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Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Impact Outside the Academy

On Monday, I talked about the impact of legal scholarship outside of the academy -- specifically, in helping to raise children.  Today, a slightly more serious example that I think is heartening for those of us who occasionally wonder whether anyone reads or cares about these law review articles we labor to produce. 



Columbia Law professor James Liebman has recently taken leave to serve as the "chief accountability officer" for the New York City public schools, serving under Chancellor Joel Klein.  His new job -- from what I can tell from reading the press release, and Klein's speech announcing it -- appears to relate to his scholarship with Charles Sabel, available here, on the "New Accountability" movement in education reform -- scholarship which built on Sabel's work with Michael Dorf on "democratic experimentalism" as a new form of regulation and governance.   For Liebman, having an impact outside the academy with his scholarship is not new, a recent and prominent example being his empirical work on the death penalty with fellow Columbia Law Professor Jeffrey Fagan and colleagues.



I have no idea how exactly this job came about, but the basic chain seems clear: write an article or two about an important issue of law and policy, someone notices and thinks it's interesting, a reformer looking for new ideas asks you to come aboard and implement the idea.  No reason one needs to be The Implementer as well as The Conceptualizer, but still interesting.  Almost makes you think that some ambitious big-city police chief should appoint Markel "chief shaming officer" in a troubled neighborhood.  Though I suppose, given Dan's views, he wouldn't do very much.

Posted by Jason Solomon on June 14, 2006 at 01:27 PM | Permalink

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