In this monthly column, law professors comment on the many academic opportunities and challenges presented by Web technology.
Legal education is a rather peculiar place when it comes to innovation.
Law teachers have a great deal of autonomy, relatively light teaching loads, and some of us are known to study and make use of disciplines far and wide. Yet, there are still law school colleagues who act less on the basis of intersecting disciplinary perspectives in legal scholarship and far more on their autonomy as masters of small educational worlds in which nothing unexpected is allowed to intrude. With nothing unusual to perplex or to baffle them, our colleagues are indeed ruling masters of small universes. Consider the following anecdotal evidence. I have had wide-ranging discussions over the past twenty years with law teaching colleagues about the possibility that some new, developing, or emerging trend in the world of discipline scholarship of which we have become aware might be used to inform, strengthen, broaden, or deepen our usual approaches to law school pedagogy.