Marginalization Matters: Discipline-Building in the Legal Writing Community

Abstract

Amy Soled’s Unending Conversations essay, The Legal Writing Community's Bonds Enable It to Flourish, responds to Kevin Bennardo’s controversial essay, Legal Writing’s Harmful Psyche, arguing that Bennardo’s analysis of why legal writing scholarship is not rigorous is flawed and that his proposed solutions are unwarranted. Bennardo's thesis is that legal writing scholars are "protectionist" and unwilling to engage in rigorous critique of each other's work, preventing the growth of legal writing as a discipline. Soled’s analysis provides an excellent critique, but doesn’t focus on what I see as a key problem with Bennardo’s essay—the failure to address the effect of marginalization on the growth of Legal Writing as a scholarly discipline. In this essay, I address the problem with critiquing the discipline without addressing the marginalization of legal writing scholars within the legal academy. I then provide an alternate critique that begins with an understanding that the cohesiveness of the legal writing community is a strength rather than a weakness, but acknowledges that there is room for the discipline to continue growing.

Keywords: Legal writing, legal research & writing, marginalization, inequality, feminism, critique, scholarly, academia, legal academia, legal academy, law review, legal scholarship, publication, scholarly, discipline, discipline-building

JEL Classification: K10, K40, K49