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This question occupied me for several hours in New Orleans, as I anticipated possible lines of inquiry for my session on Law & Management. While pondering the issue, I stumbled across an article by then-Dean Kathleen Sullivan called Interdisciplinarity, 100 Michigan Law Review 1217 (2002). On the issue of law as discipline, Sullivan wrote:

Organizational charts of the disciplines often focus on content, or the taxonomy of subject matters studied. Of course, law is a discipline in this sense. Legal rules, documents and judgments comprise a rich and complicated body of texts distinct from novels, equations, or musical scores. And law involves a rich and complicated body of institutional arrangements that structure and regulate social order, distinct from the institutional structures of markets, cultures, and religions.
But a discipline, as the term itself suggests, also represents a technique, a method of analysis, a way of working. Here too, law is distinctive. It is a branch of rhetoric that gives normative force to interpretation and analysis. It is a set of interpretive techniques of problem-solving that disaggregate and order the messy jumble of facts through which conflict presents itself. And it is an amalgam of argumentative and decisional conventions, engrained through repetition, teachable only through reiterated practice and critique, as with etiquette, musical performance, or sport.

If you have any doubt that legal method is distinctive, try reading a non-lawyer's attempt to state the holding of a judicial opinion. With rare and brilliant exception (Linda Greenhouse, Nancy Rosenblum, Austin Sarat come to mind), even the cleverest non-lawyers routinely garble such summaries, seeing holdings in cert. denials, constitutional rules in statutory constructions, substantive shifts in remedial rulings, big swings in molecular motions. Legal journalism routinely commits political mapping fallacies, announcing that the Supreme Court is "turning right" only to recant a term later to say that "the center holds." The equivalent in etiquette is the faux pas; in music, singing off pitch; in sport, the duff, the dink, the mulligan. Lawyers know better because of our immersion and internalization of our discipline, a social practice that turns out to be a lot harder than it looks.

This appeals to me, and for the time being, I am proceeding on the assumption that Sullivan is right. Law as an academic disclipline must be something more than the subject matter that we study. There must be a legal method, and she locates this in the ancient field of rhetoric. As I read this description of law, I wonder why we do not teach principles of rhetoric more systematically in law schools. Many law schools teach a course in legal process, but the content of these courses varies widely from institution to institution.

Most law students learn legal method, if at all, only contextually. That is, they learn to interpret judicial opinions by studying contracts cases, torts cases, property cases, etc. They learn to interpret statutes in a course on corporate law or environmental law. The result of this contextual learning is that most law students are not very self-conscious about employing the legal method. They are, in a word, sloppy.

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This question occupied me for several hours in New Orleans, as I anticipated possible lines of inquiry for my session on Law & Management. While pondering the issue, I stumbled across an article by then-Dean Kathleen Sullivan called Interdisciplinarity, 100 Michigan Law Review 1217 (2002). On the issue of law as discipline, Sullivan wrote:

Organizational charts of the disciplines often focus on content, or the taxonomy of subject matters studied. Of course, law is a discipline in this sense. Legal rules, documents and judgments comprise a rich and complicated body of texts distinct from novels, equations, or musical scores. And law involves a rich and complicated body of institutional arrangements that structure and regulate social order, distinct from the institutional structures of markets, cultures, and religions.
But a discipline, as the term itself suggests, also represents a technique, a method of analysis, a way of working. Here too, law is distinctive. It is a branch of rhetoric that gives normative force to interpretation and analysis. It is a set of interpretive techniques of problem-solving that disaggregate and order the messy jumble of facts through which conflict presents itself. And it is an amalgam of argumentative and decisional conventions, engrained through repetition, teachable only through reiterated practice and critique, as with etiquette, musical performance, or sport.

If you have any doubt that legal method is distinctive, try reading a non-lawyer's attempt to state the holding of a judicial opinion. With rare and brilliant exception (Linda Greenhouse, Nancy Rosenblum, Austin Sarat come to mind), even the cleverest non-lawyers routinely garble such summaries, seeing holdings in cert. denials, constitutional rules in statutory constructions, substantive shifts in remedial rulings, big swings in molecular motions. Legal journalism routinely commits political mapping fallacies, announcing that the Supreme Court is "turning right" only to recant a term later to say that "the center holds." The equivalent in etiquette is the faux pas; in music, singing off pitch; in sport, the duff, the dink, the mulligan. Lawyers know better because of our immersion and internalization of our discipline, a social practice that turns out to be a lot harder than it looks.

This appeals to me, and for the time being, I am proceeding on the assumption that Sullivan is right. Law as an academic disclipline must be something more than the subject matter that we study. There must be a legal method, and she locates this in the ancient field of rhetoric. As I read this description of law, I wonder why we do not teach principles of rhetoric more systematically in law schools. Many law schools teach a course in legal process, but the content of these courses varies widely from institution to institution.

Most law students learn legal method, if at all, only contextually. That is, they learn to interpret judicial opinions by studying contracts cases, torts cases, property cases, etc. They learn to interpret statutes in a course on corporate law or environmental law. The result of this contextual learning is that most law students are not very self-conscious about employing the legal method. They are, in a word, sloppy.

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