Legal scholarship is notorious for the long form. Really long! Back in the day, the most influential legal scholars were the treatise writers—the heirs of Blackstone and Chancellor Kent—you know the names: Corbin, Davis, Moore, Nimmer, Wigmore, Williston, and Wright. And let us not forget the last great modern treatise—Tribe’s American Constitutional Law—an attempt to revitalize a dying tradition by infusing old-fashioned case crunching with newfangled theory.
The multi-volume treatises were and are long. Really long! Dozens of volumes. Millions of words. Cases in the tens of thousands. By comparison, law review articles seem blissfully short. Oh sure, there was the occasional multipart law review article that ran to hundreds of pages and thousands of footnotes. But a mere 60 to 100 pages was considered a respectable length for a serious piece of legal scholarship—one that took a doctrinal topic and turned it inside out and upside down, comprehensively surveying the literature and the authoritative legal materials. There was, of course, a terrible dirty secret about long form legal scholarship. No one read it. Of course, the treatises weren’t meant to be read straight through. They were giant encyclopedias of doctrine.
The reader was invited to dip into the treatise on a particular topic and read a section or even a few. No one was supposed to read the whole thing. And because the treatises were comprehensive, but legal problems cluster, it is likely that some sections of the treatises had very few readers even when cumulated over a number of years—numbered perhaps in the dozens, perhaps in the single digits. Of course, a really successful treatise had readers aplenty—thousands and tens of thousands of lawyers, judges, academics, and students who wanted to know what “the rule” was on this or that topic.
Download the full pdf: SSRN-id957237
Author(s): Lawrence B. Solum