Legal Commentary

At the end of June, the AALS sponsors a conference for law professors just entering the profession. The program includes panels on teaching strategies, learning theory, law school politics, and other essentials for newcomers.  There's also a panel on scholarship, a sort of "how to" session.  I will be one of the panelists. 

My able co-panelists--Angela Davis and Cheryl Hanna--will talk about the actual writing process and the distribution of the written work after it is complete. I will be talking about "getting your ideas."  Put another way, this panel requires someone to talk about the current landscape of legal scholarship, and to suggest to newcomers how they might try to enter and change that landscape.

I've got some ideas for a taxonomy of legal scholarship that could be useful for new law profs. But I would like to hear ideas from others.  So here's the deal:  send me your ideas for how to break down the subject matter and methodologies of legal scholarship into categories that will be useful for new law professors.  If I decide to use your suggestions, I will of course publicly attribute the idea to you.

Tell me:  what should new law profs hear about the legal scholarship landscape?