otherwise ungrounded in reality’.133 The proposition, however, that the quality of legal scholarship is ‘better’ when academic writing has a strong practical dimension does not command universal acceptance. One counter-argument is that legal scholars with well-developed professional connections will be influenced by client preferences, rather than saying what they think ‘without fear or favor’.134 Another is that academics with tight links to the legal profession will have neither the time nor the inclination to undertake the sort of writing that challenges the premises underlying traditional legal analysis.135

Ultimately, then, even if academic fads are less likely to endure in fields where academics engage in ongoing dialogue with practitioners, it cannot be taken for granted that the quality of scholarship will be higher.

F. Conclusion

Each of the potential trajectories for legal scholarship outlined above has a certain plausibility. The idea that our knowledge of the legal system can accumulate by the proper application of scientific method has had enduring appeal. On numerous occasions, intellectual trends relating to law have been described in Kuhnian terms. It is possible to draw analogies from the conventional economic analysis of markets

133Brown, above note 41, at 334.

134Eisenberg, above note 41, at 393

135Bruce A. Ackerman, ‘The Marketplace of Ideas’ (1981) 90 Yale L.J. 1131, 1135–1137; Meir Dan-Cohen, ‘Listeners and Eavesdroppers: Substantive Legal Theory and its Audience’ (1992) 63 U. Colo. L. Rev. 569, 586–588.

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to offer an optimistic prognosis for legal scholarship. There have been pendulum swings in the academic literature on law, which implies that there may be ‘nothing new under the sun’. Finally, the fact that legal academics cannot possibly be fully aware of what might be ‘right’ or ‘true’ means that the field is susceptible to fads.

At the same time, no single account of the manner in which legal scholarship evolves is fully convincing. To illustrate, the fact that much academic writing about law is akin to advocacy means it is inappropriate to equate legal scholarship fully with either the received wisdom concerning natural and physical sciences or Kuhn’s recharacterisation of scientific endeavour. Moreover, while it may be accurate to say that there is a market for legal scholarship, the manner in which the forces of supply and demand operate diverges considerably from the pattern with more conventional products or services. At the same time, there is sufficient evidence that academic writing on law has become ‘better’ over time to suggest that the pessimism implied by a cyclical account or Sunstein’s faddriven thesis is not fully justified.

A related point is that the various trajectories that have been identified are, at least in some measure, contradictory. For instance, since Kuhn’s work was intended to cast doubt on the received wisdom on the accumulation of knowledge in the natural and physical sciences, legal scholarship seemingly cannot conform both to a Kuhnian framework and a

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