Attempting to find in motion what was lost in space . . . for time is the longest distance between two places. . . . For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles . . . and so goodbye.
Law can never fully insulate itself from the impact of societal and technological change. For instance, the United States Constitution was not only adopted "in Order to . . . secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," but also was "intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 415 (1819). Likewise, if law harbors any hope of sustaining "ideas and aspirations that must survive more ages than one," the law must respond to upheaval. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 901 (1992). Any stability in the law is episodic at best and prone to violent interruption.
The Jurisdynamics Network openly embraces a dynamic model of legal change. Jurisdynamics describes the interplay between legal responses to exogenous change and the law's own endogenous capacity for adaptation. Within the realm of legal scholarship, this network aspires to the goal that historian David Christian set out for his discipline: "that the appropriate time scale for the study of history may be the whole of time." David Christian, The Case for "Big History," 2 J. World Hist. 223, 223 (1991). The Jurisdynamics Network will present the case for "big law," for the proposition that the substantive scale on which law should be studied, taught, and learned is the entirety of human experience.
The flagship blog of the Jurisdynamics Network, Jurisdynamics focuses on tools and subjects that lend themselves most readily to jurisdynamic analysis. Jurisdynamic tools include:
Naturally jurisdynamic subjects include:
Agriculture has become "so vast that fully to comprehend it would require an almost universal knowledge ranging from" economics and the natural sciences "to the niceties of the legislative, judicial and administrative processes of government." Queensboro Farms Prods., Inc. v. Wickard, 137 F.2d 969, 975 (2d Cir. 1943). This blog discusses contemporary agriculture in all of its diversity and complexity.
Law engages the life sciences in a wide variety of contexts, including environmental law, natural resources law, agricultural law, food and drug law, biotechnology, law and neuroscience, behavioral psychology and evolutionary biology, health law, and bioethics. Too often these topics are addressed in isolation rather than together. By embracing all of these areas at once, BioLaw endeavors to restore the proper consilience to the study of law and the life sciences.
First Movers is managed and written by law students, LL.M. and S.J.D. candidates, and recent law school graduates. These young scholars elaborate, as they see fit, the themes that inspired Jurisdynamics in the first place: law amid societal and technological change. The members of First Movers' J.D. Studio and Graduate Division engage the other blogs within the Jurisdynamics Network, and the professionally staffed weblogs in turn engage First Movers. The hope that First Movers alumni will eventually secure jobs within legal academia inspires this forum's slogan, "Tomorrow's scholars ... today."
MoneyLaw surveys the art of winning an unfair academic game. The U.S. News rankings dominate American legal academia. They should not. This blog gathers information on how the U.S. News rankings might be reverse-engineered or replaced, and how the rankings affect law school management. At its best, this blog will develop strategies for improving the evaluation of educational quality among law schools.
In 1897, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., predicted that the future of "the rational study of the law" belongs to "the [master] of statistics and the master of economics." Dedicated to the intellectual path that Holmes predicted for the law, Ratio Juris engages in empirical and mathematical analysis of judicial decisionmaking.
Law and Technology Theory explores and rationalizes technology in all its guises, from the double helix to the World Wide Web. In particular, it ponders whether theories of technology adoption or rejection can and should influence the law's response to technology.
Law Blog Central provides digests of leading law blogs, including Jurisdynamics, Althouse, Balkinization, BlackProf, Concurring Opinions, Conglomerate, Feminist Law Professors, Jurist, Legal Theory Blog, Leiter Law School, Orin Kerr, PrawfsBlawg, Professor Bainbridge, TaxProf, and the Volokh Conspiracy. This site is also the home of the the Law Blog Orbiter , which aggregates content from all of these blogs.
The Scientific Lawyer reviews scientific literature of interest to lawyers and legal scholars. Each of its three categories can be accessed as an Orbiter :
News and reviews Research Nature Group
I teach law at the University of Minnesota. I teach and write in the areas of administrative law, agricultural law, constitutional law, economic regulation, environmental law, industrial policy, legislation, and natural resources law. For more information about me, please visit my law school home page. For my latest scholarship, please visit my SSRN page. I also welcome your e-mail.
