A Community of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure and the Legal Academy

Abstract

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of institutional support systems that inspire, fund, and shape the study of public justice.

Keywords: civil procedure, legal education, teaching, scholarship, comparative law

JEL Classification: K41