Legal Commentary

The last two weeks have been the most active for the CLC project to date. The project has had postings of one kind or another from Michael Corrado, Tony Dillof, Ken Simons, Vera Bergelson, Michelle Anderson, Stephen Garvey, Peter Westen, Joan Krause, Laura Appleman, Josh Dressler, Paul Robinson, Arthur Ripstein, Amy Sepinwall, Bennett Capers, Dan Markel, and Doug Husak. The current state of the project is summarized on the CLC Status Table.

Forty-eight articles or chapters have been nominated as the basis for a core text. Twenty of these have two or more expressions of interest in commenting; eight have three or more expressions of interest. We encourage you to tell us the pieces on which you might be interested in commenting, for it is by this means that the "conversations" to be included in the final volume will be selected. Ideally, we would like at least four or five commentators to which the core text author would then respond.

Note that you will not necessarily end up writing a comment for all of the core texts in which you express an interest. The project will move ahead only with those core texts in which a critical mass of commentators express an interest. So don?t hesitate to sign up for a variety of core texts. If by chance they all move forward, you can decide later which ones you want to pursue.

The comments normally may not exceed 800 words, and they may be as short as you wish, so feel free to take on less than the entire line of argument of the core text and instead offer an objection/insight/observation to only one aspect. The final drafts should be carefully written but the style does not call for elaborate documentation ? in other words, the comment writing should be fun! The project allows text authors and commentators to quickly and directly "join issue" in ways that more traditional scholarly forms rarely permit.

On our current development track, we are hopeful that we can complete the present phase ? identifying the potential core texts and commentators ? well before the summer, which will then give people the summer to do their writing ? starting with finalizing the core texts (this typically will be simply an editing down of an article or chapter to fit the format and 5,000 word limit of the CLC project,), followed by the drafting of comments, followed by the drafting of the core text author?s response.

Send your core text nominations and your expressions of interest in commenting to us at CLCeditors@law.upenn.edu Before the next update letter, we will be shifting to a dynamic website where you can do your own posting. More on that later.

On a final exciting note, the size and speed of the project has let us to add a third editor. We are thrilled to have Stephen Garvey (stephen-garvey@lawschool.cornell.edu), of Cornell Law School, join us!

The Editors

Paul H. Robinson, Kimberly Ferzan & Stephen Garvey

CLCeditors@law.upenn.edu

P.S. ? You can subscribe to or unsubscribe from an occasional notification of what is happening with the CLC project by signing up at http://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/phrobins/conversations/listserv/