Editor's Corner: Publishing Impactful Scholarship

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ablj.12070
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Author: Robert Sprague
• Date: 01 March 2016

Editor’s Corner: Publishing Impactful Scholarship

Law has been considered a vital part of a business education since, and

even preceding, the founding of modern business schools.

1

Despite its

important contributions, the Legal Studies in Business discipline has

chronically experienced misunderstanding by many of the other busi-

ness disciplines. As Robert Bird explains in the opening article to this

volume, “Special Report: Legal Scholarship in Business Schools,” legal

scholarship—and business legal scholarship in particular—is different in

many respects from, say, financial, economic, management, or market-

ing scholarship. But different does not mean inferior or irrelevant.

Legal scholarship is often more theoretical than empirical. But let

us not forget that some of the top journals in the business disciplines,

such as Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and Journal of Management,

do not exclusively publish empirical scholarship.

2

Legal scholarship is

also impactful, and not just within its own academic discipline. Legal

scholarship is regularly relied upon by judges in the legal analysis

underlying their decisions as well as by legislators when considering,

drafting, and amending legislation.

As Robert Bird thoroughly documents in his “Special Report,”

publishing in top-quality law journals is extremely competitive. Law

1

Robert C. Bird, Special Report: Legal Scholarship in Business Schools,53AM.BUS. L.J. 9, 9 &

n.2 (2016).

2

See Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice—Overview,WILEY ONLINE LIBRARY, http://onlineli-

brary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291540-6520/homepage/ProductInformation.

html (last visited Oct. 21, 2015) (“[Entrepreneurship The ory and Practice] publishes c oncep-

tual and empirical articles of interest to scholars, consultants, and public policy makers.

Most issues also feature a teaching case.”); Journal of Management, SAGE JOURNALS, http://

jom.sagepub.com/ (last visited Oct. 21, 2015) (“[Journal of Management] is committed to

publishing scholarly empirical and theoretical research articles that have a high impact

on the management field as a whole.”).

5

American Business Law Journal

Volume 53, Issue 1, 5–8, Spring 2016

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