to involve quantitative empirical analysis and to emphasize methodology.  Law review articles, on the other hand, are notoriously long, but a single piece can explore a variety of theories and themes and is often focused on the broader implications of legal opinions, events, or analysis.   As a result of these differences -- and leaving aside criticisms of the underlying content of the scholarship -- I think that legal academics often find social science pieces either opaque or -- due to their narrow focus -- uninteresting.  On the flip side, of course, social scientists often find law review articles tedious and imprecise. 

The increasing interest in empirical legal scholarship in the legal academy may help temper some of these tendencies, but there is a long way to go.   Scholars in both legal academia and in the social sciences could go much further in trying to make their work understandable to people outside their own field.  As but one example, I'll hold out the recent work of Thomas G. Hansford & James F. Spriggs II.  Their book, The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court explores the ways that justices use precedent.  The book is ambitious and quite interesting.  Its argument and conclusions, however, are not written in ways designed to get the attention of legal scholars who are not themselves engaged in empirical work, despite the fact that at least some of those conclusions may be interesting to qualitative scholars of the Supreme Court.   In a thumbnail review in the Law Library Journal, for example, the reviewer dismissed the book as "better suited for a political science class than a legal audience..."  The book itself contains a lot of sophisticated statistical analysis that is not translated for those who might not be familiar or comfortable with that methodology, and it assumes familiarity with political science norms and resources (the Spaeth Supreme Court databases, for example).  All of this is unfortunate because it makes it less likely that the work will be read (much less understood) by most legal scholars.  And to reiterate the point of my italics above --  this is especially unfortunate to the extent that the Hansford and Spriggs' findings would be interesting to the many law professors who are not themselves empirical legal scholars, but who study the Supreme Court from other perspectives.

So what to do?  More co-authorship would be helpful.  More self-consciousness about the ways in which the norms of one field may exclude or deter readers from another.  I'd be particularly interested in seeing different presentations of the same work in different settings.  Hansford and Spriggs, for example, might consider a law review article that presents their work to a legal academic audience.  (Of course, they may already be doing this.)  With apologies to Hansford and Spriggs, I hope that this blog post helps nudge social scientists and legal academics alike towards learning to speak a bit of each others' languages.

Comments

[Craig Joseph]

As someone who is (a) a social scientist, (b) deeply interested in law, and (c) an evangelist for cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration, I absolutely agree with your prescriptions -- there should be much more conversation between legal academics and practicing lawyers on the one hand and social scientists (not just political scientists!) on the other.

I'm less sure about the diagnosis, though. That is, is the situation really so bad that it deserves as dramatic a name as "The Great Divide"? I'm by no means able to speak authoritatively about either side of the "divide," but I'm actually impressed by how *much* work there's been at the intersection of law and social science. For one thing, a number of journals are devoted explicitly to the law-social science link (some of which are listed in the right-hand column of this blog).

There are also a number of books by social scientists that address themselves to various aspects of law. Just as a few recent examples, there's "Heuristics and the Law," edited by Gerd Gigerenzer; Shweder, Minow and Markus' "Engaging Cultural Differences"; Feigenson's "Legal Blame"; and Sunstein et al.'s "Punitive Damages."

I'm sure that readers of this blog are familiar with all or much of this work. That leads me to wonder whether the main reason for the perception of a divide on the part of lawyers and legal scholars is (as Carolyn suggests) unfamiliarity with statistics in particular, as opposed to social science and its methods in general. And certainly a lot of what I see in law & social science journals relies heavily on statistical analysis and modeling (e.g. studies of judicial decisions and punitive damages awards). And until recently, the vast majority of research on issues related to law has been (it seems to me) conducted by economists and political scientists -- two disciplines (particularly the former) that place a heavy emphasis on statistics.

Speaking as a social scientist (specifically, as a psychologist), my impression is that many of us are simply not familiar enough with the practical issues of concern to legal scholars and lawyers to see the possible applications of social science theories and methods to those issues. In some areas, it's easy to see the applications -- for example, decision-making research applied to juries and judges. But there's a wide variety of other possibilities (I think).

So I guess I'll end by seconding Carolyn's call for more effort, from both sides of the "divide," at explaining ourselves to one another and looking for opportunities to work together.

[Bill Henderson]

Carolyn,

I think your post touches on a more fundamental issue: what is the purpose of scholarship? The Great Divide exists because, depending your primary affiliation, all of your professional rewards are derived from your acceptance by only one of these two academic groups. Yes, this is about norms, but the norms are derived from institutional incentives. The goal has become career advancement (by impressing one's peers) rather than knowledge creation.

My suggestion would be this: write articles that are appealing to a third (and largely ignored) constituency--the real world of lawyers and policymakers. The access and influence garnered can be used to break down the existing parochialism in both camps. The Great Divide is academia at its worst.