Making the implicit quality standards and performance expectations for traditional legal scholarship explicit

Abstract

Scholars in search of quality standards for traditional legal scholarship could well end up disappointed. By answering the question concerning what standards legal academics use for evaluating such works—through reviewing the international literature on evaluative standards and interviews with forty law professors—this Article aims at filling this gap. This Article recommends that traditional legal scholarship is judged by using the following criteria: (1) the conceptual design—a clearly formulated research question that is both original and significant and the adequacy of the methods proposed to answer that question; (2) the composition of a particular line of reasoning—does the researcher adhere to principles of accountability, accuracy, balance, and credibility?; and (3) the overall characteristics of a work of scholarship—the readability and persuasiveness of the whole and the extent to which the researcher managed to identify and clarify the presuppositions that may have potentially affected her inquiry.