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Moneylaw, Macro-Style

By Jim Chen et al.

I cannot help but think once in awhile about the 72,000 law review articles that have been published in the last ten years. This does not count, of course, books by law professors (many of which should not count since they are recycled old articles) chapters, submissions to books of readings, casebooks, encyclopedia entries and so on. Practitioners also do a fair amount of writing so not all of this is done by law professors. Still, what do you think? 90,000 to 100,000 published works by law professors in ten years?

When I do think about this I also think of my favorite passage from Lucky Jim: ?. . . along the knife-edge dividing the conceivably-just-about-relevant from the irreducibly, immitigably, irrelevant.? In fact, I use the quote, I think appropriately, as the introductory page to my Law and Economics casebook. Not that you would have seen it as the book is still striving to hit triple digits in sales. Not a money maker, that one.

One hundred thousand offerings by law professors. Tons and tons of law review pages, ink, and now, of course, down-loaded pages just in case the article may come in handy. If you down-load as casually as I do, these are send to recycling about a year later often after not much more than a skim.

Somehow ? yes I am procrastinating about grading ? rather than think about Moneylaw in terms of law schools like one thinks of Moneyball in terms of baseball teams, shouldn?t the focus be on a Moneylaw approach to legal education more generally. In fact, the main disconnect between Moneyball and Moneylaw (other than the lack of methods to assess who wins) is that baseball?s product is competition and strategies to get an edge are part of that process. Competition makes the product better.

Does competition among law schools make legal education better? It can, but to some extent it is responsible for 100,000 articles when 50,000 might be better thereby eliminating some of the "irreducibly, immitigably, irrelevant." Fifty fewer law schools might make the system better as well. What would the most efficient system of legal education look like? Can Moneylaw principles be applied to a macro view of legal education.

Full post as published by MoneyLaw on December 10, 2007 (boomark / email).