LEGAL academics, despite facing inevitable teaching and administrative pressures, spend a considerable portion of their career reading, discussing and producing legal scholarship. In so doing, most will develop a sense of why certain ideas spread and prosper whereas other claims ‘burn out’ or fail to capture attention in the first place. Still, while academic lawyers may make assumptions about the trajectory of legal scholarship, their understanding of the topic will almost certainly be intuitive only. This is because, despite the attention devoted to scholarly activity, there is little literature on the process by which academic writing on law evolves.

This lecture departs from the existing pattern and examines various possible trajectories scholarship. Such an exercise might be thought by some to constitute introverted navel-gazing. The volume of academic writing on law is, however, mushrooming and there indeed is a growing literature on the genre. Given all of this intellectual endeavor, it is appropriate to pause and seek to discern the trajectory of legal scholarship.

No one is truly competent to evaluate properly the overall state of legal scholarship. Correspondingly, this lecture is not designed to determine in a definitive way the manner in which academic writing on law evolves. Instead, it is more of a thought experiment, with the central objective being to provide a platform for further analysis. The format will be a survey of five potential trajectories for legal scholarship, to be followed by a case study of corporate law. The topic for the case study has been chosen on pragmatic grounds, with corporate law being the field of law with which the author is most familiar.