Trends in Legal Scholarship: A Statistical Study
47 Pages Posted: 11 Nov 1999
Date Written: June 1999
Abstract
This study tracks the popularity of fifteen intellectual approaches among legal scholars during the period 1982-1996. Each approach was assigned one or more proxies consisting of a characteristic word or phrase associated with the approach. Searches were conducted in a Westlaw database to determine trends in the appearance of these proxies in law review texts. A method was devised for neutralizing distortions attributable to changes in database size over time. Among the findings: little or no decline in doctrinal analysis; a modest rise in law and economics; and a boom and subsequent bust in Critical Legal Scholarship (CLS). Leading law reviews have been unusually prone to publish works that refer to civic-republicanism, CLS, Critical Race Theory, and social norms.
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