Back to the Future? Legal Scholarship in the Progressive Era and Today

By Daniel A. Farber. Full text here.

This Article introduces Volume 100 of the Minnesota Law Review. Like much of legal scholarship today, Issue 1 was deeply and unapologetically embedded in the concerns of its day, which was on the cusp between the Progressive Era and the outbreak of World War I. It is not uncommon to contrast modern legal scholarship with some past era in which scholarship was more doctrinal, less policy oriented, and more focused on issues relevant to practicing lawyers.  Yet, of the four articles in Issue 1 of the Review (published in 1917), two are international or comparative, and three (including the comparative article) rely on policy arguments rather than limiting themselves to doctrinal analysis. The subjects include children’s rights and the juvenile justice system along with American neutrality in World War I. Indeed, even by the late nineteenth century, there were complaints that law professors and law school education had departed too far from the realities of legal practice. The golden age in which practicing lawyers and law professors walked hand in hand into the sunset may be little more than myth, like so many other golden ages.