In one noteworthy respect, scholarship is comparable to a chain— just as a chain cannot be stronger than its weakest link, a scholarly project cannot be better than its lowestquality component. Accordingly, whether scholarship utilizes numeric data or relies on non-numeric information, its output will suffer if any part of the scholarship is problematic. With this in mind, I turn to a key component of scholarship, viz., paradigms.

1.1 Paradigms in scholarship

Paradigms play an important role in scholarship because they involve the assumptions that direct scholars to the phenomena that should be studied and tell scholars how to study the phenomena. A paradigm that is defective can, therefore, hold back scholarship and the advance of knowledge. Although a discipline that uses a faulty paradigm may still add to the store of knowledge, it would make greater contributions, and/or would make the contributions sooner, if its paradigm was not defective. A faulty paradigm is, then, manifestly undesirable. Of course, scholars in every discipline want to avoid a faulty paradigm, because their output must eventually be useful, and when disciplines differ in the utility of their scholarship, they will differ in financial support and prestige. The marketplace of ideas, in brief, gives scholars a strong incentive to be on guard against flaws in their paradigms. Nonetheless, recognizing and removing established paradigm flaws is not easy and does not occur quickly.

In law, scholarship employs several paradigms and appears to be adding more, probably because law draws on many non-law disciplines. Naturally, not all non-law disciplines beneficial to law are static; at least some of them are in flux. As a result, paradigm evolution occurs, and indeed is required, in law and its areas of specialization. Such evolution is particularly needed in environmental-law scholarship, because the paradigm of environmental law at the present time ignores a key cause of the damage that has been and is being done to the biosphere. However, in ignoring a principal source of damage to the biosphere, environmental law is not alone. The paradigm in the field of ‘sustainability science,’ for example, is neglecting this cause, too, and hence is proving unable to solve problems that are relevant to it. Consequently, environmental law as well as sustainability science— disciplines that are obvious allies8— need to amend or replace their current paradigms.