Research and the Justice Mission of Law Schools

There are some obvious things to say about research and the justice mission of law schools, and many other contributors to this discussion have said them. For example, jurisprudence lies at the core of the classical legal curriculum, and-at least in the contemporary law school-definitions of justice are part of the jurisprudence syllabus. Because the concept of justice is not self-defining, conceptual inquiry into the meaning of justice, a traditional mode of legal research, is recurrently needed. In this way, research is tightly linked to the justice mission of law schools.

In this piece, I move from global concerns--jurisprudence in the classical sense-to concern with what happens in law school classrooms. At each level, I try to identify aspects of the law school's justice mission about which research is surely needed. In that way, I have tried to show that research is an inevitable part of that mission.