Can Web 2.0 Solve Conference Conundrums?
posted by Frank Pasquale
I found the discussions of academic conferences here and here very interesting. In a perceptive commentary on a recent IP conference, Mike Madison complains that:
By far the biggest flaw in presentations and papers by junior IP scholars (and sometimes by more senior IP scholars) was and is their evident ignorance of earlier work. And not just or even work published within the last year or last five years; I’m thinking of the fact that a lot of foundational work published ten years ago or earlier remains significant today. IP doesn’t have a sclerotic hierarchy, but it does have senior people who are still active scholars today, and their earlier work still matters. And, of course, there is quite a lot of relevant work from decades ago and scholars no longer with us.
I agree with Mike that ignoring prior work is a very serious problem, particularly as it tends to reinforce the “Matthew Effect” Robert Merton once commented on. Junior scholars feel pressure to deliver up a “big theory” piece before tenure, and the new law review length guidelines make that harder to do. So many have to economize on whom they cite, and often it’s going to be to the most recent work by the hottest names that everyone recognizes. There are less incentives for digging beneath that work and carefully tracing the evolution of scholarship over time.
But that problem could be ameliorated if sites like SSRN permitted commenting. (Note that Google News is giving sources and others a “right of reply” on its site. . . .once again supplanting the old media by doing something they should have been doing all along.)
Ultimately the solution seems to be the creation of webpages on which scholars can post their work and then invite others to put comments beneath to remind us of what’s already been done. Of course, ideally, we’d have found that already, but sometimes it is hard to keep on top of everything. I think I printed out at least 700 sources for my article on information overload and copyright; I probably cited half of them, and the others could easily have been included–but for the space limits of law reviews.
Another solution is to create more dialogical formats for scholars–as has recently been done in leading disputes on net neutrality, patent, and trademark.
August 12, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)
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Responses (2)
James Grimmelmann - August 12, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I also blame us. Mike is right to blame us. We’re young and we often don’t know the literature as well as we should. This is a huge argument in favor of the trend towards hiring holders of PhDs and other advanced degrees. Leave aside knowing something from another field; if you’ve been in school for longer, you’ve had longer to read past legal scholarship. I’m acutely conscious that one of the things I need to be doing is reading classics of legal scholarship; it’s also unfortunately one of the easiest things to slight when time pressure gets to be too much.
Amanda Frost - August 15, 2007 at 12:21 pm
I think the problem is also related to the fact that law reviews are published by students. Peer review would likely prevent the publication of repetitive scholarship, or work by authors who appear ignorant of key articles in the field.
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