Recherche Ponctuelle Et Recherche Sublime

Those were the terms that Harry Arthurs used a quarter of a century ago in the SSHRC Study into Law and LearningReport of the Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law, mandated by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Law and Learning / Le droit et le savoir.

And a comment at the end of a recent Tribune piece on Outsourcing legal research leads me to ask who in fact does know more.

The comment is made by David Goodman, a practising lawyer who says he doesn’t feel threatened by Dov Siedman’s cadre of moonlighting professors who’ll do syndicated research.

He says: “A professor who teaches what I do for a living, which is insurance law, they don’t know more about the subject than I do. I know more than they do, because what they do is teach generally. They have a casebook and they go through it every year. I spend 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, 300 days a year, working on the subject.”

Is this a fair statement of the difference between academic researchers and practising research lawyers? Are the academics hedgehogs and we’re all foxesAnd yes I’m aware that this is a false dichotomy?