Abstract

Almost everyone involved in the legal profession today is aware of the wide, and perhaps insurmountable, chasm between the scholarly research that takes place in elite law schools and the actual work of practicing lawyers and judges. To a greater extent than other academic professions like medicine and public health, law professors too often have little to say to working lawyers and judges, even those judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. Perhaps this has been the case from the beginning, but the gap appears more dramatic in recent decades, as legal scholarship has departed from traditional doctrinal analysis and moved in more interdisciplinary and abstract theoretical directions.