Legal Workshop: legal scholarship written for people who aren’t legal scholars
From their press release:
A consortium of America’s most influential law reviews today launched The Legal Workshop ( www.legalworkshop.org), a free, online magazine featuring articles based on legal scholarship published in the print editions of seven participating law reviews: Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review.
The Legal Workshop features short, plain-English articles about legal issues and ideas, written by an author whose related, full-length work of scholarship is forthcoming in one of the participating law reviews. But The Legal Workshop does not house a collection of abstracts. Instead, it offers an engaging alternative to traditional academic articles that run 30,000 words with footnotes, enabling scholars to present their well-formulated opinions and their research to a wider audience. In addition to making legal ideas understandable, The Legal Workshop seeks to house the best of legal scholarship in one placemaking it easier for readers to find the best writing about all areas of law. …
We’re glad to see others join the LII in recognizing the need for legal commentary that reaches out past the walls of the academy. For the last five years, the student-written LIIBULLETIN has analyzed upcoming Supreme Court cases for a sophisticated public. We are delighted that law reviews and scholars are picking up on the idea that writing for laypeople is not writing for dummies. The Legal Workshop is something that’s been sorely needed, and we look forward to its success.
[ Extra credit problem: those interested in seeing what “writing for the public” means might be interested in a “compare and contrast” reading of yesterday’s syllabus in Arizona v. Gant and the LIIBULLETIN pre-analysis of the case.]
