Legal Commentary

Brian Leiter recently posted a query on his philosophy blog asking how people read philosophical articles.  I'd like to ask the same question about law review articles.  How much time do you typically spend reading an average length article? Do you usually skim? Do you read the footnotes methodically or selectively?  Surely these answers will vary with the piece but somehow the comments on Leiter's blog were still informative. 

As I've discussed before on Prawfs, the topic is particular importance in legal scholarship where often 1/3 or more of the words in an article appear in footnotes.   In fact, one can think of every law review article as consisting of a full and a "lite" version, depending on how meticulously the reader examines the footnotes.  This makes legal scholarship like a "Choose Your Own Adventure Story." 

In deciding what text should be in the body of an article versus the footnotes, it would be helpful to know more about how scholarship is read.  Should footnotes be treated as necessary support for points in the text or also as enrichment discussion?  In practice, the answer seems to be both.  But surely there's a spectrum of choices between these two options.  Perhaps we should deliberately write our articles cognizant of the fact that they effectively have both full and lite versions.