Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Practice of Legal Scholarship
36 Pages Posted: 6 Apr 2010 Last revised: 2 Nov 2010
Date Written: April 6, 2010
Abstract
The culture of legal scholarship has become preoccupied with article placement, citations, and download numbers, thus obscuring a deeper appreciation for the contributions of scholarly work. This article proposes that therapeutic jurisprudence (“TJ”), a theoretical framework that examines the therapeutic and anti-therapeutic properties of the law and legal practice, provides us with tools for understanding and changing that culture.
More prescriptively, the article applies a TJ lens to: (1) identify a set of good practices for legal scholarship; (2) examine the TJ movement as an example of healthy scholarly practice; (3) consider the role of law professors as intellectual activists; and, (4) propose that law schools nurture a scholar-practitioner orientation in their students to help them become more engaged members of the legal profession.
Keywords: Legal Scholarship, Law Reviews, Legal Education, Therapeutic Jurisprudence
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