Empiricism and the rising incidence of co authorship in law

University of Illinois Law Review

Volumn 2011, Issue 5, 2011, Pages 1785-1825

  Ginsburg, Tom ^a   Miles, Thomas J ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 83155160600     PISSN: 02769948     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (41)

1. Larry D. Claxton, Scientific Authorship: Part 2-History, Recurring Issues, Practices, and Guidelines, 589 MUTATION RES. 31, 33 (2005);
2. Mott Greene, The Demise of the Lone Author, 450 NATURE 1165, 1165 (2007).
3. See, e.g., Jason W. Osborne & Abigail Holland, What Is Authorship, and What Should It Be? A Survey of Prominent Guidelines for Determining Authorship in Scientific Publications, 14 PRAC. ASSESSMENT, RES. & EVALUATION, no. 15, July 2009, at 1.
4. E.g., Paul H. Edelman & Tracey E. George, Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship, 11 GREEN BAG 2D, fall 2007, at 19 (hereinafter Edelmen & George, Six Degrees);
5. Tracey E. George & Chris Guthrie, Joining Forces: The Role of Collaboration in the Development of Legal Thought, 52 J. LEGAL EDUC. 559 (2002);
6. see also Paul H. Edelman & Tracey E. George, Sunstein Is and 2s, in THE GREEN BAG ALMANAC & READER 473 (Ross E. Davies ed., 2008) (hereinafter Edelman & George, Sunstein Is and 2s).
7. Robert H. Abrams, Sing Muse: Legal Scholarship for New Law Teachers, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 1, 6 (1987) (arguing that young legal scholars should not coauthor because of concerns about shared credit and increased time required).
8. Edelman & George, Six Degrees, supra note 3, at 27-31 (coauthorship);
9. Theodore Eisenberg, The Origins, Nature, and Promise of Empirical Legal Studies and a Response to Concerns, 2011 U. ILL. L. REV. 1713, 1713-14 (empiricism);
10. Michael Heise, An Empirical Analysis of Empirical Legal Scholarship Production, 1990-2009, 2011 U. ILL. L. REV. 1739, 1742;
11. Shari Seidman Diamond & Pam Mueller, Empirical Legal Scholarship in Law Reviews, 6 ANN. REV. L. & SOC. SCI. 581, 582 (2010) (empiricism).
12. Andy H. Barnett, Richard W. Ault & David L. Kaserman, The Rising Incidence of Co-Authorship in Economics: Further Evidence, 70 REV. ECON. & STAT. 539 (1988);
13. John M. McDowell & Michael Melvin, The Determinants of Co-Authorship: An Analysis of the Economics Literature, 65 REV. ECON. & STAT. 155 (1983);
14. Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones & Brian Uzzi, The Increasing Dominance of Teams in the Production of Knowledge, 316 SCIENCE 1036, 1038 (2007).
15. Barnett, Ault & Kaserman, supra note 6; see also David N. Laband & Robert D. Tollison, Intellectual Collaboration, 108 J. POL. ECON. 632 (2000) (emphasizing multiple forms of collaboration besides coauthorship).
16. See generally Paul H. Edelman, On Legal Interpretations of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, 31 J. LEGAL STUD. 327 (2002).
17. See Garey C. Durden & Timothy J. Perri, Coauthorship and Publication Efficiency, 23 AM. ECON. J. 69 (1995) (finding that coauthorship enhances productivity in total and per capita article production);
18. see also Raymond D. Sauer, Estimates of the Returns to Quality and Coauthorship in Economic Academia, 96 J. POL. ECON. 855 (1988) (finding that collaboration through formal coauthorship increases the quantity or quality or both of one's professional productivity, which has market value);
19. Matthias Sutter & Martin Kocher, Patterns of Co-Authorship Among Economics Departments in the USA, 36 APPLIED ECON. 327 (2004) (finding that quality of coauthors' institutions, measured by rankings of institutions, has a significant impact on the number of coauthored papers in top economics journals).
20. See John Hudson, Trends in Multi-Authored Papers in Economics, 10 J. ECON. PERSP., no. 3, 1996, at 153.
21. James Lindgren & Daniel Seltzer, The Most Prolific Law Professors and Faculties, 71 CHI.-KENTL. REV 781, 793 (1996) (giving fractional credit to each coauthor).
22. For example, when citing Bernard Black, Charles Silver, David A. Hyman & William M. Sage, Stability, Not Crisis: Medical Malpractice Claim Outcomes in Texas, 1988-2002, 2 J. EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUD. 207 (2005)
23. and Kathryn Zeiler, Charles Silver, Bernard Black, David A. Hyman & William M. Sage, Physicians' Insurance Limits and Malpractice Payments: Evidence from Texas Closed Claims, 1990-2003, 36 J. LEGAL STUD., no. S2, 2007, at S9, the authors could be listed as "Black et al." and "Zeiler et al.," respectively.
24. See, e.g., Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer, Corporate Ownership Around the World, 54 J. FIN. 471 (1999) (hereinafter Corporate Ownership);
25. Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, Law and Finance, 106 J. POL. ECON. 1113 (1998) (hereinafter Law and Finance);
26. Mathew D. McCubbins, Roger G. Noll & Barry R. Weingast, Administrative Procedures As Instruments of Political Control, 3 J. L. ECON. & ORG. 243 (1987);
27. McNollgast, The Political Origins of the Administrative Procedure Act, 15 J. L. ECON. & ORG. 180 (1999).
28. See George A. Akerlof, The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism, 84 Q. J. ECON. 488 (1970).
29. E.g., Heather J. Smith, Tom R. Tyler, Yuen J. Huo, Daniel J. Ortiz & E. Allan Lind, The Self-Relevant Implications of the Group-Value Model: Group Membership, Self-Worth, and Treatment Quality, 34 J. EXPERIMENTAL SOC. PSYCH. 470 (1998);
30. Tom R. Tyler, Lawrence Sherman, Heather Strang, Geoffrey C. Barnes & Daniel Woods, Reintegrative Shaming, Procedural Justice, and Recidivism: The Engagement of Offenders' Psychological Mechanisms in the Canberra RISE Drinking-and-Driving Experiment, 41 L. & SOC'Y REV. 553 (2007);
31. See Richard A. Posner, What Do Judges and Justices Maximize? (The Same Thing Everybody Else Does), 3 SUP. CT. ECON. REV. 1 (1993).
32. Id. at 566. Durden and Perri report an estimate that by 1985, fifty-two percent of published articles in economics were coauthored. Durden & Perri, supra note 10, at 69.
33. Definitions of "top" are inherently arbitrary. We define the top fifteen law reviews as comprising Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, California Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal.
34. For another study of empirical work in the JLS, see William M. Landes, The Empirical Side of Law & Economics, 70 U. CHI. L. REV. 167 (2003).
35. Contra Ian Ayres & Frederick E. Vars, Determinants of Citations to Articles in Elite Law Reviews, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 427 (2000) (looking at articles only from Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Yale Law Journal).
36. For this reason, we chose not to examine American Law & Economics Review (ALER) and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (JELS), which are influential but of more recent provenance.
37. The rate represents a fifteen percent increase for law reviews from the findings of George and Guthrie. See George & Guthrie, supra note 3, at 562.
38. See George L. Priest, The Growth of Interdisciplinary Research and the Industrial Structure of the Production of Legal Ideas: A Reply to Judge Edwards, 91 MICH. L. REV. 1929 (1993);
39. Robert B. Thompson, Corporate Law Criteria: Law's Relation to Private Ordering, 2 BERKELEY BUS. L. J. 95, 97 (2005) ("The most dramatic change in law teaching over the last generation has been the growth of interdisciplinary scholarship. ").
40. Brian Leiter, On So-Called "Empirical Legal Studies" and Its Problems, BRIAN LEITER'S L. SCH. REP. (July 06, 2010, 6:41 AM), http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2010/07/on-socalledempirical-legal- studies.html.
41. See, e.g., Ayres & Vars, supra note 29; Theodore Eisenberg & Martin T. Wells, Ranking and Explaining the Scholarly Impact of Law Schools, 27 J. LEGAL STUD. 373 (1998). (Pubitemid 128426692)