Legal Commentary

I love being a law professor.  I love thinking about the law.  I love teaching and engaging with students.  I love writing.  I love hanging out with law professors.  And I love the many personal and professional benefits that come with being a professor.  (Do all junior professors feel this way?  Does it wear off?)

One of the very few things I don't like about being a professir is that it is confining.  I mean this in a broad sense--it really limits experiences and exposure, I think (as, perhaps, does every job)--but I have something very specific in mind here, and I'm looking for advice.

I have drafted an extremely short, non-traditional piece (2500 words, not yet footnoted), and I don't know if there is anyplace to publish it. 

The piece, Everything I Needed to Learn About Legisprudence I Learned by Third Grade, is a little gimmicky.  Okay, maybe it is very gimmicky.  Based on a true story, it starts with a proclamation by Mother, the Supreme Lawmaker, that "no food may be eaten outside the kitchen."  What follows is a series of rulings by Judges (Father, Babysitter, Grandma, etc.), who, using traditional tools of interpretation, eventually declare it to mean that all food may be eaten outside of the kitchen.  Ultimately, the Supreme Lawmaker reacts and clarifies.

The piece, which I will use as a teaching tool in my Legislation and Statutory Interpretation class, is meant to highlight the following:

• We use the basic, competing modes of statutory interpretation all the time;
• When we interpret pronouncements in real life, we resort to a mix of textualist, literalist, purposivist, legal process, precedent, and other techniques and sources;
• Although the various tools seem (and often are) perfectly reasonable individually, in the aggregate, they can lead to ridiculous results;
• Even when we agree that the ultimate results are ridiculous, it is sometimes hard to pinpoint exactly where the error occurred;
• The legislature can sometimes clean up after bad judicial opinions, but it often takes a long time.

(I will also offer it to my students as a way of identifying types of arguments and a tool for reviewing their cases.)

I have thought about making these points explicitly in the piece, thus building a somewhat longer article around the gimmick, but I think it stands better as it is.  I'm very open to comments, though.

I just have no idea if there is an outlet for this sort of thing.  Do traditional law reviews ever publish small, non-traditional pieces?  Regular law review articles are useful for some purposes, but surely there are other ways of communicating ideas.  Short as it is, it is too long for a blog post. 

Are there other outlets?

/end_rant