Courses | Columbia Law School

This seminar will examine the production of legal scholarship for those who are or think they may at some later point be interested in a career as a legal academic. How do you select a topic? How do you match a methodological approach to the kind of question you are addressing? What does it mean to do interdisciplinary work? How do you go from outline to rough draft to finished article? How do you get your paper published? And most importantly, what makes for good legal scholarship? With a goal toward gaining greater focus for your research topics, exploring the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of a work, and in working through what it takes intellectually and practically to begin serious work on an article, we will spend substantial time reading published scholarship across a range of methodological and substantive fields. Students will become familiar with how to both give and receive serious feedback on their work.

Students seeking to take the seminar must apply for admission by submitting to Professor Franke by e-mail no later than Friday, August 16th a two-page description of the writing project they will undertake during the seminar, plus a one-page reading list. Students who are admitted to this course and who accept a place in the course may not drop the course during the add/drop period at the beginning of the term. Students taking this seminar must be committed to producing publishable-quality papers as the work product of the seminar. Papers will be published as a special issue of SSRN.

More information, including the syllabus, is available here: http://web.law.columbia.edu/gender-sexuality/faculty/katherine-franke/seminar-legal-scholarship