Merchantability Applied to Legal Scholarship

We know that merchantability means passing without objection in the trade. If law review articles were goods, what would that trade be? For law professors, it  seems like it is second and third year law students.  At some level it would also reviewers of works when a professor is considered for promotion. Recently, though, a colleague of mine and I did a bit of research and began to wonder if acceptable in the trade — as defined by law students and law professors —  is a meaningful strandard within the trade of academia.

Law professors who do research are generally spending the money of others. The actual buyers are, therefore, those who pay  for the scholarship. Let’s add that they have no idea what the standard is but would uniformly agree that every article should make someone or something better off and should reflect high quality research. Students and reviewers should be regarded as agents for those paying the bills.

If that is the measure of merchantability (and why wouldn’t it be) then editors and reviewers should apply that standard in their own decisions. Clearly they do not and left to their narrow and inappropriate standard for merchantability we have  massive amounts of scholarship that, let’s face  it, is written to justify being granted tenure.  There is little verification that most, no matter how carefully done or clever, actually benefits anyone. Some of it — a small percentage — is cited but rarely for the substantive points made as opposed to piggy-backing on a fact asserted in the first work.  Morever the research is often sloppy.  Here is an example. I recently read an article that makes the claim that a certain area of law is now consistent with empirical studies. I looked at the cite and it was to another professor who had not actualy done any empirical work and did not quite say what was claimed. And the work cited by that professor was not on the point made in the first article. In fact the most frequent cite is  the hearsay cite in which the author makes a claim because someone else made the same claim.

I expect readers of this will disagree but shouldn’t the test of merchatability mean making someone or something (even if a fish) better off and shouldn’t documentation be careful and accurate? Don’t misunderstand, much of scholarship meets these standards. But much of what currently passes in the trade without objection does not.