Academic

I was pleased to see your post on Victoria and Greg's paper, which I also admire. And thanks to Greg for posting a correction regarding the positions Stewart Macaulay and I have taken on some of the issues they discuss. In particular, we would not define new legal realism around a requirement that law professors perform their own fieldwork or empirical research (as opposed to becoming expert translators). We also would not denigrate largescale quantitative research as in and of itself unworthy of being included in a new legal realist project. (To the contrary - I myself have consistently included quantitative research in my project designs, for example). It's more that we advocate consulting results from studies using multiple methodologies -- including qualitative research as a very important source of empirical information (see our website, newlegalrealism.org, or the guest blog symposium we did on the els blog a few years back -- http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/blog_forum/page/4/).

But I do really appreciate the exciting synthesis Greg and Victoria have put together, challenging all of us working in the area to think about our relationships with one another and with other strands of legal thought. Stewart and I are both great admirers of Victoria and Greg's work.

Beth Mertz