The Process and the Product: A Bibliography of Scholarship About Legal Scholarship

This bibliography of scholarship about legal scholarship was originally prepared for the 1997 Conference of the Association of Legal Writing Directors. The Conference explored the rapidly developing area of scholarship by legal writing professors and the ways in which this important scholarship can be encouraged. Characteristically, when writing teachers turn their attention to a particular kind of writing the genre employs-that is, the process and the product. This bibliography is one result of that study.

We hope that it will prove helpful to anyone interested in legal scholarship, especially to law faculty in the early stages of their scholarly careers. Some may criticize this "meta-scholarship" as just so much pointless navel-gazing. However, serious examination of the genre of legal scholarship serves at least two important functions: it renders the scholarly life more accessible to newcomers to the academy, and it sustains a conversation that can identify and question assumptions that might otherwise hold the academy captive. If the academy is to remain open to new ideas, we must critically examine what makes scholarship valuable and how best to produce that valuable scholarship.