FAMILY COURT REVIEW—APRIL 2012

AuthorAndrew Schepard
Published date01 April 2012
Date01 April 2012
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2012.01442.x
EDITORIAL NOTES
FAMILY COURT REVIEW—APRIL 2012
Parents are not supposed to play favoritesbetween children and, by analogy,editors should not play
favorites among issues. I do have to confess, however, some special fondness for this issue. I am a
lawyer and the authors in this issue are all lawyers (mostly law professors) or law students.This is a
bit unusual for FCR, which usually publishes authors from different disciplines in a single issue.
Professional chauvinism aside, I think readers will conclude that the lawyer authors in this issue have
a great deal to contribute to the family court community. I also think that the articles in this issue
demonstrate how much legal scholarship and thinking has been influenced by the interdisciplinary,
collaborative approach that is the cornerstone of FCR and AFCC.
SPECIAL ISSUE: EMERGING FAMILY LAW SCHOLARS AND TEACHERS
The “special” in this special issue is not a particular topic but who the authors are. This special
issue is, in effect, an outreach effort by a group of Emerging Family Law Scholars and Teachers to
communicate how they would change family law and the family dispute resolution system to the
family court community. For me, a now somewhat senior family law professor (a fact that I only
grudgingly admit), this issue is a kind of “passing of the torch” to a new generation of law teachers
interested in having an impact on public policy.
Legal scholarship has gotten a bad name recently for playing “inside baseball,” focusing on topics
of concern to law professors but not of relevance to policy makers and the community. High-profile
judges have been particularly vociferous in voicingthis concer n. Here, for example,is an excer pt from
a recent New York Times article on the state of legal education discussing the role of scholarship by
faculty members:
[C]itable law review articles are vastly outnumbered, it appears, by head-scratchers. “There is evidence
that law review articles have left terra firma to soar into outer space,” said the Supreme Court Justice
Stephen G. Breyer in a 2008 speech.
Some articles are intra-academy tiffs that could interest only the combatants (like “What Is Wrong With
Kamm’s and Scanlon’s Arguments AgainstTaurek” from The Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy).
Others fall under the category of highbrow edu-tainment, like a 2006 article in The Cardozo Law Review
about the legal taboos of a well-known obscenity, the one-word title of which is unprintable in a family
newspaper.
Still others crossbreed law and some other discipline, a variety of scholarship that seems to especially irk
John G. Roberts Jr., chief justice of the United States. “Pick up a copy of any lawreview that you see,” he
said at a conference this summer, “and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel
Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great
interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.”1
The articles by the Emerging FamilyLaw Scholars and Teachers in this issue are a counterpoint to this
high-level charge that legal scholarship has become irrelevant and arcane.Their very purpose is to
FAMILY COURT REVIEW,Vol. 50 No. 2, April 2012 175–178
© 2012 Association of Familyand Conciliation Cour ts

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