Law in Action.doc

/law-in-action/davislawinactionessay.html Law in Action: The Deans View Law in Action reminds us that no matter how interesting or elegant the theory or idea, we always need to ask, Why should this matter to people in the real world? Law in Action, our signature approach to legal education, captures the unique and special role that Wisconsin plays within legal education.? It is a multi-faceted concept that influences our teaching, our research, and our scholarship.? The concept of Law in Action comes up whenever we discuss who we are and who we want to be.? I remember hearing this phrase often upon joining the faculty in 1978. It signifies that in order to truly understand the law, you need not only to know the law on the books, but also to look beyond the statutes and cases and study how the law plays out in practice. Law in Action also means that in teaching and research, no matter how interesting we find a legal theory, we always need to ask, How does this affect peoples lives in the real world? It is an orientation that has led to our national reputation for innovative approaches to both teaching and scholarship. It embraces our preeminence over the years in fields such as legal history, criminal justice, industrial relations, law and society, and comparative institutional economics. And it challenges us to combine our expertise and scholarly traditions with the strengths of the great university of which we are a part, in order to assume national leadership in emerging areas such as globalization, bioethics and other dimensions of law and technology. A Little History Law in Action is hardly a new concept, nor did the term originate at Wisconsin. The first reference Ive found is in a 1910 article by Roscoe Pound, the Harvard Law School dean whose work was a forerunner to the legal realism movement. But at Wisconsin the concept quickly took hold and developed a distinctive form. It was energized both by the schools appreciation of the value of other social scie