Oct 27, 2009 Tanina Rostain and John FloodLegal Profession
An invitation from the Legal Profession Section Editors
John Flood and Tanina Rostain
As legal profession scholars have observed, law practice is being reinvented at an ever-accelerating speed the world over. Legal services are being routinized, commoditized, outsourced, disaggregated, reassembled, computerized, and unbundled—among associates, law firm partners, solo practitioners, contract lawyers, paralegals, law consultants, temporary law workers, websites, and online shared platforms. In the corporate realm, multinational companies demand that their lawyers be available to provide services 24/7 in every corner of the globe. In the meantime, lawyers representing individuals, non-profits, and NGOs increasingly use new technologies and transnational resources and strategies to develop more effective and efficient models of service delivery. Despite this rapid pace of change, many lawyer regulatory regimes lag behind and continue to hew to a model of regulation tied to geographical jurisdiction and domestic legal norms.
In recent years, the field of the legal profession has benefitted from a proliferation of research by scholars seeking to understand the many changing dimensions of the legal profession. Researchers have drawn on a broad range of social science disciplines, methodological approaches, and multilingual proficiencies to investigate legal practice(s) in a wide variety of geographic settings. Continue reading "An Invitation to a Global Discussion on the Legal Profession"
Oct 26, 2009 Michael FroomkinLegal Profession
Legal Profession Section Editors
The Section Editors choose the Contributing Editors and exercise editorial control over their section. In addition, each Section Editor will write at least one contribution (”jot”) per year. Questions about contributing to a section ought usually to be addressed to the section editors.
Professor John Flood
University of Westminster School of Law Continue reading "Meet the Editors"
Oct 25, 2009 Michael FroomkinLegal Profession
Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) seeks short reviews of (very) recent scholarship related to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience. The ideal Jotwell review will not merely celebrate scholarly achievement, but situate it in the context of other scholarship in a manner that explains to both specialists and non-specialists why the work is important.
Although critique is welcome, reviewers should choose the subjects they write about with an eye toward identifying and celebrating work that makes an original contribution, and that will be of interest to others. First-time contributors may wish to consult the Jotwell Mission Statement for more information about what Jotwell seeks, and what it seeks to achieve. Continue reading "Call For Papers"
Oct 19, 2009 Michael FroomkinLegal Profession
The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)–JOTWELL–invites you to join us in filling a telling gap in legal scholarship by creating a space where legal academics will go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new legal scholarship. Currently there are about 350 law reviews in North America, not to mention relevant journals in related disciplines, foreign publications, and new online pre-print services such as SSRN and BePress. Never in legal publishing have so many written so much, and never has it been harder to figure out what to read, both inside and especially outside one’s own specialization. Perhaps if legal academics were more given to writing (and valuing) review essays, this problem would be less serious. But that is not, in the main, our style.
We in the legal academy value originality. We celebrate the new. And, whether we admit it or not, we also value incisiveness. An essay deconstructing, distinguishing, or even dismembering another’s theory is much more likely to be published, not to mention valued, than one which focuses mainly on praising the work of others. Books may be reviewed, but articles are responded to; and any writer of a response understands that his job is to do more than simply agree. Continue reading "Jotwell Mission Statement"
