TOTM

Empirical Legal Scholarship, Empirical Legal Scholars, and the Quality of Legal Education: A Response to Professor Bainbridge

Professor Bainbridge isn’t fond of empirical legal scholarship; more significantly, he asserts that law professors trained to pursue it fundamentally undercut the purposes of legal academia.  (His judgment on legal academics which moonlight as amateur statisticians remains to be seen.)  Professor Bainbridge has for some time criticized empirical legal scholarship – but now he targets legal scholars themselves.  Stated another way, Professor Bainbridge claims that empirical legal scholars depress the quality of legal education by fusing an underdeveloped corpus of legal knowledge to a second-rate grasp of an extra-legal discipline.  The provocative claims in Professor Bainbridge’s recent National Journal article do not end there.

Read the full piece here.