By: dmc-admin//September 1, 2008//
A recent post at Prawfsblog by Professor Adam Scales, who teaches torts at Washington & Lee, asks the question, “Are Law Reviews Useful to Lawyers?”
My own thoughts tend to correspond with his first sentence in the post, “Even to pose this question is to invite a degree of ridicule; the estrangement of academic law from ‘real’ law has been long and amply commented upon.”
That being said, however, the post is a reasonable defense of the position that law reviews need not be irrelevant to practicing lawyers and judges. He writes: “until one thinks about it a bit, it is not necessarily obvious that restrictions on out-of state wine shipments potentially implicate at least three different constitutional provisions that each enjoy a complicated background and relationship to one another. I would put such issues into the category of questions for which one might not even realize what the questions are (let alone their answers) without benefit of the academic perspective.”
I certainly wouldn’t say I consider myself sold, but he makes a good case in academia’s defense.