Legal Scholarship: The Course

Journal of Legal Education

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 539-554

  Markovits, Richard S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS   (United States)

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EID: 0032237239     PISSN: 00222208     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. My coteachers have included David Anderson, Lynn Baker, Jack Balkin, Lynn Blais, Philip Bobbin, Liz Chambliss, Bob Dawson, Joe Dodge, Cindy Estlund, William Forbath, Mark Gergen, Jack Getman, Henry Hu, Sam Issacharoff, Cal Johnson, Susan Klein, Doug Laycock, Brian Leiter, Mark Lemley, Sandy Levinson, Tom McGarity, Inga Markovits, Neil Netanel, Michael Sean Quinn, Scot Powe, Bill Powers, David Rabban, Jack Ratliff, Alan Rau, David Robertson, John Robertson, Tom Russell, Ed Sherman, Charlie Silver, Terry Sullivan, Jay Westbrook, and Zipporah Wiseman.
2. See Matters of Principle: Legitimate Legal Argument and Constitutional Interpretation, ch. 1 (New York, 1998).
3. For a discussion of this trend, see Richard S. Markovits, The Professional Evaluation of Legal Academics: On the Shift from Evaluator judgment to Market Evaluations, 48 J. Legal Educ. 417 (1998).
4. Two other Legal Scholarship students did apply for teaching jobs. In the end, however, they chose to go into practice and test the market again after some experience. I should add that in the eight years since the course's inception about ten Texas graduates who did not take it have become university teachers or have applied for university teaching jobs.
5. I do not mean to imply that "policy considerations" of what the law ought to be are always external to the determination of what the law is. Certainly, an understanding of the policy goal of a particular statute is relevant to the interpretation of any ambiguous language it contains. And some policy considerations are also built into the common law. But the issue "which policy goals are internal to particular branches of the common law" is subtle and complex. My complaint is that the apparent inability of many who have entered the academy in the last 15 years to grasp the distinction between policy analysis and internal-to-law analysis precludes them from appreciating the subtlety and complexity.
6. For a comprehensive statement of my jurisprudential position, see Markovits, supra note 2, ch. 1.