In the beginning, there was law. Then came law-and. Law and society, law and economics, law and history, law and literature, law and philosophy, law and finance, statistics, game theory, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, critical theory, cultural studies, political theory, political science, organizational behavior, to name a few.

This development makes clear that the vocation of the legal scholar has shifted from that of priest to theologian. No longer is a law professor successful by virtue of well-informed and detached normative prescription directed to those toiling at practice, policy making, and adjudication. No longer is the highest aspiration of the law professor to restate the law or lead the bar. Instead, legal knowledge is perceived to advance through techniques of measurement, explanation, and interpretation, the positive and analytic tools of the social sciences and the humanities. 

And yet we continue to owe our jobs as law professors, with our special place and privileges within the university, to teaching lawyers the tools of practice. We still publish casebooks and respond to requests from judges, legislators, and businesses for advice. The analytic techniques of the law school classroom continue to follow the ancient professional folkways of taxonomy and synthesis, analogy and distinction. We thus live a curiously bifocal existence, viewing law close-up by day, and from an external vantage point by night, both insiders and outsiders to our profession. 

To some of those who practice and apply law, this development represents decline and fall. A decade ago, Judge Harry Edwards famously lamented that “many law schools … have abandoned their proper place, by emphasizing abstract theory at the expense of practical scholarship and pedagogy,” thus dissociating the legal academy from the legal profession in a centrifugal spiral. To others, especially nonlegal academics, law professors who do interdisciplinary work are practicing social science and humanism without a proper professional license, acting as historians, economists, or political theorists manques. 

Stanford Law School’s faculty shows why those critiques are wrong. The extreme implication of the first is that law schools ought be increasingly partitioned from the rest of the university, specializing in practical education with little affinity for other disciplines; the extreme implication of the second is that law schools ought be dissolved as distinct entities and absorbed into the university’s various other departments. The far better third alternative, which we put into practice daily at Stanford, is to retain the distinctive institutional place of law schools as postgraduate professional schools within the university, while continuing to lower the barriers to exchange between scholars of law and other disciplines university-wide. Under that approach, the rise of law-and scholarship elevates both our knowledge of how law works find our teaching of how to practice it. 

Any discussion of interdisciplinary legal studies needs to start with a reminder that law is itself a discipline. Organizational charts of the disciplines often focus on content, or the taxonomy of subject matters died. Of course, law is a discipline in this sense. Legal rules, documents, and judgments comprise a rich and complicated body of texts distinct from novels, equations, or musical scores. And law involves a rich and complicated body of institutional arrangements that structure and regulate social order, distinct from the institutional structures of markets, cultures, and religions. 

A discipline also represents a technique, a method of analysis, a way of working. Here too, law is distinctive. It is a branch of rhetoric that gives normative force to interpretation and analysis. It is a set of interpretive techniques of problem solving that disaggregate and order the messy jumble of facts through which conflict presents itself. And it is an amalgam of argumentative and decisional conventions, engrained through repetition, teachable only through reiterated practice and critique, as with etiquette, musical performance, or sport. 

But law, though a discipline, is not and never has been an autonomous discipline. The regulation of social order through a variety of authoritative texts necessarily interacts in complex and dialectical fashion with the content and techniques of the social sciences and the humanities. Take criminal law. Its classification of crimes ,and its hierarchy of punishment reflect a mixture of deontological and utilitarian theories of blameworthiness and deterrence. Similarly, constitutional law enforces a set of institutional design mechanisms rooted in liberal political theory about how to constrain government tyranny. To teach law necessitates fluency in the disciplines that underlie the law. 

For these reasons, even work that some would describe as “doctrinal” in today’s legal literature is rarely simply that. The attempt to explain or rationalize patterns of judicial or administrative decision making necessarily draws upon implicit theories in order to make interpretations, assessments, and predictions. For example, to describe the Rehnquist Court decisions in the areas of federalism, voting law, and associational liberty as expressing an overall tendency to favor decentralized decision making whether by state agencies, political parties, or Boy Scout troops is implicitly to draw upon political or social theory, whether or not Madison or 10cqueville is expressly invoked. If law is a discipline, that itself draws upon multiple disciplines, then what is the role of the self-consciously interdisciplinary work in law that increasingly characterizes the work of the legal academy? There are three possibilities.

Interdisciplinary work adds to legal knowledge

Interdisciplinary legal scholarship starts from the irreverent proposition that nothing in law need be as it is, and that critical rationality can illuminate whether it’s doing what it claims, and if not, how it got that way. 

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of interdisciplinary approaches that can provide this perspective. The first, positive research, looks at the “is” rather than the “ought” of law, or how the law actually works in practice. Expertise from economics, social theory, or political theory enables legal scholars to describe, measure, and assess how well legal rules, practices, and institutions perform at the functions expected of or ascribed to them. The second, interpretive scholarship, draws on the techniques of philosophy, literary analysis, history, and cultural theory. It does not measure legal outcomes against a preassigned function, so much as seek to articulate the function, including tile expressive function or social meaning, implicit in legal materials. 

There is nothing mutually exclusive about pursuing these two sorts of interdisciplinary work. The point is that both the positive and the interpretive strands of legal scholarship take a stance outside legal rules, decisions, and institutions in order to describe, explicate, and assess their social role.

Interdisciplinary knowledge improves the teaching of law

The outpouring of scholarship, extending the methods of history, philosophy, literary analysis, political science, psychology, economics, and so forth to law, can improve legal pedagogy. Some techniques of other disciplines that may be taught in law schools provide law students with skills that are directly useful and applicable in legal settings. A law professor fluent in the language of the other disciplines for scholarly purposes will likely convey useful interdisciplinary knowledge in the classroom as well. The teaching of interdisciplinary knowledge also illuminates the tacit theories underlying the mix of statutes, regulations, and judicial precedents that comprise tile law. 

More subtly, interdisciplinary knowledge that is explicitly conveyed in legal teaching helps students to absorb, as part of the social practice of law, the deep structure of the ideological and institutional tensions that law helps to resolve. Private law subjects are illuminated as playing out deeper tensions between allocative and distributive concerns in the operation of markets. Public law subjects are situated in broader debates about which topics are, and are not, better decided by majoritarian political processes rather than by private ordering or specialized expertise. The student with an architectonic understanding of the larger debates will subsequently better see how the same tensions reappear in miniature later in practice, as smaller oppositions nested within the larger ones.

Interdisciplinary legal studies benefit the other disciplines

Too often, the non-legal disciplines see law, as a planet unto itself, impervious to contemporary trends in thought, or slow to awaken to them after a considerable lag time. But law offers rich material for analysis and reflection by non-lawyers. The continued lowering of walls erected between law and other disciplines out of institutional turf battles, or misguided mutual isolationism, is sure to produce better thought and analysis on both sides.

 Interdisciplinary research is increasingly the touchstone in the basic sciences; Stanford university, for example, has ambitious plans to bring biologists, medical researchers, ,md engineers together to pioneer new insights and techniques in “bioengineering.” No one thinks these three departments ought to merge, or their specialized disciplinary standards be diluted. But the potential gains from collaboration are evident to members of each of these three intellectual communities. 

Similar gains from collaboration are evident to tile scholars who ,lttendlaw school workshops in law and economics, law and humanities, law and history, law and environmental science, law and philosophy, and the like. The law professors at these workshops are ,IS often as not also great lawyers and teachers of legal practice. The non-lawyers in attendance are as often as not well attuned to the particular structures and nuances of law. Legal scholars need not choose between practical and theoretical destinies, nor non-legal scholars be exiled from the precincts of law. To the contrary, an interdisciplinary approach promotes synergy and enlightenment.