Law as Science event in collaboration with the Graduate Colloquium will host the meeting on Tuesday, February 14, 2023 at 12:00pm ET
Descriiption: Thomas S. Ulen [Hosted by U. of Illinois]
In 2002, I published an article entitled “A Nobel Prize in Legal Science: Theory, Empirical Work, and the Scientific Method in the Study of Law,” 2002 U. Ill. L. Rev. 875. The purpose of that article was not to advocate for a Nobel Prize (or a prize of equal eminence) for law or legal scholarship. It was, rather, to take stock of the state of legal scholarship by comparing the legal academy’s academic process and output to that of other disciplines in the modern university – especially to those disciplines for which a Nobel Prize is awarded. I thought that I might have something interesting to say because I have a Ph.D. in one of those disciplines (economics) but had spent most of my academic life teaching in law schools in the United States and elsewhere and writing books and articles directed at other legal scholars and legal practitioners. My conclusions twenty years ago were that legal scholarship was not then being conducted in the same way that a normal science in the university conducts itself but that there were signs that the study of law was moving toward the characteristics of a normal science. The passage of twenty years is significantly long so that that process of the “scientification” of the study of law might have picked up steam or even completed the transition. So, in this talk I take stock again of my hypothesis that there has been progress toward making legal scholarship more like a normal science. In making this assessment, I shall seek to discuss the factors that impede and that hasten this transition, such factors as the rise of several “law and …” disciplines, changes in the market for lawyers, changes in the societal use of legal expertise, the apparent slowdown or reversal of globalization, and others. I conclude that although there has been some progress toward a legal science that is universal and scientific. I speculate on what might be done to foster the further development of legal science.
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