Wow! Larry's post is amazing. Thanks for linking to that, Christine.

Christine. Thanks for pointing out this wonderful post. If I may, I’d like to try and apply some of this discussion to our mundane world of corporate law scholarship. The issue seems to me to start with the question of constituencies. Who are we “working for” as members of the corporate area of the legal academy? One constituency is certainly our students, but I translate the challenge to Tamahana’s claim to be that there are other constituencies we would hope to consider as well.

In the case of corporate law generally perhaps this is the hypothetical judge or regulator. One could see the more traditional doctrinal approaches as first efforts to assist this hypothetical “judge.” But if our constituency is the ideal regulator then it is not surprising the “we” wanted to go beyond doctrine to address corporate law issues using methods that are more robust. In a way this provides a different lens for David Hoffman’s recent post about methods of corporate scholarship. Rather than asking what methods are most successful in given the current state of the legal academy, we should be asking which methods are most appropriate to better understand and address important corporate law issues.

Sorry to ramble on, but this seems to be a debate where the blogsphere has brought to the fore important issues we are all struggling with.