Forms of Legal Scholarship and Law Professors' Influence

Following up, tangentially, on earlier threads about the value of legal scholarship, I'll offer this speculation about forms of legal scholarship and law professor influence.  I'm spending a fair bit of time now reading English legal scholarship, and a little German, which reminds one of the distinctions in how law professors approach their work.  American law profs are notorious for long articles (but we write fewer books--probably because two or three U.S. law review articles equal a book in word length.)  English and German law profs (like most other U.S. academic disciplines) write mostly in shorter forms, often articles of 15-30 pages (plus books). I'd also say that it seems English and German scholars do more work than we do that focuses on a recent court decision, statute, bill or other specific development in law--work that Americans might call (sometimes a bit perjoratively) "close to the ground."  (Though there's plenty of critical/theoretical/etc. work as well as this policy-analytical work, to be sure.)  My speculation is this: shorter, more practical articles reflect scholars' greater capacity to influence law development and reform in these jurisdictions.  The higher the prospects that one's work might matter to courts and legislatures, the more likely one is to write in forms that are accessible and relevant to them.

I can defend this a bit more as to England than Germany.  I think English law profs have better odds of having influence on law reform by Parliament and agencies than in we do in the U.S.  At least two things point in that direction: England's standing Law Commission, on which law professors serve and which can realistically  influence Parliament's agenda; and the English tradition of appointing ad hoc Royal commissions, staffed by respected lawyers and scholars (among others), to study and report on various policy issues, which then often help set legislative reform agendas.  (And note that, with law profs on those commissions, other law profs can write pieces relevant to a commission and expect law prof members, at least, to pay attention.) Perhaps the greater capacity to influence policy and law reform inclines scholars to write more often in ways that directly speak to current issues and specific topics in fairly practical ways. (Here is an interesting paper on how 'knowledge regimes'--think tanks and other sources of data/information/analysis that informs government policy--vary across nations.  One argument/insight is that information sources affecting politics are more partisan in the U.S. than England and elsewhere.)

This is broad generalization, to be sure.  U.S. law profs do plenty of articles with the purpose of saying, in effect, "X line of cases are wrong and doctrine Y ought to be this way," though it tends to take us 60 pages to make the case. Still, I think there's something to the distinction.

I can't say as much about Germany, except that I have a vague sense mostly from hearing this said by those who claim to know, that by long tradition German legal scholarship carries more weight with German courts (and even legislatures?) than American scholars' work does with U.S. courts. Others surely have better information and insights.  BTW: German law profs, I've noticed, seem also commonly to produce very short pieces--2-5 pages--that are basically case comments.  I'm a bit puzzled about the utility of these, unless German legal materials lack equivalants to our various law update/summary services (e.g., U.S. Law Week, Cornell's LLI, or various good blogs), which seems unlikely.