Yale Bulletin and Calendar

August 23-30, 1999

Volume 28, Number 1

Stanford-Yale forum will boost junior
faculty's skills in legal scholarship

The law schools at Yale and Stanford universities have launched an innovative program to help their young faculty strengthen their skills in legal scholarship.

The Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum will encourage the work of young scholars at the two universities by giving them experience in how scholarly inquiry is conducted. The initiative also seeks to enhance the sense of community among legal scholars -- particularly among new and veteran professors -- by bringing them together for a formal paper submission, selection and presentation program.

Alan Schwartz, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, and Ronald J. Gilson, the Meyers Professor of Law and Business at Stanford, will direct the forum.

"Legal scholarship is done in a number of genres," says Schwartz, "but within each genre there tends to be consensus regarding what is the best work. Our goal is to make more transparent the methodological assumptions that underlie these judgments."

Gilson notes that this is "the first real effort to create an institution devoted to helping young law school faculty develop their scholarship. Precisely because legal education does not provide the professional training in being a scholar found in Ph.D. programs, this cooperative effort between two like-minded law schools fills an important gap."

Beginning in the spring of 2000, one session of the forum will be held each year, switching between the Yale and Stanford campuses. The focus of the forum will alternate each year between public law and the humanities, and private and dispute resolution, and will include a range of other topics.

Each year, a selection committee composed of senior legal scholars will choose six to eight papers submitted on a blind basis by law school faculty members in their first seven years of teaching.

The two-day forum will place emphasis on two components: commentary on the papers by leading scholars in the relevant field, and sustained exchange between the presenter and audience.

For further information about the forum, contact Alan Schwartz at alan.schartz@yale.edu.

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Campus Notes