Deadwood Report Update: Paperweight

ABSTRACT:

When we introduced the Deadwood Report in our Winter 2008 issue, we staked out two main positions on what we would treat as scholarship when assessing faculty productivity. Fair Warning to Law Schools..., 11 GREEN BAG 2d 139, 144. We are standing by one of those positions and abandoning the other, at least for now. First we said, "Not all writing is scholarship and not all scholarship is the same" - a position we still like. For now we plan to proceed with a simple independent-sufficiency-for-tenure standard: We know that a professor can satisfy the scholarship requirement for tenure with a record consisting exclusively of articles in scholarly journals or exclusively of books. We know of no law school that grants tenure based on a record consisting exclusively of any other form of publication. But the Green Bag is not all-knowing, and so, as we said in our Winter 2008 issue, we will make exceptions. We do hope to provide some insight into one touchy area: the relative worth of student, faculty, and practitioner judgments about scholarly value. As with the weighting of teaching, we will be asking deans for help. See Deadwood Report Update: Pick Your Own Weight, 11 GREEN BAG 2d 275. The draft survey below invites deans to assign weights to a variety of scholarly products, including articles appearing in journals edited by students, professors, and practitioners. As before, we welcome your comments on the draft. Second we said, "Inbreeding is bad policy"; - a position we cannot justify now. For a variety of reasons, works appearing in organs published by your school or your students, or on which a member of your faculty serves as an editor or in some similar capacity, do count.