Articles for author: Ralf Michaels

Free Trade in Legal Scholarship?

I want to decline Rob Howse’s invitation to talk about my own residual anxieties, because he introduces another more interesting theme into the debate: whether scholarship can actually be traded between countries. He suggests that such trade exists, though apparently only in one direction: “It is not as if Americans are going to buy their doctrinal scholarship from Germany […]; on the other hand, some forms of interdisciplinary scholarship from the US may well be exportable to Germany.” But it was not always so. There was a time, prior to World War I, when many Americans were indeed eager to ... continue reading

Culture, Institutions, and Comparison of Legal Education and Scholarship—A Response to Rob Howse

In a post on verfassungsblog.de I compare two reports on legal education and scholarship: one concerning Germany from the German Council on Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), the other concering the United States from a task force of the American Bar Association. I find the Wissenschaftsrat’s decision to maintain an emphasis on doctrinal reasoning, while promoting interdisciplinarity and theory, to be prudent—especially for the German situation. By contrast, I find that the ABA report, in its emphasis on teaching skills and tools and implicit rejection of interdisciplinarity, to threaten what has always been a strength of law schools in the United ... continue reading

“Law as the Study of Norms” – Foundational Subjects and Interdisciplinarity in Germany and the United States

The German Council of Science and Humanities’ report on “Prospects of Legal Scholarship in Germany. Current Situation, Analyses, Recommendations” has sparked a lively debate amongst legal scholars in Germany on how to adapt legal education and legal scholarship to the challenges of increasing internationalization of the law. The first contribution to our symposium on Prospects of Legal Scholarship takes a look at the state of interdisciplinary studies at German and US-American law faculties and compares the Wissenschaft’s report to the recently issued report by the American Bar Association.   In my view, the Wissenschaftsrat’s report hits almost all the right notes. One ... continue reading